Thousands Homeless : S. Africa-- Fratricide at Crossroads

Huddled together against the cold rains of the Southern Hemisphere’s fast-approaching winter, the Temba family--mother, father, four children--had the forlorn look of refugees anywhere.

Their home, a three-room shack of wood, tin and plastic but with the luxury of real glass windows, was among those destroyed in the first round of fighting at the Crossroads squatter settlement outside Cape Town last month.

Sam Temba’s head was still wrapped in dirty gauze bandages after a rifle bullet grazed him as he tried to salvage some of the family’s meager possessions from their shanty. He complained of recurrent blackouts and dizziness. His wife, Elizabeth, was burned on the legs as she fled the settlement with their children.

Wounded by Machete

Their oldest son, Andries, 19, was wounded when the machete of a black vigilante slashed his right arm almost to the bone as he and other youths tried to defend their homes against the vigilantes’ repeated attacks.

The younger Temba children, all with sad, watery eyes, runny noses and dirty, ragged clothes, were wrapped in old woolen blankets in the corner of a leaky Red Cross tent.

“We’re suffering, really suffering,” Elizabeth Temba said, tending the crying child of a friend who had gone in search of her husband, missing since the worst of the fighting. “What are we to do now? Where are we to live? How will we survive?”

The Tembas, along with 50,000 others whose homes were destroyed in the Crossroads fighting, are not the first refugees in 21 months of South Africa’s racial strife, but in their unprecedented numbers they are testimony to how large and complex the conflict has become.

Comrades Under Attack

The fighting at Crossroads last month and this, some of the worst yet in South Africa, pitted the Witdoeke, a conservative black vigilante group known by the white strips of cloth ( witdoeke in Afrikaans) that they wear to identify themselves, against militant black youths called Comrades, who belong to affiliates of the United Democratic Front, a national coalition of anti-apartheid groups.

The Witdoeke support the longtime but now controversial leader of the Crossroads settlement, Johnson Ngxobongwana, and were commanded by his chief lieutenant, Sam Ndima. In some of the fighting, the Witdoeke, estimated to number more than 1,000 men, are alleged to have had police backing and to have been given guns.

The Witdoeke motive in launching their attacks on three sections of the Crossroads complex was clearly stated in angry meetings over the previous three months: The Comrades, some of whom had been recruited into new urban guerrilla units of the African National Congress, were endangering all the settlement’s 120,000 residents by bringing increased police and army patrols into the area and, because they had refused to leave, had to be driven away.

“We did not mean to go to war, but we had to respond to the activities of these youths,” said Edward Qhangana, a member of the Crossroads residents’ executive committee under Ngxobongwana. “They may have militancy but they lack political maturity, and this makes them a danger to the whole Crossroads community. They had to go.

“When they attacked the security forces with their stones and petrol (gasoline) bombs and hand grenades even, we all suffered from the police retribution. Many of these youths were not even from Crossroads families but had fled here from nearby townships to escape the police. Finally, when they started attacking the Crossroads community leaders, we had to protect ourselves, and counterattack to drive them out. The Comrades bear the responsibility for all these deaths and all these people’s misery.”

The Comrades tell a different story. They see themselves as being in the vanguard of the black struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule. And they see Ngxobongwana and members of his executive committee as “sellouts” collaborating with the government, helping to maintain that system, for personal advantage.

“We are against exploitation, and Ngxobongwana’s committee is exploiting the people of Crossroads,” Mxolisis Tolbat, chairman of the Crossroads branch of the Cape Youth Congress, said, emerging briefly from a hiding place outside Crossroads.

‘Tool of the System’

“The committee is not democratic, and lately it has become a tool of the system. There is also a vast amount of corruption, with the committee taxing the people far too much and then helping themselves to the money to buy cars and cattle and maybe even farms. . . .”

The Comrades refused to leave Crossroads, according to Alfred Siphika, the leader of one of the three Crossroads sections that was razed in the fighting, because “the youths are part of the community, not some foreign force, and the ANC men, were they perhaps present in our area, certainly are our people, too.”

The Crossroads committee, which was chosen in an election that it had managed itself and that drew no more than 5,000 of an estimated 87,000 adult residents, may have felt threatened by the growth of the United Democratic Front affiliates in the settlement, particularly in the newer sections of Crossroads where Ngxobongwana’s leadership has been questioned recently.

Andries Temba, one of the Comrades, remarked to the nods of older Crossroads residents standing around him, “If we were not certain before about where Ngxobongwana and the other committee members stood ideologically, we knew when the Witdoeke attacked us. They were doing the work of the police, of the system. They were splitting the people in our struggle against apartheid and they had joined the enemy.”

