Poverty, pilfering and the plantations

Across Africa, ‘youth may have begun earlier and lasted longer’ as a consequence of the disruptions of colonialism (Waller Reference Waller2006: 81). Certainly, this was the case in the settler farming districts of the Natal Midlands of South Africa, where a long history of youth gangs and intergenerational tensions is linked to a protracted history of rural dispossession. Bradford's (Reference Bradford1987) and McClendon's (Reference McClendon2002) work reveals how the expansion of commercial agricultural production in the Natal Midlands during the 1920s and 1930s placed an immense strain on African labour tenant households, with women, children and, most notably, youths forced to provide more labour to the settler farmers. Bands of youths became a potent force in the Midlands, especially in the district of Weenen, which had particularly high numbers of labour tenants. During the interwar years, young iigosa in Weenen District were transformed ‘from leaders of dance associations to “generals”’ elected by their peers. At the weekends, rival igosa would ‘lead their armed detachments to weddings and beer drinks where “faction-fights” often erupted’ (Bradford Reference Bradford1987: 46). Their activities sometimes caused great disquiet amongst the chiefs who nominally held authority over the tenants living on the white farms.Footnote ⁸

In this section, I explore how these long-standing intergenerational tensions in the Natal Midlands were exacerbated by apartheid's forced removals – a process that would see 1.1 million labour tenants across South Africa evicted from the farms. According to a contemporary account:

Thus came ‘the mixed-up period’, when, over the course of a few years, perhaps 20,000 African labour tenants were forced off the commercial farms of Weenen into the neighbouring district of Msinga, which fell under the KwaZulu Homeland Authorities. This was a time when once moderately prosperous labour tenants – migrants who had kept cattle and ploughed their own land on the Weenen farms while working in South Africa's cities – lost the cattle that made them men, when their livestock ‘went to the speculators at knockdown prices’. The removals also led to social dislocation and conflict: ‘a time of great thieving’, as ‘poverty and the rising cost of food forced many people who cannot get jobs to find that stock-theft and dagga [cannabis] growing are a secure way of making a living’.Footnote ¹⁰

The Alcock family, the founders of the Church Agricultural Project, had come to Msinga in 1973 hoping to support smallholder farming. Their newsletters provide a finely wrought account of the divide between an older generation of labour tenants who had ploughed Weenen's land and a younger generation who would have a very different relationship to the land and rural livelihoods in Msinga. Older men and women were well versed in natural lore; they could name dozens of grasses – ‘intunga, mlalatensha, uqambalala, ubabe, ingongoni, imbuthane, isinandi, imbanjane, umsingizane’ – each with different characteristics and uses.Footnote ¹¹ But most young boys had little detailed knowledge of or interest in these matters, given that they had little hope of putting a plough to the ground. The Alcocks worked closely with some of these older men, such as Seliswe Dladla, a migrant worker who laboured on Johannesburg's construction sites for 50 rand (R) a month, yet had been a man of substance – with fifty cattle, a hundred goats and two wives – when he lived as a labour tenant on Weenen's farms. The forced removals had been disastrous; his cattle and iron plough were bought at a discount by speculators.Footnote ¹² Surveys conducted by the Surplus People Project at Sahlumbe – a settlement at the entrance of the Mashunka Valley of Msinga – confirmed such accounts. Of the households surveyed, 93 per cent had grown crops when they lived on the ‘white farms’ at Weenen; now not one had a field. Moreover, Msinga was a thornveld district lying in a rain shadow. The 1955 Tomlinson Commission estimated that here a black smallholder farmer required 83 hectares and sixteen cattle to make a living. Following the relocations, average landholdings in the district were 1.6 hectares per person – ‘much of this stony hillside’.Footnote ¹³ Nonetheless, many from the older generation remained keen to make some sort of a livelihood from the land, and they participated in the initiatives of the Church Agricultural Project. ‘We are men again! At last our hands can feel the hair of living cattle!’ they jubilated as they drew an ox plough across the Church Agricultural Project's farm. ‘How funny we are making a noise about what was once an ordinary thing.’Footnote ¹⁴

The dissolution of the patriarchal homestead and authority during the apartheid era is also strongly evoked by a trade union researcher, Paul Stewart, who visited rural homesteader M. X., recently made redundant from a factory in the neighbouring district of Nqutu. The other crisis falling on migrant households across South Africa at this time was the decline of unskilled, blue-collar work, as, from the mid-1970s onwards, ‘the economy simply grew too slowly to keep up with growth in the labour force’ (National Planning Commission 2011). M. X. was among the 100,000 unskilled workers laid off from the metal industry in the early 1980s. Paul journeyed to Nqutu to find himself pitched into the middle of a family crisis. M. X.’s second wife had recently absconded along with eight young children. ‘Quiet – don't let the secret out,’ an older sibling gestured to another child who was talking to the researchers (Stewart Reference Stewart1981: 15, 17). Other family members, too, were evading M. X.’s patriarchal authority. Some openly complained that M. X. was too poor to provide Christmas presents. And while his first wife deferentially knelt whenever she addressed him, she would not reveal the whereabouts of another daughter who had also fled the family home. M. X. was eager to show off his oxen plough to his guests, yet he struggled to yoke these scrawny beasts that clearly had not been used as draught animals for some time.

