![]() Like the former Soviet Union, South Africa in transition provides a sobering illustration of the links between tyranny and lethal anarchy. Natal’s war is steeped in the violent history and self-fulfilling prophesies of apartheid. One must focus instead on all the myriad other elements in the picture which in the end explain tribalism’s potency in much of the rest of Africa as well: the weak or corrupt institutions of law, the machinations of opportunists and their proxies, the meddling of outsiders, the fusion of politics with crime, poverty, and ignorance. So the most obvious and superficial explanation for conflict-ethnicity -falls away in Natal. Moreover, unlike the fighting in the Transvaal, where the killing has largely broken down along ethnic lines, Zulu against Xhosa, the fighting in Natal has pitted Zulu against Zulu. By the time the fighting finally spread to the Transvaal townships outside Johannesburg, in 1990, it had been decimating Natal for about five years. Natal is a good place to begin asking these questions, because South Africa’s civil war began there. “ Khali al-ahid yakul al-abid,” goes an old Sudanese saying from the nineteenth century, when Arab slave merchants dominated southern Sudan by playing one black African tribe against another-“Let the slave eat the slave.” But what does tribalism have to do with the current fighting in South Africa? And why is the fighting happening now, when the promise of an end to white rule is more real than it has ever before been? By “tribalism" I mean not an exotic habit of hatred but rather a method, as common elsewhere in the world, from Bosnia to Lebanon to India, as it is in Africa: a cynical means of acquiring or retaining power by exploiting or exacerbating ethnic differences. South Africa’s system of apartheid in some ways typified Africa’s most self-destructive tendency. And even those not inclined to ascribe “black-onblack” violence to some mysterious inherent savagery in the African soul may observe this gradually debilitating war and wonder: For all the promising changes of the past several years, could be headed down the familiar African path of protracted war and ruin? The civil war that has been smoldering for the past decade has roots deep in the country’ s past and presages a troubled future for the new South Africa South Africa WARLORDS CALL TO ARMS HACKED 3 FREEThe violence casts doubt on whether the country’s first universal election, scheduled for April, can possibly be free and fair. Even as men in suits and ties were negotiating an enlightened, nonracial constitutional order at a conference hall in Johannesburg’s white suburbs, in just six weeks last July and August more than 800 people were shot, stoned, burned, or hacked to death in townships and squatter camps south of the city. Carnage among blacks in Natal and in the townships outside Johannesburg has dimmed the bright hopes raised four years ago, in February of 1990, when the African National Congress was unbanned and Mandela was released from jail. de Klerk, are being feted as Nobel Prize-winning peacemakers, the country is sliding ever deeper into civil war. IT is a measure of South Africa’s schizophrenia that while its world-famous leaders, ![]()
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