This chapter will argue that nationalist politics is driven to exclude and ultimately even repress those that defy its terms. In intending a ‘free people’, where freedom is incarnate in a specific personality/figure, nationalists must at best ignore, at worst destroy those that do not resemble the national being. Instead of a theoretical proof of this claim, however, the chapter will show how this perspective helps us grasp the logic of a violent conflict that overcame three townships east of Johannesburg between 1990 and 1994. What concerns us will be the conditions or terms of the violence. How did the violence take the form of a conflict between hostel-based, mostly Zulu migrant workers and township youth organised in and through civic structures and youth organisations? What the chapter will suggest is that as the politics of NDR become dominant in the 1980s, two things occurred simultaneously:

The chapter will consider this double movement: estrangement and, ultimately, war. The first movement it will situate in the rise of NDR trade unionism on the East Rand. Hostel dwellers, who had until then been among the most militant of the trade unions’ members, were increasingly overlooked by Cosatu officials and ultimately alienated by the new style of unionism. We will see how the growing political distance between, in the main, Zulu migrant workers and the new ‘social movement’ unions began the migrant workers’ estrangement from the larger township community. Rather than the product of a long-standing cultural difference or the effect of the particular nature of the hostels, we shall see how this estrangement was brought about by the inability of many Zulus to accept the nationalist politics of NDR. In contrast, we will notice that under the auspices of Fosatu, being a (‘traditional’) Zulu was not a logical obstacle to behaving as a democrat.