7 - Living in a War Zone

Summary

We lived like animals, always scared.

This is a story of communal trauma. Residents of Katlehong and Thokoza contended with four years of violent conflicts and, although some areas were more directly affected than others and the intensity of the conflict varied, the ANC–IFP fighting and all the associated violence persisted for the duration of the transition period. Its impacts were felt in many ways by different groups of residents, but a consistent theme appearing in survivor narratives is the inescapability of violence: ‘If you lived in the townships, you were automatically involved. It was better for those who had money, they simply found new places to stay.’ The accounts of those who remained provide an impression of what people endured and how life changed during the conflict.

Duma Nkosi, the chairperson of Thokoza's ANC branch, relates an incident that indicates the scale of the carnage. Police regularly collected corpses and transported them to mortuaries. Nkosi explained that the local ANC kept a record of such bodies in the hope of notifying relatives:

There were lots of people, we buried people which we couldn't get to be claimed by family … There were five hundred graves without names. We had a record because we took fingerprints but if ever someone has been burnt it will just be a piece of a charred body, human remains, but the point is you won't know who the person is. Even now we actually have the grave numbers … There were terrible albums where we tried to even take photos of people who were butchered and killed … so that we can try to encourage people to identify their relatives.

A father whose son had been shot and killed and whose body had been taken away by police approached Nkosi for assistance in locating his son's remains. After several inquiries, they were directed to one of the local mortuaries:

There were piles of bodies. They said, ‘When did the person die?’ I said, ‘No, he was shot today.’ I was with the family and someone behind the counter said, ‘I saw a body of a young man who was looking like you. I put him somewhere at the back.’ So, we went to identify the body, you know if you have seen the movies of the German massacres of the Jews, it was just stacked bodies.