Fergal Keane

The Bondage of Fear

The people who lived in these townships did so in the knowledge that their death could come at any time, in the most awful circumstances, and nobody would ever trace their killers. The rate of detection for political murders in the East Rand townships was abysmally low. The dead came from squatter camps, from the little township blockhouses and the long bleak barracks of the migrant workers. They were murdered coming and going from work or the shops, on their way to school or waiting for a train to Johannesburg. There was no real pattern to the story of death. At the height of the battles crowds of several hundred swept backwards and forwards across the disputed territories. Men from the migrant hostels, chanting the fearsome Zulu war cry 'Usuthu', would rampage through areas controlled by the ANC. The ANC might respond by attacking hostel dwellers on their way home from work. Or it would begin with an attack on hostel dwellers gathered at a railway station and spiral into street battles that could rage for weeks. As the fighting continued, Zulus living in township houses were targeted and driven out. It made no difference that these people had no political allegiance to Inkatha or that they had lived in peace with their neighbours for years. I frequently came across families standing outside burning houses, their belongings piled around them, their neighbours watching impassively. There were echoes of ethnic cleansing in this expulsion of the Zulu speakers but the crucial difference was the lack of a history of inter-tribal bitterness. The Zulus who lived outside the hostels had been members of the township communities for decades and were accepted as fellow South Africans by their neighbours. It was a brotherliness that survived the best efforts of the white state to divide and rule on the basis of tribal affiliation. Now, in the heat of the fiercest battles seen in the townships since the unrest erupted in 1990, the stain of suspicion fell on Zulu speakers. Those who were burned out of their homes fled to the hostels, where they found relative safety among their fellow tribespeople.

In the chaos of war humanity was easily forgotten. Men, women and children were butchered while others looked on in celebration or in fear. Most residents shivered indoors during the fighting, listening to the wild chorus of shouting and gunfire that filled the streets. They would hide their children under the bed, turn the radio up loud, weep and pray that the killers would pass by their door. Children were kept from school; parents did not go to work; for much of the time people were too scared to visit the shops or to gather wood for fires. Those that did ran the risk of sudden and senseless death. We would come across their bodies on our morning trawls through the townships. Bodies lying on waste ground, bodies in trenches, or at the entrance to houses. The person with a missing relative faced a difficult choice. To go out and search for the body at the height of the fighting could mean dying oneself. Not to recover the corpse would be to leave it to the dogs. Some people hauled the corpses home and hid them until the fighting died down and it was possible to reach the undertakers. I tried to imagine what it would be like, sitting in a tiny house with the body of a father or brother wrapped in a blanket on the floor - day after day for a week or more looking at what had once been a warm, walking, laughing being, now transformed into a silent bundle.

In July 1993 more than 200 people were killed in Katlehong and Tokoza. They had in common the fact that they were black and had no votes.