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Political Violence, ‘Tribalism’, and Inkatha

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

Probably no other aspect of the South African conflict has elicited more divergent explanations and misinterpretations than the ongoing political violence. It is variously attributed to (1) de Klerk's double agenda and unreformed police; (2) a ‘third force’ of right-wing elements in the security establishment, bent on derailing the Government's negotiation agenda; (3) Inkatha–A.N.C. rivalry, engineered by ambitious Buthelezi in danger of being sidelined as an equal third party; (4) the A.N.C.'s campaign of armed struggle, ungovernability, and revolutionary intolerance; (5) ingrained tribalism, unleashed by the lessening of white repression that merely resulted in ‘black-on-black’ violence formerly held in check; (6) the legacy of apartheid in general, a ‘lost youth’ generation. Helen Suzman, for example, singled out sanctions for at least ‘part of the blame’ in her 1991 presidential address to the Institute of Race Relations, while its director, John Kane-Berman, lists all parties as having ‘bloody hands’.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

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35 As Steven Friedman pointed out in the Weekly Mail (Johannesburg), 10–16 05 1991, the well-intentioned ‘phasing out’ of the hostels may well trigger greater violence, as long as those living there are not part of the agreements.Google Scholar

36 Ibid. 22–7 March 1991.

37 Friedman, loc. cit.

38 The ploy of forged leaflets has been extensively used at different times and locations in South Africa to fan inter-communal antagonism or to discredit activist groups. Port Elizabeth seems to have been a centre for fomenting anti-A.N.C. sentiment during the 1980s when forged U.D.F. and Cosatu leaflets stirred up trouble by demanding financial contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle from each household.

Usually such materials could be easily identified by the false ‘struggle language’ they attempted to imitate. Over time, however, the products of the hate-mongers became ever more ‘sophisticated’. For example, in early 1990, pamphlets distributed widely in Natal maintained that Indian women carried an antidote to AIDS– a pernicious call for racial rape that was repeatedly denounced by Mandela.

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41 Ibid.

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45 Buchanan, Allen, Secession. The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sunter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder, 1992), p. 161.Google Scholar