The Bang-Bang Club

by Greg Marinovich

  8

  BAD BOYS

  Here comes mellow yellow, yes ma, people are going to cry

  Here comes mellow yellow, yes ma, it brings troubles

  Mama, please don’t cry

  Mama, don’t cry

  Songs from the Struggle

  One morning in 1992, Heidi and I were at home discussing yet another story about zombies in a local Sunday newspaper. It seemed as if there was at least one witchcraft-related story every week. To Heidi, raised in western Europe, it was ludicrous that people could let their lives be so consumed by superstition, but belief in witchcraft, shades and the undead is widespread in South Africa. I had covered several zombie stories and knew that people truly believe in the ability of evil witches to turn the dead into zombies - the bewitched slaves of the sorcerer. Taking the paper, I went to find Joyce Jenetwa, the woman who came to clean house for us once a week, to hear what she had to say about zombies.

  She was ironing in the kitchen. As she rhythmically pressed and folded each item, she would lose herself in memories or deep thought, trying to resolve problems that troubled her. When I casually interrupted her, showed her the article and rather flippantly asked if she thought zombies actually existed, she finished a pair of trousers before stating matter-of-factly that her granddaughter Mimi was a zombie. I already knew that 13-year-old Mimi had been shot to death in her mother’s backyard shack on 13 August 1991 - more than a year previously - but I was taken aback to hear that Joyce believed she was a zombie, in thrall to a shebeen queen.

  Joyce was a short 59-year-old Xhosa woman with bright humorous eyes and a quick smile. She had been working for us for a year. A fiercely independent woman, she cleaned for several different households because she refused to be beholden to a single employer. In South Africa at that time, domestic workers were not protected by any union, or entitled to a minimum wage, and could easily be exploited by their ‘masters’ and ‘madams’. Besides, she had her own life, with family, church and ancestral obligations that she did not want to sacrifice to some boss’s late dinner parties and baby-sitting obligations.

  Over time, she told me the full details of the story, and I gradually came to understand the notion of zombies as a way in which people deal with trauma. Joyce had opened my eyes as no newspaper article ever had, and I discovered an entire undercurrent to the violence, where ancient beliefs that I had thought were separate from the modern nature of the political struggle were in fact woven into almost every aspect of it.

  Mimi had been killed in Thokoza, that strange and dangerous black township 16 kilometres south-east of Johannesburg, where I - and the other journalists - had come to accept that anything could occur. Thokoza had the highest death toll of any township during the four years of war that began in 1990, shortly before Mandela’s release: on just one day in August 1990, for example, 143 people died in hand-to-hand combat. At one stage, there were so many casualties that the police had to leave the corpses lying in the streets for much of the day. Dogs left behind by residents fleeing the war formed ravenous packs that survived by feeding on the corpses. Joyce told me of those dogs shadowing funeral cortèges all the way to the cemetery.

  Thokoza is a small, nondescript township. The main road, Khumalo Street, runs north-south for four kilometres through an elongated triangle from one set of migrant workers’ hostels to another. At its southern end, Khumalo Street turns east for a further two kilometres until it reaches three more hostels, grouped together in neighbouring Kathlehong township. We photographers got to know the roads and neighbourhoods that Khumalo Street traversed extremely well. Many of the pictures of violence we took were in that tiny area. It was on the wide dirt pavement bordering Khumalo Street that Joao photographed a man smiling at a mob of women beating another; it was across the blue-grey tar of Khumalo Street that Ken captured the moment when a young girl desperately pulled her even younger sister to safety from an impi of thousands of armed Zulus emerging from the early morning haze. The residents of Khumalo Street were regularly terrorized by the rhythmic clash of spears, stricks and sharpened steel on the hard cowhide shields which the hostel Zulus carried. This terrifying sound was punctuated by the occasional gunshot that elicited the war cry ‘Usuthu!’ from thousands of baritone throats.

