FOREWORD
By Desmond M. Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape
Town, South Africa
Nearly everybody made the most dire predictions
about where South Africa was headed. They believed that that
beautiful land would be overwhelmed by the most awful bloodbath,
that as sure as anything, a catastrophic race war would devastate
that country. These predictions seemed well on the way to
fulfilment when violence broke out at the time of the negotiations
for a transition from repression to freedom, from totalitarian rule
to democracy. At the start of the 1990s, the most awful
bloodletting began to seem endemic. What appeared to be random
killings were taking place on the trains, massacres were happening
when township residents were pitted against the hostel dwellers who
led an unnatural existence in single-sex hostels and were being
alienated from the more stable community-life in the black urban
townships. People were dying like flies and dying gruesomely,
through the notorious necklace when a tyre filled with petrol would
be placed around a victim’s neck and then set alight. Whenever the
daily statistics of casualties were published and they said five or
six people had been killed in the previous twenty-four hours, most
of us would sigh with relief and say, ‘Only five or only six’ - it
was that bad.
Conventional wisdom declared that most of this
bloodletting was due to the bloody rivalry between Nelson Mandela’s
African National Congress (ANC) and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s
Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), fighting for political turf to
establish unchallengeable supremacy. That seemed a plausible
explanation until one pointed out certain odd features in this
whole gory rivalry. The massacres seemed almost always to take
place just when the negotiations for transition had reached a
delicate stage, and it was an odd coincidence that the
negotiations were put at very great risk at a critical point in
the discussions.
It would seem that the train killings were a part
of the rivalry between political foes, but this view was made
untenable by the fact that the killers shot and killed people at
random. They said nothing; they did not ask the passengers to
declare their political affiliation. How would they, therefore,
know that they were not murdering their own fellow members?
The explanation of inter-political party rivalry
was even more difficult to accept as accounting for the drive-past
shootings, which were a feature of the volatile pre-election
period. It made more sense to see that it was all designed to fill
township dwellers with panic and to get them saying that the ANC
was unable to protect its members, and thereby erode its
considerable support in the black townships. Increasingly,
therefore, many of us spoke about a sinister third force somehow
linked to the apartheid government and its security forces, which
was intent on fomenting so-called black-on-black violence, enabling
the apartheid government and many whites to crow about how these
blacks were clearly not yet ready for democracy and political
power. I have always been intrigued by this obsession with
so-called black-on-black violence, as if black-on-white violence
was somehow more acceptable. And why had no one ever described what
happened in Northern Ireland or in Bosnia, Kosovo, et al. with its
vicious brutality as examples of white-on-white violence? There it
was just violence - then why black-on-black violence?
The apartheid government and its cohorts denied
any such involvement in fomenting this gruesome and gory violence.
They were to be proved liars, through for example the Goldstone
Commission. Pieces began to fall into place - for instance, that
explained the silent killers on the trains. Most of them, it was to
be revealed, came from outside South Africa - from Angola, Namibia,
etc., and could not speak the local languages. They would have
given themselves away had they opened their mouths. It had in fact,
nothing to do with political rivalry and everything to do with
people who wanted to cling to power at all costs, at the cost of
some of the most awful bloodletting.
And the world needed to be told this story. We
were greatly blessed to have some of the most gifted journalists
and brilliant photographers. They helped to tell the story. They
captured some riveting moments on film, such as a gruesome
necklacing, and the barbaric turning on a helpless victim by a
baying crowd from one or other side of the conflict. Some of these
professionals won high honours, such as the Pulitzer Prize, for
their work, one for his picture from the Sudan of a vulture
stalking an apparently dying child. It was a picture that stunned a
somewhat complacent world. We were often amazed when we saw their
handiwork. Just how could they have managed to capture such images
in the midst of so much frenzied mayhem? They must have been
endowed with extraordinary courage to work in death zones with so
much nonchalance and professionalism. And they must have been
remarkably cool, no, even cold-blooded to look on it all as being
part of a day’s work.
Now we know a little more as the veil is lifted
on the ways this remarkable breed operated, how frequently they had
to be callous, to the extent of trampling all over corpses without
showing too much emotion, so that they could capture that special
image which would ensure that agencies would want their work. Now
we know a little of the cost, the constant gambling with death, of
being part of what they call, with macabre humour, the Bang-Bang
Club. And we know a little about the cost of being traumatized that
drove some to suicide, that, yes, these people were human beings
operating under the most demanding of conditions. Yes, this is a
splendid book, devastating in what it reveals about the lengths to
which we are prepared to go to gain or to cling to power, and
searingly honest about the high cost, as it brings to public view
what has for so long been out of sight. We owe them a tremendous
debt for their contribution to the fragile process of transition
from repression to democracy, from injustice to freedom.
It is the work of two outstanding artists; no
wonder one of them won the Pulitzer Prize for his photographic
depictions of the Hostel War of which this book is the written
account.