SOUTH AFRICA: Tribal Instinct

All the trouble in South Africa is not simply black and white; it can also be black v. black. All over the land, and most particularly in the ramshackle black suburbs that now ring the great white cities, tribal jealousies fester. In native townships bearing such names as Zondi, Moroka and Shantytown—from which some 94,000 native workers stream each day into Johannesburg to work for the white man—Basutos, Bechuanas, Xhosas and Zulus live more or less segregated from one another under a government policy designed to preserve tribal instincts and to maintain the fiction that all native labor is transient and will some day return to the bush.

The Tsotsis. Life is hard for these enforced suburbanites. They must ride to work each day on crowded, filthy “native trains” whose hard plank seats are always jammed with sweating Africans, standing, squatting, sitting on laps or even riding the couplings between the decrepit cars. In these crowded human cattle cars, violence is quick to flare. Flashily dressed native gangsters, known as Tsotsis, wait to pounce upon the unwary worker, particularly on paydays, relieving him of his wallet and sometimes pushing him clean off the train if he resists. Even in the darkness of the stations and the roads near by, the Tsotsis wait to attack the worker as he races, blind with fear, from the station to his squalid home. Tsotsism is a problem older than the Boer government’s apartheid policy, but apartheid has aggravated it.

Among the most prized of African workers are the Zulus. Fiercest fighters in the African bush, they work mostly as houseboys for white city dwellers, and for years lived in rooms atop the apartment houses. In recent years, thanks to the government policy of clearing out their “locations in the sky,” more and more Zulus have been forced into the suburbs. Confronted by the bullying Tsotsis, the Zulus stuck together, fought back in the trains, and often ambushed the Tsotsis themselves in the streets. The Zulus had a few gangsters of their own. Sometimes they made mistakes and attacked the wrong men. Soon the Zulus were embroiled with members of the Basuto tribe, which includes, besides many an honest workingman, a secret society of gangsters who call themselves “the Russians.”

Bloody Boogie. Early this month, fed by weeks of intertribal bitterness, open battle was joined between the Basutos and the Zulus of Johannesburg. Two Zulus were beaten to death and a Basuto leader was caught, castrated and clubbed to death. The proprietor of a lunchroom shut down his jukebox, on the theory that too many tunes like White Horse Boogie and Bennie’s Second Street Special would overexcite his Zulu clients. The precaution did little good. On the following Saturday a swarming mass of Zulus marched against the Basutos, armed with clubs and spears.

In a prepared ambush along the slum town’s dusty main street, the Basuto “Russians” were waiting with jungle knives, needle-sharp iron rods, battle-axes and a few guns. When the Zulus bore down, the Russians tried to corner each one singly. Then, in the horrified words of a local police officer, who witnessed the scene, they would “hack his knee or his Achilles tendon so that he would drop, then slowly, neatly, talking to him all the while and wishing him a pleasant journey to Hell, proceed to pare his head with a knife until he fell dead.”

Seven Zulus died that night a fortnight ago, but on the following afternoon when the Basutos, protected by a police guard, marched past the Zulu stronghold on the way back from burying one of their dead heroes, the Zulus struck back. Streaming behind a shower of stones from their government-built hostel gates with cries of “Idedele, idedele!” (Get out of the way!), they swarmed through the police lines; the police opened fire on the Zulus with pistols and Sten guns.

Storekeepers in shops for blocks around scuttled under their counters. Women and children fled as the battling spread sporadically through the town, but not all escaped. One 18-month-old baby was shot on its mother’s back. Last week police were able at last to chalk up a partial list of the casualties: 40 dead in the city morgue, another 30 wounded, in the native hospital. As tension continued to mount in the native townships, Johannesburg’s police called in army help in a desecrate effort to reestablish law and order.