Land a Key Issue

But the issue of land, perhaps even more than politics, appears to be at the center of the Crossroads fighting--and to have led directly to the razing of about 5,000 shanties in three sections of Crossroads last month. This week, fighting spread to a fourth section of the Crossroads complex where many had taken refuge, and thousands more shacks were burned.

After attempting for years to remove Crossroads’ residents from the squatter settlement, either by returning them to the Xhosa tribal homeland of Transkei, where most had come from in search of work, or by housing them in a new black township farther from Cape Town, the government agreed last year to let about 40,000 stay and to develop the shantytown as a model urban community if the remainder moved.

Ngxobongwana, a former longshoreman, had led the decade-long fight to remain at Crossroads, becoming one of the most prominent community activists in the country. He felt the government’s offer was fair because not only would Crossroads be redeveloped but most residents would get permission to remain in the Cape Town area and no longer be subject to deportation to the rural homelands.

But disputes arose immediately over who would remain in the upgraded Crossroads, about 12 miles southeast of Cape Town, and who would move, and under what terms, to the new town of Khayelitsha, about six miles away.

Coveted Newer Areas

And the deal led the 47,000 residents of the Old Crossroads, the oldest section of the settlement, to covet three newer adjacent areas, a total of 62 acres, whose 38,000 residents had come more recently and were refusing to move to Khayelitsha without explicit government guarantees that they would be allowed to remain in the Cape Town area permanently.

“We were here before them and have a right to stay here,” Prince Gobingca, a member of the residents committee, said, referring to Old Crossroads, where most of the Witdoeke live. “We fought a long time, many years before they even came, for the right to stay here, and they were jeopardizing everything we had won. We do not want to continue living like this--look at these mud pools, we live like pigs--but to get better houses, to get Crossroads upgraded. We need to spread out.”

To Sam Temba, this is simply an attempt to justify theft.

“They are saying, ‘You have what we need, what we want, and we are going to take it from you,’ and in the Bible that is called stealing,” he said. “The truth is that I have been here since 1978, about as long as those in Old Crossroads, and in fact I used to live there until I brought my family from Transkei.”

Years of Clashes

Although rival groups had fought at Crossroads several times over the years, the battle lines for the latest clash were drawn late last year when the Witdoeke, then known as the “Fathers,” tried to drive the Comrades out of the settlement. They failed then, largely because the Comrades’ numbers had increased with the inflow of hundreds of young militants from nearby black townships.

The Witdoeke attacked again in March, hitting at critics of Ngxobongwana and his committee, but were repulsed, suffering serious losses at the hands of the Comrades and armed African National Congress guerrilla cells.

Ngxobongwana’s committee then struck another deal with the government, according to his critics. They agreed to demolish those squatter camps whose residents were still refusing to move to Khayelitsha. In return, he and his people would get the land adjacent to his Old Crossroads section, as well as guns and police and army protection for the Witdoeke, the critics say.

At the end of April, Sam Ndima, the Witdoeke commander, gave an ultimatum to Siphika and the leaders of the other two sections adjacent to Old Crossroads.

“Mr. Ndima said he wanted to flatten our camps, and that if we did not move out of the area he would destroy our camps by force,” Siphika told the Cape provincial Supreme Court in an affidavit seeking protection for the remaining camps. “He said he had been given 200 guns by the police for this purpose.”

Charismatic Leader

Ngxobongwana, a charismatic leader and powerful speaker, was also reportedly promised a seat on the government’s proposed national council that is to give blacks a share of political power.

If true--Ngxobongwana refused to be interviewed--this would be a political coup for the government, for Ngxobongwana is still chairman of the Western Cape Civic Assn. and until recently played a major role in the Cape Town branch of the United Democratic Front. But it would probably brand him a “sellout” in the eyes of many blacks for collaborating with the white-led government and abandoning the fight against apartheid.

Ngxobongwana, known as “Nobs” around Crossroads, had spent much of 1985 in jail on murder charges. He was eventually acquitted, and on his release appeared to many who had worked with him over the past decade to be a broken man.

“Nobs was a different man when he came out,” said a white clergyman who has worked in Crossroads for many years but asked not to be quoted by name. “Nobs was physically unwell, his mind was no longer as sharp as before and his personality had changed a great deal. How the police broke him, I can only speculate, but he came out of jail a compromised man.”

Whatever deals may have been made, a ferocious Witdoeke attack began on Saturday evening, May 17, according to residents of the three sections adjacent to Old Crossroads. It continued for a week with little respite until the Comrades had been soundly defeated and all 5,000 shacks in the other areas were destroyed.

Spears, Clubs, Guns

“First, they came in gangs of 50 and 60 looking for all the Comrades,” Sam Temba recalled. “They were armed to the teeth with spears and clubs and pangas (machetes), and quite a few had rifles and pistols. All the youth had to flee because the Witdoeke clearly intended to kill anyone and everyone they thought might be a Comrade.

