Al J Venter
They are making guns in bush factories in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands and on both sides of the Umzimkulu River further south. And while none of them would pass muster with the South African Bureau of Standards, they’re pretty nifty when it comes to killing.
The slaughter they cause can be intense: eight dead in one village, 20 or 30 in another. Then, a week or a month later, another attack: payback time. Those not hacked to death in these ongoing vendettas (to save ammunition, we hear later) are shot with a variety of firearms, many of them home-made.
Most are cheeky adaptations of the 12-bore shotgun. It is the most popular weapon of choice in the killing zones because of its wide spread.
Other firearms range from devilish adaptations of the ubiquitous AK-47 to drilling through the barrel of a starting pistol so that it will accept a conventional cartridge. It probably cannot be used very often, but by then it will have served its purpose.
Curiously, there is an astonishing number of military carbines about – South African Defence Force R-4s, AKs, an occasional FN or a former Portuguese Army G3 brought across the border from Mozambique. As security force operations start to take effect, this arsenal appears to be thinning.
Most of the people living in the embattled zone are taking some bad knocks. Barely a week goes by that there aren’t more casualties in ambushes or attacks on isolated homesteads.
Technical expertise is reasonably sound considering the conditions under which these weapons are produced. Those responsible rarely use machines: in the mountains where the workshops are situated, there is often no electricity. Tools can be as elementary as a hammer, a hacksaw and a file, as well as a youngster to provide muscle to drive a set of cow-hide bellows over a charcoal fire.
Some of the devices that have emerged from these backwoods workshops hardly resemble modern firearms. One incorporated a flint- lock that had been prised off a stolen blunderbuss, literally a museum piece. Quite a few used lengths of water pipe for barrels. At diameters of 25mm, these are ideally suited for 12-bore cartridges.
Piping is preferred because there are no tell-tale ballistics for the police to work with afterwards.
Recently, in Port Shepstone, police confiscated two home-made weapons seized at a roadblock. They were lengths of metal tubing that had been strapped to crudely shaped wooden grips. They could have been made by a child.
The smaller of the two fired a 9mm bullet. The other chambered a .762 FN rifle cartridge. When police tested them the following day, both weapons displayed an adequate ability to blow a fair-sized hole in a person.
The improvised .762, said a police officer from Harding, already had blown holes. They had been looking for its owner for a while.
“HC”, an armourer attached to KwaZulu-Natal Command, has given evidence in a number of trials that resulted in convictions. Like others involved in this business, he prefers to remain incognito.
Ten or 15 years ago, he says, the weapon most likely to be used to settle differences in the rural areas was the knife. “Now everyone who hasn’t got a gun can get one.” A new AK-47, still in its grease, brought across from Maputo, can be had for a few hundred rand.
“Or they can have someone make them one. Some bush `factories’ produce five or six firearms a week. All the workshops are medieval, smoky, one-roomed tin shacks stuck away in the back of beyond to avoid attention. It is invariably a condition of sale that the vendor must show the buyer that the weapon can fire.
“They use anything from piping to some metal off a steel plough that has been hammered and filed into shape. Quite a few that we come across are not immediately recognisable as weapons.
“It wasn’t all that long ago that the performance of a kraal weapon was something of a hit-and-miss affair. Often the guns would blow up in someone’s face. The first the police would know about it was when they were called to a hospital because a person had been admitted with blast wounds.”
HC points out a starting pistol converted into an effective single-shot weapon. It has been used in a political assassination that was big news. A prominent Inkatha political figure had been shot behind the ear at point-blank range.
A few of the weapons are nothing short of dangerous to the user. One or two have gaps between the receiver and barrel, usually carried separately. Or the cartridges are so loose-fitting that the gun emits a sheet of flame from the breech when fired.