What were the consequences of such scenarios of homestead dissolution for youth socialization? Outwardly, childhood continued as before. Primary schooling arrived late in the poorest and most peripheral rural districts of South Africa – surveys suggested that well into the 1980s only 30 per cent of children in Msinga District attended school.Footnote ¹⁵ Consequently, bands of prepubescent boys spent much of their childhood outdoors, herding cattle. (Indeed, the district continued to hold relatively high numbers of goats and cattle.Footnote ¹⁶ ) Stick fighting remained the predominant sport: a means of testing oneself against friends and rivals, and a preparation for manhood. Gangs of boys – perhaps led by a champion stick-fighter (ingqwele) – enjoyed hunting mice and rabbits, which were barbecued and eaten in the veldt. Petty theft of small livestock such as chickens (considered women's possessions) was normally considered a boyish prank – worthy of a thrashing – rather than a crime.Footnote ¹⁷ In this sense, the forms and expressions of male socialization that were seen in the 1970s resembled the patterns that had been seen a generation earlier.

At the same time, the poverty and ‘confusions’ that had followed the forced removals gave these boyish escapades a sharper edge. Studies across the Natal Midlands and nearby districts noted how the decline of smallholder production and the increasing circulation of purchased goods ‘necessitated the reorganisation of household activities around a wide variety of income generating activities’ (Mpanza and Nattrass Reference Mpanza and Nattrass1987: 23). Women knitted, sewed and sold their handicrafts. Msinga was very poor, even by rural South African standards, and at Mashunka young girls turned household chores into petty trades, for instance carrying heavy loads of pilfered firewood into town for richer households. (They were paid with cabbage leaves.Footnote ¹⁸ ) These were the economic pressures that lay behind young boys’ hunting, poaching, pilfering and scavenging.

In some households, such boyish misadventures shaded into patterns of delinquent behaviour that lay beyond the control of the community. A medical mission in the neighbouring Nqutu District noted that every rural community had a handful of children who ‘scrounged for food … and occasionally raided homes’.Footnote ¹⁹ Take the Siwela brothers, aged eleven and twelve, who were running wild. ‘Time and again they have been caught and returned to their grandfather who just cannot cope. They have been beaten for their misdemeanors … Their mother is in Durban and comes home only at Christmas; their father is unknown’ (Clarke and Ngobese Reference Clarke and Ngobese1975: 37). Likewise, legal sanction (such as it existed, for the few policemen allocated to Msinga District were busy running their own criminal rackets) held few fears for young children living hardscrabble lives. S. D. was ‘the scrawny gang leader of all the naughty kids at Mashunka’. He had the rust-coloured hair of kwashiorkor and had been the main breadwinner of his family since the age of seven, when his parents were killed in a stock-theft feud. ‘He laid ambushes, fought, poached, trespassed and stole’ and boasted ‘about his latest escapades to make quite sure that everyone will know’.Footnote ²⁰ At one stage he briefly worked as a weekend errand boy at a trading store in the nearby town of Weenen, until he demanded his wages early and, when refused, stole a nearby bicycle in a moment of pique. He was locked up in the police station in Tugela Ferry town for a few days, until he was brought to court and punished with five lashes of the cane. ‘How was it?’ his gang asked when he returned. ‘Kumnandi [sweet] … They bring you a cup of water and a slice of bread and you sit all day watching the policeman go past.’Footnote ²¹

More worrying for parents and elders were the vast numbers of boys and girls who absconded to do casual togt labour on ‘the plantations’ (i.e. the white farms). The household surveys undertaken by the Surplus People Project suggest that day and seasonal work on commercial farms became an increasingly important source of livelihoods in the Natal Midlands.Footnote ²² While Africans had worked on commercial farms since the early decades of the twentieth century, it is likely that flows of itinerant labour increased after the forced removals eradicated many African tenants from commercial farming districts. One old man remembered: ‘I never had to work on the plantations … like all our children do today.’Footnote ²³ Increasingly, Weenen's white farmers sent lorries into Msinga in search of casual labour on a 100 kilometre round journey each day. Others were hired for longer periods, particularly during the harvest months that required a glut of labour. They journeyed the length and breadth of Natal on the back of farmers’ lorries.Footnote ²⁴ The numbers of youths taking seasonal work are difficult to obtain, for the apartheid government did not keep decent statistics on the subject. But campaigners’ investigations suggested that this practice was widespread across Natal, the Free State and Transvaal.Footnote ²⁵