  The conflict in Thokoza pitted the hostel-dwellers against local householders. Migrants against residents. Most township residents regarded the hostel-dwellers as backward country bumpkins who contributed nothing to the community but discord. In tsotsitaal, the urban slang that sets city sophisticates apart from their country counterparts, the hostel-dwellers were referred to as stupids. More insultingly, they were mdlwembe - feral dogs - from the Zulu adage that says once a domestic dog has left the kraal, or homestead, and gone into the bush, it becomes wild and can never be domesticated again. For their part, Inkatha supporters often referred to their ANC opponents as isazi, or clevers, meaning deceitful city-slickers.

  Most residents owed allegiance to the ANC, and relied for protection on volunteers who grouped themselves into self-defence units made up of militant youths and the occasional trained guerrillas who were given weapons by the armed wings of the liberation movements. Inside the hostels, the Zulu inhabitants were almost all combatants linked to other hostels by a controlling web of indunas or headmen, taking orders from the Inkatha leadership. This networking ensured the conflict spread rapidly from township to township, and that the ubiquitous hostels were at the centre of every conflict.

  Soon, no-go areas developed around the hostels. We took to calling them the dead zones. We all passed through these no-man’s-lands countless times during the conflict, sometimes casually, sometimes scared witless and sometimes all fired up with adrenaline while chasing the bang-bang. Running through the heart of the dead zone in Thokoza was Khumalo Street. At its northern end, on the left, was a sprawling municipal hostel complex, the impregnable Inkatha stronghold to which the Zulu warriors would retreat when the fighting was going against them. The furthest of the three fortress-like hostels lining the western pavement was dubbed Madala (‘the Old One’) by residents. The middle hostel was Khuthuze (‘to be pickpocketed’), while the southernmost one, adjacent to the petrol station, was called Mshaya’zafe, a Zulu phrase meaning ‘beat him to death’.

  The Zulus eventually spread out to occupy the neighbourhood of little matchbox houses opposite, and nicknamed their territory Ulundi, after the rural capital of the KwaZulu homeland that is the seat of Inkatha’s power. This area was feared and hated by non-Inkatha members, who would not dare to set foot there, just as a visit to the township was deadly for hostel Zulus. At the beginning of the war, it was possible for us to drive through Ulundi and even to enter the hostels, but as the conflict deepened and attitudes hardened, that stretch of Khumalo Street became a no-go area, though occasionally we would brave a run along it, sinking low into the car seats while racing through the stop signs and hoping no one would shoot. As the first year of the war wore on, venturing into the hostels became a scary gamble. One day it would be fine to go in, meet the induna and get permission to work, talk to people, drink a beer, photograph. On other days, when hostility ran high, we were soon met with aggression that prevented us staying or working. Later still, entering the hostels at all was out of the question.

  At the other, southern, end of Khumalo Street, Khalanyoni Hostel was overrun early in the war by ANC fighters, most Xhosa tribesmen from the adjacent Phola Park shanty town. These warriors were called blanket men as they wore their initiation blankets to fight; hiding sticks, spears and guns under the heavy wool folds. They dismantled the buildings, brick by multi-coloured brick, and used them to rebuild their shacks that were destroyed in the fighting. From day to day, the shanty town transformed itself from a maze of drab corrugated iron into a bizarrely colourful place. The surviving Zulu hostel dwellers from Khalanyoni retreated to the hostels at the northern end of Khumalo Street.

  Once the pass- and influx-control laws of petty apartheid were annulled i
n the mid-80s, many former hostel-dwellers moved into shack settlements with their families. Those from hopelessly overpopulated tribal homelands like the Transkei and Lebowa were eager to leave the countryside and move into urban townships, but Zulus continued to see life in the townships as a temporary sojourn. Their wives and families stayed on in the rural areas and the men went home to visit when work and money allowed. The system of land control in KwaZulu supported this choice: unless land remained in use by a family, it could be taken by the chief and reallocated to more productive families. Zulus were also strongly attached to traditional lands where their ancestors are buried and where their spirits resided. Zulus who died in the cities were rarely buried there - their bodies were usually taken home. One consequence of these strong rural ties was that the hostels came to be increasingly dominated by Zulus. The Zulu proclivity for murderous clan-feuds spanning generations was pursued just as viciously in the cities as they were back home. This meant that hostel Zulus were permanently prepared for conflict and organized in the traditional Zulu militarized social units, amaButho, or warrior-groups under the control of an induna.

