AS Easter approaches, so the killing season starts in the valleys of Zululand. It is time for the men to come home for the holidays, and it is time for them to settle old scores.
“We can almost predict when it is going to start,” says policeman Jacques Lombard. “Most of the men in the rural areas work in the cities, and when they start to come home to their families for Easter, the level of violence rises.”
According to Zulu historian Alan Mountain, faction fighting pre-dates Shaka’s time. “There have always been disputes over women, land or cattle.
“Before Shaka’s time, however, these were more trials of strength than actual battles. They fought with sticks, and there was an element of skill and tactics involved. If anyone died it was more often by accident.?
“However, after the Anglo-Zulu war, it was in the British interests to keep the Zulus divided and to foster civil war. So they parcelled the nation up into arbitrary regions and appointed their own chiefs. The faction fighting now took on the aspect of tribal loyalties as well as property disputes and became more serious.”
But clan violence was still men playing at war – until the apartheid government saw it as an ideal opportunity to divide and rule as the British had done before.
It was during the explosive eighties that clan violence became political violence and led to thousands of deaths. But now, seven years after a black-led government has taken control and political violence has all but disappeared, people are still dying in the valleys of Zululand.
Police statistics reveal a staggering number of motiveless and unsolved murders.
“Of course, as population densities increase, so the clash for resources becomes more ominous,” says Mountain.
Natal University academic Jabulani Sithole agrees: “There is a myth that this is just fighting for the sake of violence. But there is always a source of the dispute – usually over resources – sometimes going back centuries.”
According to Sithole, the term ‘faction fighting’ is a convenient and inaccurate catch-phrase invented by urban people to explain a complex phenomenon. “Rural people call it ‘izimpi zemibango’ which can be translated as ‘fighting caused by disputes’.
Usually, groups of men gather in the hills and engage in running battles for several days. The areas are mostly accessible only by foot. The police are usually unable to intervene until it is too late. Most of the time they are not inclined to intervene at all.
This is reflected in Mngomezulu’s attitude to the legal question of clan murders. “When we arrest people for faction fighting, what do we charge them with? There might be dead people, but we will never find out who actually committed the murders.?