Intriguingly, the children often went off to work on the commercial farms in small groups and gangs. Creina Alcock described S. D.’s band leaving in high spirits: it was a youthful rite of passage, one in which there was ‘a bit of an adventure and a wage’.Footnote ²⁶ Another observer, a black clergyman, suggested that child labourers and their parents sometimes believed that ‘the difficult life provided by farm work is maturing’ (ASS 1983: 18). We see this sense of joint purpose and pride in the remarkable group photographic portraits of teenage farm workers held by the Killie Campbell Library in Durban: they proudly show off their best clothes, which they have presumably bought with wages earned from farm work. Indeed, roving photographers toured the commercial farming districts of the Natal Midlands, for teenage farm workers would pay for Polaroid portraits that they could send on to friends and lovers.Footnote ²⁷

At the same time, teachers, parents and elders feared that the deepening incidence of itinerant, togt labour meant youths were escaping adult control. ‘Sex is free and all social conventions are broken … Vast numbers of children learned dagga smoking.’Footnote ²⁸ Some farms were notorious for abuse. One young woman successfully sued for child maintenance after she was raped. Others were beaten: ‘It's easier to sjambok a girl lying on a table than to whip them on the ground,’ boasted another white farmer.Footnote ²⁹ It was also hungry work: ‘The food was good – porridge, cabbage, beans and some meat – but there was very little of it,’ remembered M. D. He worked on the farms aged ten, but fled after a year (Bond Reference Bond1979: 19). The squalid living conditions endured by child labourers on South Africa's commercial farms are captured in the social realism of documentary photographers, whose gritty black-and-white portraits were exhibited by the London-based Anti-Slavery Society in the 1980s. Another elder explained: ‘Any child who had grown up in “The Wilderness” [a common term used to describe the commercial farms] will be a trouble to society.’Footnote ³⁰

Izinkabi – oxen

‘I was asked what I want to be when I am big,’ explained an Msinga youth when he was around fourteen years old (Bond Reference Bond1979: 46). ‘It is difficult to talk about the future. All I can say is that I want to be a MAN.’ In their late teens, young men (inisizwa) from Msinga travelled to South Africa's cities in search of a living, now that they were too old for seasonal farm labour, which was considered to be work for women and children. However, the paths that their fathers had taken towards manhood – steady ‘blue-collar’ employment in the cities, which would allow them to marry and build their own homesteads on Weenen's farmlands – were blocked for this younger generation of migrants. This was the context in which some youths discovered that violent crime could provide a shortcut to manhood and a respect of sorts.

Heuristically, one might speak of three overlapping forms of illicit and often violently criminal activities that were linked to the transformation of patterns of migration and mobility. In one, a handful of transient young men organized themselves into impromptu gangs that engaged in crime sprees that brought them quick returns. The newsletters and reports of the Church Agricultural Project provide a vivid description of how the return of half-a-dozen young thugs from the migrant hostels of Johannesburg to Msinga sparked off an epidemic of cattle rustling and armed robberies.Footnote ³¹ After each robbery, the young men toured the neighbouring districts and rural townships, hurriedly selling off their booty, the only evidence that would convict them. They feasted on their stolen goods with girlfriends, ‘wives’ and followers. After one robbery, a witness saw S. X. driving down the valley, jubilantly stopping to tell everyone ‘there was lots of money … and he would be buying meat and liquor to celebrate’.Footnote ³² The brazenness with which such gangs operated shows how violent crime might reward young men with a brutal prestige of sorts. This was a fleeting fame, however – they would soon be fleeing vigilante groups and police pursuers into the ‘tent towns’ in neighbouring districts and the run-down migrant hostels and burgeoning squatter camps found in the big cities.

One reason why these young drifters operated with such impunity was because they hid in the cracks of the collapsing system of labour migrancy. From the mid-1980s onwards, as apartheid controls crumbled, new shack settlements emerged on the fringes of cities and small rural towns. Migration was no longer an oscillation between city and countryside; instead, it became a tangled network of multidirectional movements (Potts Reference Potts2010; Todes Reference Todes2001). The decline of factory work also transformed the migrant hostels into slums. Radical researchers provided compelling contemporaneous accounts of the illicit and illegal activities that found a haven in dilapidated hostel complexes, as they filled up with unemployed young men. ‘Crews disguised as repair men … looted dormitory rooms’; disputes escalated into confrontations and stabbings (Sitas Reference Sitas1983: 266).Footnote ³³ Men urinated in bottles at night, for visiting a toilet was too dangerous. ‘So much fighting, so much blood over nothing,’ lamented one man. ‘The Lord turned his gaze away in shame from the hostel, I am sure. There, the Devil has become king, and every man was becoming a tsotsi’ (Sitas Reference Sitas1983: 267).