  It was these forces that were harnessed by the Inkatha political leadership and unleashed repeatedly in 1990 and 1991, in an attempt to ensure that it became a national political player. Tens of thousands of Zulus wearing red headbands and carrying spears, shields, machetes and the occasional assault rifle would surge out of the hostels and down Khumalo Street, a sea of chanting belligerence. At first they inflicted heavy casualties, until the formation of neighbourhood self-defence units evened the odds.

  The conflict spawned an entire sub-culture. For the denizens, the map of Thokoza had been redrawn: Ulundi on one side, separated by the dead zone from the ANC neighbourhoods which had also been renamed. The three neighbourhoods surrounding the hostels most involved in the conflict became known as Slovo section, in honour of the Communist Party leader Joe Slovo; Lusaka section, with a nod to the Zambian capital where many exiled ANC leaders had found a home; and Mandela section.

  In Mandela section, a group of young ANC fighters occupying a tiny cluster of homes in the northern-most corner of Thokoza somehow resisted the Inkatha impis. We got to know the self-defence unit there that was led by a man in his early twenties. He shared a nickname with one of the enemy hostels: ‘Madala’, they called him - ‘The old one’. He had been given the name by his fighters, most of them in their teens and still trying to balance schoolwork with warfare. From one of their bases bordering a dead zone, in a house deserted by its owners, the teenage fighters would keep watch through a brick-sized hole in the wall. The hole was large enough to fire out of, but small enough to present a minimal target to opposing snipers. The house was shared by a dozen kids and their even younger camp-followers - pre-teens who ran errands and assisted during combat. The yard would be swept clean most days when there was no fighting. The boys washed their own clothes and cooked their own meals. Racy girls would sometimes appear, especially for parties, but they were excluded from the mainstream of the fighters’ lives. Contributions from the neighbourhood residents enabled them to buy the food they needed, although some fighters took to crime to supplement the donations: Coco-Cola trucks were favourite targets for a hijacking when the boys needed money.

  Some of the self-defence units earned a loyal following among the township folk, while others were simply regarded as gangsters. In Lusaka section, the fighters were proud of their heroic image. They wore bandannas and black T-shirts with ‘Lusaka Section SDU’ printed on them. They were extremely proficient in combat, silently using hand signals to communicate and moving like trained soldiers, which they were not. They could strip and reassemble the battered AK-47s they used in a matter of seconds while under fire and they had young boys to carry ammunition clips for them. The idea was to keep the spare ammunition separate from the big machines in case they got picked up by the police or army - the scarce bullets were more valuable than the rifles themselves.

  The ferocity of the fighting that engulfed townships on the Reef - the highly populated swathe of mining and industrial towns centred on Johannesburg - surprised South Africans. Various factors contributed to the volatile situation. Following the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the unbanning of the liberation movements, including the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Communist Party, political competition intensified. Decades of suppression and the liberation movement’s Marxist-influenced ideologies meant that there was no culture of political tolerance. Inkatha’s decision to transform itself from a ‘cultural movement’ into a registered political party - the Inkatha Freedom Party - and to establish a membership outside of the Zulu homeland, ensured that a climate of violence predominated. Years previously, in 1980, the KwaZulu homeland leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi had broken with the ANC when he agreed to take part in the homeland process, allowing him to gather power and a partisan homeland police force in KwaZulu-Natal province. This eventually led to open conflict with the various ANC-aligned groups inside the country, especially the United Democratic Front. The ANC by contrast refused to work within the system of apartheid, and a bloody war raged in the province for over ten years before the release of Mandela.

  Within the white security forces there were government ministers, officers and foot soldiers who played an active role in helping to spark the dangerously flammable tinder that lay between the opposing sides by supplying weapons and training to Inkatha. After decades of government propaganda demonizing the liberation movements as part of an anti-Christian, Communist total onslaught against white South Africa, it was unsurprising that the average white policeman (like the average white citizen) loathed and feared ANC supporters. The antipathy was mutual. The ANC and the more radical black consciousness Pan-Africanist Congress considered all policemen legitimate targets for assassination. Ordinary black citizens hated and mistrusted police as the arm of the law that harassed, arrested and tortured them.

