Introduction

On 5 August 1985, the violence which had already led to a State of Emergency in much of South Africa exploded in Natal, leaving more than seventy people dead and thousands injured and homeless in the course of a week and raising the spectre in some areas of a repetition of the anti-Indian riots of 1949.

In 1985 at least half the dead were shot by the police, and it would be foolish to see the disturbance in simple racial terms. Political differences between the newly formed United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Zulu cultural movement, Inkatha, and sheer economic deprivation which led to the looting of African as well as Indian traders, warn against any simple equation of the violence with racially motivated anti-Indian sentiment per se . Thus, according to the Weekly Mail :

an unprecedented wave of terror is sweeping the Durban townships of Umlazi and KwaMashu where hordes of armed warriors are purging the townships of United Democratic Front sympathisers. At least three people have been abducted and brutally killed by the 'impis' who roam the streets at night, forcing males to join them on their murder and destruction spree.^[2]

Two weeks later there were further reports of people being killed in Lamontville, allegedly by members of Inkatha impis, while its leader, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, denounced the African National Congress (ANC) for wanting 'a bloodbath' in South Africa and was hailed in the media as a peacemaker.^[3] Three months later the unrest had still not subsided completely, for there was an even more disturbing attack on Mpondo workers in southern Natal, an attack promptly labelled 'faction fighting' by a press ever ready to identify any conflict amongst Africans as 'tribalism'.

The attacks on the Indians, the members of the UDF, and the Mpondo were widely believed to have been instigated by 'a few well-organized, tribal "impis"', some of them deliberately brought in from rural Natal as vigilante groups, allegedly to put an end to violence in the townships. They were widely associated with Chief Buthelezi's Inkatha, although some of Inkatha's own members have themselves suffered at their hands and its Central Committee appears unable to control them. There is also some evidence of collusion

between the vigilante groups and the security forces.^[4] As Sutcliffe and Wellings point out,

the Inkatha leadership is caught in something of a Catch-22. . . . If Chief Buthelezi publicly and specifically condemns the actions of these impis he will clearly lose a substantial section of his support-base. At the same time, if he supports these groups he will be seen as condoning mob-violence. Given these options, Buthelezi has chosen simply to warn the leaders of these impis that they were acting without the support of the Inkatha central committee.^[5]

Whether or not Inkatha has been directly implicated, these tragic events reveal starkly the reactionary and conservative repercussions of 'cultural' organizations which serve to glorify ethnic identity and heighten ethnic consciousness. While the violence has to be understood in the context of the gross overcrowding, high unemployment and intense poverty of Durban's urban 'locations' and shanty towns, the attacks on both political dissidents and minority groups also raise urgent questions about the apartheid state's manipulation of ethnic politics in South Africa, questions which can in part be addressed through an analysis of the role and nature of earlier cultural ethnicity in Natal in the years prior to the riots of 1949.