***

Young men were also at the forefront of the rise in faction fighting that gripped many districts of the Natal Midlands in the 1980s. Msinga was infamous for these conflicts – the district ‘surges and eddies with restlessness’, noted an early newsletter of the Church Agricultural Project. ‘When we arrived here in 1975 there was tension because Mvelase youths were helping themselves to Mtshali cattle and goats. Like all the jobless at Msinga, they had nothing to do all day, so rustling neighbours’ stock was a game with a meal at the end of it.’Footnote ³⁴ Elders put their fears starkly: ‘Our sons do not want to work. They have learnt that pay is low, conditions are bad … They have found that theft brings better returns. Jail is not feared … These young men steal guns and bullets, which makes them lords at home.’Footnote ³⁵

From the viewpoint of Msinga's elders, there were perhaps three reasons why young migrant men had become ‘lords at home’. One was the close links between young men's pursuits, such as poaching and cattle rustling, and the burgeoning minibus-taxi industry whose owners raised capital by engaging in stock theft and other criminal pursuits. South Africa's violently competitive minibus-taxi industry has been well documented. It became the main mode of transportation in the mid-1980s, as new webs of commuting and migration proliferated at a time when apartheid patterns of spatial segregation collapsed (Gibbs Reference Gibbs2014: 431–4). Its networks, which centred on the cities of Durban and Johannesburg, were often dominated by migrants from the Natal Midlands.Footnote ³⁶ As well as carrying passengers, minibus drivers trafficked illicit goods.Footnote ³⁷ The multibillion-rand dagga-growing trade was especially prevalent in the poor, peripheral districts of the Natal Midlands.Footnote ³⁸ The remote valleys were also centres of a roaring trade in stolen livestock. Stock thieves were often carjackers too, and Msinga's valleys were littered with the carcasses of vehicles that had been stolen in South Africa's cities.Footnote ³⁹ These multi-centred networks were suffused with the idioms of migrancy. Stolen vehicles were ‘skinned’ in hidden valleys like stolen, slaughtered cattle. Men said that they were ‘piercing their ears’ (the older generation of migrants had worn earplugs) when they bought a new minibus.Footnote ⁴⁰

A second (and related) element was that young men were at the forefront of a new, more brutal and criminalized form of faction fighting that gripped Msinga in the 1980s: ‘It is not the impi [warriors] who are fighting … it's the izibengu – criminals, gangsters.’Footnote ⁴¹ Clegg (Reference Clegg and Bonner1981) writes that, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, faction fighting echoed contained rituals of stick fighting: rival impi would publicly assemble on a hill and ritually call each other out in ‘a spectacle of violent confrontation’. Yet with the intensification of rural conflicts in the 1970s and 1980s, faction fighting was increasingly undertaken by well-armed war parties that carried out assassination-type killings. Clegg describes these war parties as amashinga (stick fighters), a term that alludes to longer established patterns of youth socialization and conflict.Footnote ⁴² These fighters also acted as hired hitmen – colloquially known as izinkabi (oxen) in Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal – not least in the internecine feuds of the taxi industry.Footnote ⁴³ (A peace agreement signed in 2000 and posted in the office of the Weenen Taxi Association is telling: ‘We will not attack and kill each other; we will not steal from each other; we will not kill each other's livestock; we will not damage each other's property; we will not intimidate, threaten or insult each other.’) Thus, there were close links between rural faction fighting, illicit trades and criminal violence that spread along migrant routes from Msinga into the cities.

A third point is that the violence of young fighters was particularly disquieting because they broke established codes and conventions of warfare and flaunted gerontocratic controls. Elders complained that they were no longer respected; the conflicts were not the ritually contained faction fights of their youth. Although fights still started in long-recognizable ways – a stick fight between rival dance teams; a dispute over land; stock theft directed at a neighbouring clan – the violence of the war parties then spiralled out of control.Footnote ⁴⁴ Codes of war were ignored: ‘People are killed even when they are hiding. You can't kill a man who is hiding from the fight.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Geriatrics fled into the hills. Sometimes they hid with their drinking companions. At other times they were herded into crèches, guarded by younger fighters from their own clans from those of rival ones. Extortion was also an integral part of faction fighting, for provisioning a war party with guns and bullets and hiring transport (typically a minibus) was a costly business. Men who wanted no part in the fighting paid a fee then disappeared into the shack settlements of South Africa's cities until the fighting was over. To pay the levies demanded by the gunmen, women sold off their goats and took extra togt labour on the white farms. (‘They [the gunmen] are wasting our bullets,’ Msinga women complained, when they heard fighters on the hillside loosing rounds into the night sky.Footnote ⁴⁶ ) War also spilled from the hillsides into homesteads as fighters foraged for supplies, raided homes and held up vehicles, much like common criminals. And the fighters sometimes raped women – a violation of beliefs which held that, for the safeguarding medicines to work, the fighters must be purified by chastity.Footnote ⁴⁷