  Relations between the police and Inkatha, however, were a different matter. It was not uncommon to see a Zulu migrant raise his hands in a show of deference or call a white policeman inkosi - ‘my lord’. The bearded white AP bureau chief Renfrew, who might have been mistaken for a policeman on a bad day, told me how he had come across a Zulu castrating a dead Xhosa in the aftermath of a battle in Thokoza in 1990. The man with the knife had turned to him and said, ‘Please, my colonel, let me finish just this one!’

  The Zulu’s attitude to Renfrew should not have been surprising; Inkatha and the white regime were using each other to gain an advantage over their political opponents - primarily the ANC. The same illegal strategies being employed by the government had been tested during the election run-up in South West Africa (as neighbouring Namibia was called while it was a South African protectorate - in effect, a colony). When Pretoria was faced with the inevitability of democratic elections, officials clandestinely set about fomenting communal violence in the hope of disrupting the elections and preventing a landslide victory for the former guerrilla movement, SWAPO. They failed, in the end, to do so, but the same regime and their covert units nonetheless redirected their energies to weakening the ANC powerbase, especially within the urban areas where the liberation movement had the vast majority of support. They stopped at nothing - from gunrunning and assassination to unlawful funding and crooked justice - to ensure that Inkatha weakened the ANC enough to upset their electoral chances. One early morning in 1990, for example, I arrived at Phola Park in Thokoza just 20 minutes after the sunrise. Xhosa warriors told me that they had killed a white policeman who had led an Inkatha attack on their shacks. The policeman had had black camouflage paint on his hands and face. He had lain in the grass for hours before the police managed to retrieve his body. I had just missed a picture that would have proved the third-force theory. The first I had heard of the term ‘the third-force’ was in an ANC press conference in which they accused covert police and/or military units of provoking and indeed committing violence to disrupt black c
ommunities. It had become clear that there was a lot more to the killings than just the ANC and Inkatha attacking each other, and more than just police breaking up riotous situations.

  One time in Soweto an army lieutenant complained to me from the top of his armoured vehicle that the police would not let him disarm an Inkatha impi that was rampaging through an ANC neighbourhood. Another then-inexplicable example of suspicious police behaviour was when I had raced to the scene of an explosion in Soweto, only to find white plain-clothes men, obviously cops, who threatened to kill me if I entered or if I took their pictures. They were wild, and clearly a law unto themselves. I complained to the uniformed police spokesman who was there, ‘You heard them threatening me, I am going to lay a charge!’ but he just kept walking me away from the house, he was clearly not going to side with me against them. Even though he was black, he was assisting his murderous colleagues. It was only years later that I discovered that the white men had been a part of the notorious Vlakplaas police unit responsible for assassinations, and that the explosion had been the sabotaged earphones of a Walkman tape-player exploding and ripping through the head of an ANC lawyer. Their real target had been their former Vlakplaas commander, Captain Dirk Coetzee, then being protected by the ANC in Zambia after he had spilled the beans on government hit squads. But Coetzee had not accepted the parcel mailed to him and it had been sent back to the return address, that of ANC lawyer Bheki Mlangeni, who, of course, had nothing to do with the sending of the booby-trapped Walkman in the first place. The tape inside the Walkman was marked as containing evidence on hit squads. He died as he pressed the play button. I never did get a picture showing illegal police or third-force activity. None of us ever did.

  In this houses closest to the Zulu area of Thokoza, residents’ lives were tossed about like flotsam on an angry sea. The war advanced street by street, encroaching ever further into previously safe sections. Homes were burnt, windows broken, everything of value looted. Gardens were overgrown with weeds. These abandoned houses became front-line bases from which opposing sides sniped at each other, and soon one could hardly find a wall, iron gate or fence on Khumalo, Tshabalala and Mdakana streets that did not have a bullet-hole in it.