“Some of our young men did get together, and fought back with stones and petrol bombs and whatever weapons they could get. But the Witdoeke had more men and more guns, and whenever the battle turned against them, the police intervened with their tear gas and shotguns against the youth.

“They began burning our houses late on Sunday, and when they got the upper hand they set fire to everything. Many people saw some policemen even helping the Witdoeke to burn us all out. Of course, we all had to flee for our lives. And then the police and the army put up a barbed-wire fence to prevent us from returning. So there is no doubt in our minds that the Witdoeke were working for the system.”

Tiaan van der Merwe, a member of Parliament from the opposition Progressive Federal Party, an organization of liberal whites, said after several visits to Crossroads during the battle that the police and army had “either been active in supporting the Witdoeke or, at the very least, were prepared to let them get away with what they were doing. They only interfered when the other side, the Comrades, were getting the upper hand.”

Police Deny Involvement

The police strongly deny any involvement in the fighting, saying that they had difficulty separating the two sides. But a Supreme Court justice, hearing residents’ accounts of the fighting, quickly granted a restraining order barring the security forces as well as the vigilantes from attacking another Crossroads camp.

The Witdoeke, however, ignored the court order and launched a new attack Monday on another section of Crossroads known as the KTC Camp after a nearby store. In two days of fierce fighting, the Witdoeke drove the Comrades away and burned the shacks that had been home to 50,000 people. Unofficially, the death toll is now at least 85, including 17 reported killed Monday and Tuesday.

The government has rejected “with the contempt they deserve” all suggestions that it conspired with the Witdoeke to oust some of the most stubborn Crossroads residents and force them to move to Khayelitsha by destroying their homes.

But the government barred the residents displaced by the fighting last month from returning to Crossroads and rebuilding their shanties. It cleared that ground of rubble, surrounded it with barbed wire and put a 24-hour-a-day military guard on it.

Relocation Ordered

The government insists that all those displaced by the fighting must move to Khayelitsha--”our new home” in the Xhosa language used by most Crossroads residents--where they will be given temporary housing in tents and allowed to rebuild their shacks on sites with water and sanitary facilities.

Only 4,000 have so far gone to Khayelitsha. The rest, finding it too far from their jobs or fearing new attacks from vigilantes there, moved into other sections of Crossroads, including KTC or were taken in by residents of surrounding black townships. Some like the Tembas, were housed in a Red Cross tent city that the Witdoeke vigilantes burned to the ground Monday, making them refugees for the second time this month.

In the view of many white relief workers, the government appears to be trying to force more to go to Khayelitsha by providing a minimum of shelter, food, clothing and medical care for the refugees. The Red Cross, churches, charitable groups and even foreign embassies--the U.S. Embassy donated $35,000--have given more aid to the refugees than the central government has.

J. Christiaan Heunis, the minister of constitutional development and planning, who has jurisdiction over Crossroads, told Parliament that although 35,000 people were made homeless in the fighting, the government saw no reason to declare an emergency or disaster area here because everyone could be accommodated at Khayelitsha.

“There is no possibility that these people can go back to Crossroads,” Heunis said.

‘Mass, Forced Removal’

The government’s critics accuse it of trying to take advantage of the refugees’ misery and forcing them into a move they had fought for so many years.

The Rev. Allan Boesak, a founder of the United Democratic Front, said on a visit to Crossroads that the government’s actions there amounted to “a mass, forced removal of 35,000 people, and there should be no doubt about that.”

Heunis replied that the security forces, whatever power they might appear to have in other circumstances, could not protect the refugees from the Witdoeke vigilantes if they returned to their old camp areas in Crossroads.

“The government cannot allow conditions to redevelop into what, in all probability, will result in a revival of the recently experienced violence,” Heunis said. “It affects the stability of the whole Cape Peninsula.”

More Violence Feared

But Colin Appleton, regional director of the Urban Foundation, said that the government’s decision not to allow the displaced residents to return and rebuild could itself bring further violence if they attempt to reclaim the land.

The decision also rewarded the Witdoeke for their violence, Appleton said. The Urban Foundation has withdrawn from a $12-million project to upgrade the squatter settlement.

The Progressive Federal Party’s Van der Merwe sees the battle for Crossroads as a dangerous new development in the country’s civil strife.

“If even half the allegations are true, then we are into a new ball game where the government is prepared to exploit divisions within the community ruthlessly and to support the bad elements to achieve its own political ends,” he said. “This divide-and-rule strategy is very dangerous because it could become uncontrollable. . . . What it is doing is pushing us all the faster down the road to civil war.”