‘Although the unrest in Msinga is conventionally blamed on disputes resulting from overpopulation and shortage of land, it has become increasingly clear to us that the root of most wars lay in the criminal activities of small gangs of young men,’ concluded the Church Agricultural Project in the mid-1980s, during a spate of faction fights.Footnote ⁴⁸ Their activities meant that ‘entire communities of hundreds of people are eventually embroiled in the trouble – drawn in unwillingly out of fear’. Another participant at a peace meeting stated the problem succinctly: ‘It is the young men who are quarrelling. Only the young men can settle this.’Footnote ⁴⁹

***

Msinga's elders worried that youths had become ‘lords at home’; but the young men who fell into crime related to the burgeoning minibus-taxi industry take on a more forlorn appearance in Johannesburg's court records. Given that this industry was the main form of capital accumulation for black South Africans in the 1980s, a minority of prosperous vehicle owners became ‘exemplars of patriarchal authority in South Africa's post-industrial, highly unequal society’ (Gibbs Reference Gibbs2014: 433). Successful taxi owners from the Natal Midlands bought township houses, practised polygyny, acquired pedigree hunting dogs, and kept large cattle herds. But they were in the minority: the industry, which often employed marginal, migrant youths, was also infamous for its fragmented, precarious working conditions.

Perhaps the image of an ox (inkabi) best encapsulates the struggles faced by young migrants working in this setting, and more generally trying to survive in the city. Many migrants used the epithet ‘an ox perseveres’ to describe the forbearance that was required to endure exhausting casual labour and make a life in the squalid migrant hostels and shack settlements (Ndima Reference Ndima1997).Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, it is important to emphasize that many young men working in the taxi industry did not wholeheartedly embrace criminality, but rather found themselves drawn into the activities of violently competitive owners and rival associations. Working fourteen hours a day, for instance, taxi-rank marshals wielded whips as they herded commuters away from rival vehicles into their masters’ minibuses (Barrett Reference Barrett2003; Bonner and Nieftagodien Reference Bonner and Nieftagodien2008: 382). Similarly, minibus drivers, who were hired and fired on the spot, were beholden to bosses who sometimes used their young men as ‘foot soldiers’ in the violent competition for new routes (Nkosi-Thomas and Randera Reference Nkosi-Thomas and Randera2000).

However, oxen are not simply draught animals eternally harnessed to a plough; many are admired and much loved for their proud, stubborn characters.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, the young taxi drivers from the Natal Midlands working in Johannesburg took pride in their toughness and resilience. They muscled their way into township taverns, naming their tables after the districts of the Midlands: ‘Mahlabatini, Msinga [and] Nqutu’.Footnote ⁵² They drank bottled beer; wore All Star trainers; permed their hair straight; and proposed love to sophisticated, perfumed, township women (for firewood-gathering rural women carry the smoky musk of open fires). They boasted of and declaimed their exploits in Johannesburg, ‘the city of the rambling mountains [the mine dumps], where women beat their husbands’ (Xeketwane Reference Xeketwane1993: 154). And their hard-boiled commentary – not least the quips aimed at aloof township women who rode in their vehicles – was the talk of Johannesburg's townships. Township youths explained why they dared not challenge the taxi drivers who insulted their girlfriends: ‘Even if you defeated him in a fair fight he would call his folks and you would have to flee.’Footnote ⁵³

Moreover, a few oxen are champion fighters whose victories against rival bulls at the cattle-dipping tanks are celebrated in the praise songs of herd boys (Mathaba Reference Mathaba2000). Likewise, the izinkabi hired guns of the taxi industry ‘elicited a certain wary reverence, not just from their peers living in the migrant hostels, but from the township as a whole’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, in one trial the defendants explained why they had specifically sought out an inkabi from the migrant hostels: ‘It was felt that Zulus were best suited for such violent action.’Footnote ⁵⁵ This was an ambivalent symbol of masculinity.

The reticence of eldership

As much as violence along the migrant routes spiralled outwards in the 1980s, we should also note attempts within rural districts to bring these conflicts under control. Given that violence was often experienced as a generational crisis, it is not surprising that much effort focused on disciplining young delinquents and reincorporating dissonant parts back into the whole. Hence, kin-based ideals of social cohesion were deeply treasured at a time of great social stress that undermined the authority of elders and chiefs.

One place to start is to note how elders, with limited success, sought to discipline individual ‘delinquents’. As discussed above, the waning of established patterns of migrant labour and the chaotic living conditions inside migrant hostels allowed individual, transient thugs to avoid sanction. Nevertheless, elders made sporadic attempts to impose their authority. One Zulu man explained to researchers visiting a migrant hostel in Soweto how his nephew was stabbed to death by a ‘homeboy’ in a dispute over a girlfriend. The fighting youths had been brought before elders, admonished and separated, but an unwitting Pedi neighbour later opened a door to the attacker, who struck with a knife. The killer ‘is still around the hostel’, explained the uncle. ‘We are not going to have him arrested; we will settle this thing in December [at a chief's court] at home’ (Peskin and Spiegel Reference Peskin and Spiegel1976: 28). Occasionally, senior men living in the hostels took more direct action. In 1983, M. D. was ‘chased out by the other hostel dwellers in an action so unprecedented that it was the talk of Mashunka valley’.Footnote ⁵⁶

