A youth is clubbing the burning body of a man identified as a Zulu Inkatha supporter. The burning man was set alight by rival supporters of the African National Congress in Soweto, South Africa, on September 15, 1990

A youth is clubbing the burning body of a man identified as a Zulu Inkatha supporter. The burning man was set alight by rival supporters of the African National Congress in Soweto, South Africa, on September 15, 1990.

Photographer Greg Marinovich was a member of the so-called Bang Bang Club, four white photographers who worked for agencies and newspapers in Johannesburg. Together, they covered the wave of violent political clashes that plagued the nation’s black townships at the time. At one of those encounters, Marinovich saw four or five men beating a lone victim with rocks and clubs. One attacker dosed the man with gasoline and Marinovich made the picture.

IN 1990 THE NATIONAL PARTY (NP) GOVERNMENT entered into negotiations with opposition groups and liberation movements, leading to South Africa's first non-racial elections in April 1994. Although the advent of democracy ended centuries of white political domination and repression, the four-year transition period preceding the elections witnessed the bloodiest ‘political’ violence of the apartheid era. Many areas throughout the country experienced outbreaks and/or the continuation of fighting. Parts of what is now the province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), and townships on the Witwatersrand or Rand, the urban sprawl surrounding Johannesburg, were hit particularly hard. Analyses of this period have produced a dominant narrative in which the bulk of transition violence is attributed to the government's determination to weaken the African National Congress (ANC) prior to the 1994 elections. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a politically ‘conservative’, predominantly Zulu organization, and a sinister collection of state security units referred to as the ‘third force’, are key actors in this narrative. In Thokoza and Katlehong – two adjoining townships south-east of Johannesburg that experienced extraordinary levels of violence – third force elements are reputed to have made common cause with IFP supporters housed in municipal hostels1 to target the common ANC enemy.2 Focusing on these townships, this article draws on residents' oral testimonies to examine this theory.

Beyond the academic interest in piecing together the most accurate possible version of history, there are more practical implications for contesting conventional accounts of transition-era violence. Liberation struggle credentials – however defined – can greatly enhance one's political currency in post-apartheid South Africa. Those who supported the ANC and its allies have an automatic claim to legitimacy as citizens in the new order. Inkatha followers who actively opposed the ANC are at risk of being marginalized by the ANC government, at least according to hostel dwellers who insist they have been punished for their association with the IFP. Jonny Steinberg's assessment of the 2008 communal/xenophobic attacks in Alexandra points to Inkatha supporters' perception of being overlooked during the allocation of development resources as a critical aspect of their mobilization for violence.3

Post-apartheid development initiatives, including the improvement of services and the construction of hundreds of houses in Thokoza and Katlehong, have largely bypassed the hostels discussed in this study.4 Almost twenty years after the end of the conflict the main hostel complex in Thokoza remains without running water, electricity, or sanitation facilities. Instead, the ANC-dominated local government spent an appreciable sum on the erection of a concrete barrier to enclose the hostels, isolating them from the adjoining township. The Gauteng provincial government has embarked on a hostel eradication programme in Soweto that, if extended to the East Rand, may result in further violence. Importantly, the ANC's proposal, when it emerged from exile in 1990, to either demolish the hostels or transform them into family housing is often cited as a factor contributing to the civil conflicts on the Rand.

Based on interviews with about one hundred township residents, twenty former members of the ANC-aligned Self Defence Units (SDUs), sixty hostel dwellers and a handful of local officials, violence monitors and police,5 this article demonstrates that the narrative that casts the ANC as heroic defenders of freedom versus the Inkatha sell-outs who opportunistically sided with the white government (and its security forces) does not hold for Katlehong and Thokoza, two of the townships most afflicted by communal conflict. Instead, hostilities were far more complex and ambiguous than the one-dimensional morality play that still retains hegemonic status. This is important, because the dominant narrative of transition violence works against the emergence of a more inclusive, less partisan, nation-building project with room for all South Africans.

Explaining transition violence

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