The Bang-Bang Club (15 page)

Finally, all the coffins were neatly laid out in rows, emotions had settled somewhat and it was time for the speeches. Both Joao and Ken were shooting for
The Star
, and Joao decided to take a drive around the township, just in case there were any revenge attacks on Zulu speakers.
A photographer with the
Weekly Mail
, Guy Adams, joined him. Within minutes of leaving the stadium, they heard a gunshot, and saw a group of people chasing a man along a street. The fleeing man ran into the adjoining houses, where he hoped to lose his pursuers. Joao and Guy abandoned the car and followed the chase on foot. They caught up with the mob which had trapped the man on the driveway of a house.

The victim was a young man with dreadlocks, sitting on the concrete. A circle had gathered around him, telling him that he was Inkatha and that they were going to kill him. Joao and Guy were on their knees photographing him from behind, with the menacing crowd looking down on to him. Then a youth emerged from the anonymity of the crowd, stretched his arms high above his head and brought a large rock smashing on to the man’s head. That was the beginning and then the killing-frenzy commenced. Everyone began pushing and shoving as they tried to beat or stone the suspected Inkatha member. Joao was shooting pictures through a confusion of legs. The frenzy of the mob waned after their victim lost consciousness. A youth unceremoniously grabbed a limp arm and dragged the man down the driveway into the middle of the dusty road, leaving a long trail of blood in his wake. He had not regained consciousness, but the attack resumed. Someone shot him with a kwash; another ran up and kicked him; one man hacked at the unmoving body with a panga. Joao watched a young child run up and throw a Coke bottle at the still body; it bounced off the corpse. He did it again, but this time the bottle broke, ending the game.

Throughout this, Joao continued to shoot pictures, getting sucked into the moment, thinking of nothing except what he was photographing. He paused to change film and wondered how long it would all continue. A minibus filled with men made its way through the crowd. The men inside were armed with several AK-47s. The vehicle slowly and deliberately drove over the inert figure on the road, each wheel rising over and dropping off him with a ‘thunk’. Joao just watched. Suddenly an arm wrapped itself around his neck from behind and he was being pulled roughly backwards. He could not see who it was, but his assailant was yelling at him, angry, and he felt the cold
touch of the barrel of a gun at his neck. Joao was scared. All he could think was that he would die next in this orgy of death. He screamed for Guy and began pleading with his attacker. Then Guy was alongside him and he was no longer being dragged. He turned to face an older man whose face was tight with anger.

They kept repeating that they had not taken any pictures showing faces, that no one could be identified: the usual lies that we told when we had angered men with guns. The crowd had not even noticed the incident: someone had found discarded tyres and they were intent on burning the dead man. A huge flame suddenly rose above the mob, a collective scream of what sounded like joy rose with the flames. The gunman was distracted, Joao and Guy turned and ran. They went through yards and climbed over fences until they finally reached their car.

Back at the stadium, tens of thousands of voices were singing the evocative liberation anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. Despite the shock from what had just happened, or perhaps because of it, Joao got goosebumps, the hair on his neck and arms rising as he felt his skin tingling. Joao struggled to control his emotions as the mourners’ song pleaded with God to bless Africa.

I watched Joao making his way through the crowd and I could see that something was very amiss. He came straight to me. I put my hand on his shoulder, asking what was wrong. Ken had joined us. We listened to Joao and Guy’s story and then they took us to the scene, where the body was still smouldering. A woman came out from one of the houses and threw a blanket over it, giving us a look of profound distaste, as if we were responsible for the body outside her house.

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 in 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.