By contrast, the documents of the Church Agricultural Project provide a detailed account of how a spate of robberies committed by a small band of young men across Msinga District in the mid-1980s was quashed by the more resolute action of senior men.Footnote ⁵⁷ They formed hunting parties and went in search of the stolen goods and the thieves. They pointed guns at the outlaws and their associates and dragged them before the chief's courts. Relatives suspected of harbouring the young men were threatened with banishment. Most importantly, police from Pietermaritzburg swept the district for guns – the first serious crackdown in years. Eventually, most of the youngsters were jailed for whatever offences could be pinned on them. Even those who escaped conviction were severely chastened, having been badly beaten during police interrogations.

More structured, well-provisioned vigilante groups also formed in response to the activities of organized gangs committing stock theft and armed robbery in rural South Africa. In each of these instances, powerful senior men were at the heart of the response to criminal activities. Senior men living in the migrant hostels of Johannesburg's East Rand townships, for instance, told researchers how they had formed vigilante groups back in their Nqutu home district in response to the rising levels of stock theft committed by taxi owners. Here, it seems that key leaders were senior factory workers who were also involved in local Inkatha structures.Footnote ⁵⁸ At Mashunka Mountain, by contrast, vigilante bands were organized within local communities by isigodi (wards) and izinduna (headmen).Footnote ⁵⁹ One man was trekking home to Limehill with cattle bought at an auction in Msinga when he was accosted in a quiet gorge by a well-armed band of men, ‘all with guns and bullets’, who demanded proof of ownership. The man hunted for the receipt in his pockets, ‘speaking very meekly, as you do, when addressing a man with a gun’. The cattle had been legitimately bought, so the vigilantes ‘took us home, gave us beer, and we slept there that night, as is the custom with travellers’.Footnote ⁶⁰

***

The larger faction fights and local wars were even more fractious. Households and communities splintered as men scattered, hiding from the violence in the hills or the shack settlements of the cities. One murder could set off cycles of kin-based vengeance killings (see Clegg Reference Clegg and Bonner1981). The worst of the fighting choked the rural valleys. Rival factions set up roadblocks and ambushes that throttled the district's main arteries; they shot at the taxis belonging to their rivals and dragged men off buses, executing them on the road. ‘Now the roads are blocked the district has to cope with an unsettling mix of gossip and rumour, and snatches of news that can only add to the tension,’ wrote the Church Agricultural Project during one Mashunka war.Footnote ⁶¹

At the same time, we should also note the attempts to restore social communication and relationships. While faction fights became synonymous with sexual violence, they also gave prominence to senior women. Sometimes, women provided a protective shield and safe passage for non-combatant men stranded in no man's land. They also used their moral authority to browbeat chiefs and izinduna into organizing peace meetings.Footnote ⁶² During one particular conflict, the women from opposing sides even attended each other's funerals. This was a sensitive process, given the internecine divisions caused by violence. Distraught mourners sometimes refused reconciliation: ‘Your husbands killed my father … And your sons also! Go! I don't want you!’ Thus the groups of women from either side of the fighting warily kept apart during the burial and cleansing ceremonies, washing at separate pools in the mountain streams, waiting until young girls from the bereaved family brought over trays of tea and bread as a gesture of appeasement.Footnote ⁶³

Because the Church Agricultural Project had the only phone in the valley, their house was another important centre of correspondence and diplomacy. During one particularly vicious war, the phone would start ringing from 5 a.m. as migrant men illicitly called in from factory phones to check on their families. A cook at the huge Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, who emerged as the ‘diplomatic agent amongst those who had not run home’, called each day for a bulletin.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similarly, local magistrates might broadcast the news of a particularly important peace meeting through Radio Zulu – a radio station especially popular among migrants because its broadcasters read out messages sent between families and friends.

A handful of senior izinduna, who commanded respect through force of personality, were perhaps the most important mediators.Footnote ⁶⁵ They bravely summoned groups of young fighters to their courts. Their gatherings were recognized as safe spaces for negotiations between rival factions. While war parties hunted their rivals across South Africa, these elders conducted shuttle diplomacy by taxi and bus, meeting fighters on a mountain top or in a city hostel. Inevitably, after months of tortuous dialogue, ‘the guns sputter[ed] out’. Rituals of forgiveness and reconciliation, intended to bind the fighting men back into the wider body politic, would symbolize the peace accord.Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘Then taxis are summoned to carry the breadwinners back to eGoli (Johannesburg).’ Thus, while faction fighting increased in frequency and intensity in the 1980s, older ideals of eldership remained.

