One of Numsa's signal achievements had been to foster national solidarity among metal workers. Fantasia has pointed to the primacy of unity as a source of power, viewing ‘militance and solidarity’ as the ‘base of working class power’. Allen argues that it is through unity that socialism expresses its opposition to capitalism. ‘Solidarity, equality and democracy express the antithesis of capitalist values … individualism, the core of capitalist activity, is confronted by collectivism.’ In the early 1990s, however, the union was to confront deep worker divisions in the Pretoria /Witwatersrand/ Vaal (PWV) area, sparked by violence which claimed at least 14 000 lives. Macun details racial cleavages and the rate of unemployment as affecting the capacity of the working class to unify itself, access power and forge common interests in relation to other classes. In Numsa, working class power was weakened by the fracturing of solidarity along ethnic, and migrant versus urban, cleavages.

As in Natal, Inkatha was central to the Transvaal upheavals. The TRC report notes its involvement in 75 per cent of violent incidents. But Inkatha was only able to foment conflic t because of a deep instability in township, hostel and squatter communities. Noting a pattern of urban township violence since the late 1800s in the Transvaal, Kynoch observes that ‘politicised rivalries found fertile ground for escalation partially because a culture of violence was already ingrained.’ From 1989 until the 1994 elections, a cycle of violence and counter-violence became an entrenched feature of township and, in some cases, factor y life.

In the late 1980s previously good relations between Transvaal township residents and hostel dwellers came under strain. After the repeal of the pass laws in 1986, there was an influx of unemployed residents into hostels where conditions had declined because of local government neglect, and at the same time retrenchments on the East Rand and in the reserves offered little relief to jobless migrants facing overgrazed land and widespread stock theft. As Bonner et al comment, ‘the migrant lifestyle was thus being corroded at both rural and urban ends … An incendiary situation existed in the hostels.’