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At the same time, we must note how kin-based violence corroded social authority. Eight izinduna were murdered on Mashunka Mountain in four years.Footnote ⁶⁷ ‘It's no longer an honour in these parts to be selected an induna,’ noted Creina Alcock in another newsletter, written in 1980.Footnote ⁶⁸ Three years later, Neil Alcock and four fellow members of a peace delegation would be ambushed and killed in the Church Agricultural Project's minibus when driving home from a courthouse mediation meeting, while trying to settle a conflict that had already claimed dozens of lives. Later, the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the Natal Midlands uncovered more instances in which peace monitors – men of authority, such as chiefs and clergymen – walked into murderous ambushes as they tried to mediate conflicts between rival clans and taxi associations.Footnote ⁶⁹

One reason why chiefly office brought such danger and exposure, which made mediation so difficult, was that social relationships were fragile and fluid. A transient son who had stolen and sold on building materials belonging to his uncle, for instance, might hold a family feast from the proceeds of another robbery six months later.Footnote ⁷⁰ Most significantly, as much as men of violence took lives and broke families apart, it was illicit and sometimes outright criminal activities that brought money into the poorest rural districts of the Natal Midlands. From an early age, children in Mashunka were taught to ‘be careful what they say’ – not in the romanticized manner of Rudyard Kipling's ‘A Smuggler's Song’, but because loose talk would bring killings into their homes.Footnote ⁷¹ For, in the mid-1980s, many of the men of substance and authority in Mashunka Valley were making their money in South Africa's notoriously fractious minibus-taxi industry and its associated trades, such as stock theft. This ‘grey area between licit and illicit enterprises, the paternal benevolence of the successful taxi owner who provides for neighbours and the kin based violence that permeates the industry’ was remarkably difficult to navigate (Gibbs Reference Gibbs2014: 446). Such fine-grained moral sensibilities posed particular difficulties for izinduna, who were expected to mediate disputes and judge cases brought before them. Moreover, most chiefs and headmen did not enjoy much in the way of government resources or support – the chief induna of the Mthembu clan, for instance, held his court cases in a rusting bus, the courthouse having been destroyed in a storm. Their authority was their word and little else.Footnote ⁷²

Consequently, some men refused nomination to traditional leadership.Footnote ⁷³ Another cautious induna in Msinga, for instance, cannily adjudicated tricky stock-theft cases by levying court fees on the plaintiff that were equal to the fines he demanded from the guilty parties, gaining a reputation for equivocation that kept danger from his door.Footnote ⁷⁴ The few izinduna on Mashunka Mountain who sought to uphold the authority of their office trod a lonely path. Sometimes they slept at home, when everyone else had fled into the hills, dangerously preserving their dignity and impartiality. These were ‘reticent men, listeners, wary’, who chose their words carefully.Footnote ⁷⁵

Udlame – political violence, social chaos

As much as elders sought to mediate Msinga's conflicts, the final decade of apartheid was not a propitious moment for peace making. In July 1990, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Chief Minister of the KwaZulu Bantustan, launched the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) at a rally in the PWV – the city region that sprawled across Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Vereeniging – provoking a spasm of violence across the city. In most of the 220 migrant hostels spread across the city, IFP supporters seized control. These hostels became ‘fortresses of fear’: both sanctuaries for Zulu-speaking refugees fleeing their burnt-out township homes and rallying points from which IFP militants mounted attacks on neighbouring townships (Segal Reference Segal1992). Some 14,000 lives were lost in the next four years – most in the PWV region – during a time of political violence that was commonly known as the udlame. This powerful word conveys social chaos: a violence that ‘initiates a spiral of revenge attacks’; ‘that opens the door to the violent resolution of many other [community and family] disputes … which might otherwise have ended peacefully’ (Peires Reference Peires2000: 99; see also Kelly Reference Kelly and Shetler2015). The udlame had different sources and took various forms as it spread across South Africa. Here, I explore how the political violence that spiralled out of the migrant hostels of Johannesburg was entwined with and exacerbated by patterns of conflict associated with the criminality of uncontrollable young migrants.

Violence was concentrated in and around the migrant hostels, where older patterns of eldership had been unravelling for some time as industrial decline transformed them from factory dormitories into hubs of the taxi industry and its related illicit trades. In 1990, there was a decisive rupture when a new wave of young migrants flooded into the dilapidated dormitories. One NGO was undertaking an upgrading project at Vosloorus hostel when its residents – older men who had lived in the hostel for decades – fled the violence. V. L., for instance, had been conscripted into an impi and forced to join the first clashes. A fortnight later he escaped for Orange Farm informal settlement, which was teeming with similar refugees.Footnote ⁷⁶ Such accounts are congruent with the research bravely conducted by Babylon Xeketwane (Reference Xeketwane1993: 41, 43) in the migrant hostels of Soweto at the height of the violence. His snapshot surveys suggested that the majority of hostel residents were less than thirty years old; most had come to Johannesburg in 1990 or 1991. There were even reports in the press (never proven) claiming that the IFP leadership was bussing in young men from rural districts notorious for faction fighting.Footnote ⁷⁷

Ndlovu's and Xeketwane's remarkable accounts emphasize the despair of the older generation at the criminality that the young migrants brought into the hostel. First, it seems that the age-set youth leaders, so important in the faction fighting of the Natal Midlands, were often at the heart of the political mobilization of the early 1990s. At Meadowlands hostel, ‘the inisizwa told us not to waste time but to arm ourselves. We took up arms and have not laid them down’ (Xeketwane Reference Xeketwane1991: 28). At George Goch hostel, the young leader (igosa) of the best dance troop in Bergville, a district that is almost as well known for its stock theft and dagga smuggling as Msinga, played a central role in the fighting (Ndlovu Reference Ndlovu1994: 21). A second indicator of the transformation of the hostels was the influx of women – mainly refugees fleeing violence – into what had once been a male-only domain. In turn, hostels became notorious for sexual violence: ‘Some [township women] come voluntarily whereas others are dragged against their will because they think they are smart. They think we are worth nothing because we are township rejects; that is why we drag them in kicking and screaming’ (Xeketwane Reference Xeketwane1993: 114).Footnote ⁷⁸ Third, township thugs fleeing vigilante justice often sought refuge in the hostels, falling in and making joint enterprise with the migrant stock thieves and carjackers. ‘Cars are hijacked … girls are jack-rolled [raped at gunpoint] … attempts to seek peace were overridden … the younger generation had become uncontrollable’ (Xeketwane Reference Xeketwane1993: 128).

However, we might also note that many young migrants – the ‘oxen’ struggling to endure the city – saw their fragile livelihoods and social networks shattered by the political violence. Two images of devastation recurred in a series of interviews concerning memories of this period that I conducted in 2011. One was the destruction of ethnically cosmopolitan relationships. A man from Nqutu, for instance, explained how, having been conscripted into an impi, he fled his rented backyard shack for refuge in the migrant hostels, having first put his girlfriend and their child on a bus back to her mother in the Northern Transvaal. He never saw her again.Footnote ⁷⁹ The second concerned the feuding within the minibus-taxi industry, which not only destroyed lives and livelihoods but also brutally split the townships into rival routes and zones, further isolating those living in the hostels.Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, many migrant taxi drivers fled the hostels for the shack settlements of the city (Xeketwane Reference Xeketwane1993: 117): ‘Life was unbearable for me … I was always scared that one day they [the passengers] would find out I was one of them [the hostel dwellers]. Besides, how do you kill your own customers?’ Much as Msinga's war parties dragged whole communities into faction fights, so too many young men now found themselves sucked into the udlame.

Udlame savagery was not restricted to the hostels and townships. It also spread along migrant routes, devouring lives. Indeed, it was as hired muscle beholden to more senior political leaders and criminal bosses that some young migrants were inserted as hired guns into the spiralling political conflicts. Take the infamous Nqutu Massacre of 1993, in which the kraal of an ANC-aligned traditional leader, Chief Joseph Molefe, was attacked by a gang of sixty masked men. Allegedly, the gunmen were organized by Albert Mlaba, a township taxi owner and dealer in stolen cars, who had become close to the IFP leadership in the East Rand of the PWV city region after he supplied them with transport to attend political rallies.Footnote ⁸¹ Violence also crossed political boundaries. Take the example of another feud transported along the transport corridors of KwaZulu-Natal from city taxi ranks to the rural Bergville District.Footnote ⁸² What made it so vicious was that rival taxi operators hailed from rival clans who were aligned to opposing political parties. The local induna and vicar who attempted to broker a peace deal at a series of public gatherings were themselves murdered by a young hitman from the migrant hostels. The gunman claimed that he was linked to an ANC-aligned self-defence unit, and the killing was a political act; the judge ruled that it was a criminal conspiracy. ‘He [Reverend Izak Shandu] was a man who worked for peace,’ noted the judge by way of brief tribute to one of the murdered peace monitors.Footnote ⁸³

The udlame likewise fed violence within Msinga in the early 1990s. ‘Some of the change came from the accumulation of violence outside the valley. Some of the change came from the accumulation of war [and conflict] here at home,’ explained Creina Alcock. ‘Among the many deaths that have touched [the] Church Agricultural Project’ were those of a white farmer from Dundee, murdered by three young carjackers; ‘the fiancé of a member of staff … killed after he agreed to help an old man safeguard his pension from his son’; a teenage migrant necklaced (i.e. burned to death) by township Comrades; and an adolescent and his parents whose homestead was attacked by stock thieves.Footnote ⁸⁴

It was also during the udlame that S. D. (‘the scrawny gang leader of all the naughty kids at Mashunka’, mentioned above) was shot dead. Now a young man, he may well have been embroiled in political violence, for he had certainly been mixed up in criminal activities. A few years previously he had been ‘hired to shoot a man, but didn't quite manage [it]’. The Church Agricultural Project wrote him a short obituary: