COLUMN ONE : Myths Blur Rivalries of South Africa : Most blacks honor their own and others’ heritage. Analysts believe political and economic differences under white rule fueled the current conflicts.

Like most inhabitants of the vast urban melting pot of Soweto, Wilson and Isabel Zitha have fond, if not particularly strong, feelings about their ancient cultural heritages.

So, when Zulus began battling Xhosas in the streets outside their modest home recently, Wilson, who is Xhosa, and Isabel, who is Zulu, looked on in stunned silence. And Isabel began to feel ashamed of her own roots.

“How can I say I am Zulu? People are starting to hate us,” she said. “We try to tell them that not all Zulus are like that.”

The recent outbreak of internecine fighting here has been a painful reminder that ethnic identity, nurtured by white missionaries and later by white rulers here, remains a dangerous and easily manipulated force in South Africa.

And, for all the proliferation of marriages, friendships and partnerships among South Africa’s 10 black ethnic groups, ethnic animosity can have reasons as old as war itself--struggles for power and limited resources.

“We are all used to living together in peace, but we still have people who don’t trust other (black) nations,” said Wilson Zitha, 51, who works as a messenger.

That distrust is one of the many obstacles South Africa faces in its quest for a racially harmonious future.

South Africa today is one of the most ethnically diverse countries of the continent. Not one of its major languages is spoken by a majority of its people.

Of the 29 million blacks in South Africa, about 7 million speak Zulu, 6 million speak Xhosa, 3 million speak Northern Sotho, 3 million speak Tswana, 2 million speak Southern Sotho and the rest use other tongues, from Shangaan to Venda. The 2.5 million white Afrikaners and most of the 3 million mixed-race, or Colored, people in the Cape speak Afrikaans.

Over the last century, the black and white tribes of South Africa, especially those in urban areas, have begun to embrace one another’s languages. Now, more than three-fourths of all South Africans speak at least two and often three or four languages.

Both the battle between Zulus and Xhosas near Johannesburg, in which more than 500 people have been killed in less than three weeks, and the 3-year-old conflict among Zulu-speaking people in Natal province, which has killed nearly 4,000 people, have taken on the appearance of historic ethnic rivalries.

But most analysts believe those conflicts were started and fueled by political and economic differences under white oppression, not by any ages-old tribal nationalism.

“These are not prehistoric or preordained enmities,” said Patrick Harries, a historian at the University of Cape Town. “They are very much modern conflicts, over wealth and over power.”

Cradle of Prehistory

Archeologists consider the vast southern tip of Africa to be the cradle of humankind. Prehistoric peoples were living here nearly 2 million years ago, and bushmen’s rock paintings date back 26,000 years.

The ancestors of today’s black South Africans arrived more recently, however. They came from other parts of Africa about 2,000 years ago--still about 1,600 years before the first white settlers landed in Cape Town. The largest group of those migrating Africans was the Nguni, whose descendants are the present-day Zulu, Xhosa (pronounced KO-saw) and Swazi peoples.

Those three groups, with similar languages characterized by clicking sounds, settled throughout the eastern half of South Africa--the Swazis in the present-day independent country of Swaziland to the north, the Xhosas to the south in the nominally independent coastal homelands of Transkei and Ciskei, and the Zulus between, in what is now Natal province.

Relatively small numbers of Africans, including Tswana, Ndebele, Venda, North Sotho and South Sotho, moved into northern and central regions of the country. The Hottentots settled in the Cape.

Those ethnic groups were never the monolithic kingdoms suggested by European missionaries and colonizers. Historians say that they had hundreds of autonomous chiefdoms, spoke different dialects of the same language and often fought among themselves over land, food and cattle.

South Africa’s first and only centralized African kingdom was born in the early 1800s under the ambitious direction of King Shaka Zulu.

Shaka built a disciplined army and, using highly advanced military tactics, conquered 50 major clans and hundreds of smaller ones. Many peaceful and prosperous clans were reduced to poverty by his quest to build a mighty Zulu nation. The period was known as the mfecane , Zulu for “time of the hammering.”

In the ensuing years, the Zulu nation clashed repeatedly with groups of Afrikaners, white European farmers who were trekking into South Africa’s heartland from the Cape coast to escape British colonial rule. The Afrikaners found their guns barely a match for the great numbers of Africans armed with homemade spears and sticks.

Today, the most revered Afrikaner holiday honors the 1838 battle of Blood River, in which Afrikaners believe that God intervened to help them defeat a large force of attacking Zulus.

The British colonial army was surprised by the strength of the Zulu forces nearly 40 years later when it invaded the kingdom and, in a humiliating defeat, was routed by a Zulu army under Mnyamana Buthelezi--great-grandfather of modern-day Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

Six months later, the British returned with reinforcements and defeated the Zulus, exiled the king and brought that African military dynasty to an end.

South African historians have recently begun to believe that the stories told of the powerful Zulu nation were romanticized. They say that Shaka’s kingdom never encompassed more than 100,000 subjects, and that many thousands of Zulus sided with the British army.

Today’s Factions

The modern-day black factional fighting in South Africa has pitted Buthelezi’s Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party against the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela.

Buthelezi and his uncle, King Goodwill Zwelithini, are direct descendants of King Shaka. Buthelezi broke away from the ANC in the mid-1970s, over the ANC’s guerrilla war against Pretoria, and formed Inkatha. Today, Inkatha claims about 1.8 million members (about a fourth of the country’s Zulu speakers) and it recently opened its ranks to all South Africans.

Mandela is a Xhosa from the royal house of the Thembu, and many of the ANC’s leaders also are Xhosas. The ANC has wide support among Zulus, though. For years it was led by a Zulu, Chief Albert Lutuli, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960.

Both ANC and Inkatha leaders deny that the current trouble in Soweto and other townships near Johannesburg had its roots in Xhosa-Zulu animosity.

“We have never declared war on each other, not in the past and not even now,” King Zwelithini said. “Our people are victims of the misguided political ambitions of some of our subjects.”

The ANC and Inkatha blame each other’s political ambitions. Inkatha says that the ANC is trying to undermine Buthelezi and Inkatha as the country begins negotiations toward a new constitution. The ANC counters that Inkatha is using Zulu nationalism to whip up anger toward the Xhosa-led ANC because it fears it is losing political strength.

Both sides blame the white-led government for encouraging ethnic rivalries and creating the conditions in which they could grow.

The first attempts at black unity--and white efforts to thwart it--began in earnest in the 1920s, with the opening of South Africa’s gold mines. Tens of thousands of black Africans moved to the mines and the cities, and African chiefs saw their power over village life dwindle.

That trend worried the British colonialists. The British War Office warned that collapse of the traditional black societies could open the way to “the fusion of the hitherto antagonistic tribes,” which, it said, would be “a far greater danger to the white community than any of the present tribes.”

Support for Tribes

The British made many attempts to prop up tribal leaders, and in the 1960s and 1970s the Afrikaner government took up the cause. It established self-governing black “homelands,” appointed traditional chiefs to be their rulers and withdrew South African citizenship from millions of blacks.

Many blacks were granted permission to work in the white cities and live in one of the satellite townships divided into ethnic neighborhoods. The law still considered them homeland residents, and thousands who came to the cities in search of work were arrested and taken back to the homelands.

Many black leaders, including those of the then-banned ANC, vehemently fought the government’s actions. Other black leaders, such as Buthelezi, accepted positions in the homelands. They maintained that some black autonomy was better than none.

The homelands system fostered ethnic rivalries by forcing millions of Africans to live on crowded tracts of remote, unproductive land.

“It’s a situation where the economic cake is always too small,” said John Wright, a historian at the University of Natal. “And, under those conditions, people can be mobilized by politicians to regard other people as their ‘traditional enemies’ in fighting for a slice of that cake.”

The government has recently admitted that the homeland system was a mistake, but it is not one that can be easily corrected. The government has invited all homeland leaders to participate in negotiations toward a new South African constitution, under which it promises that the black majority will have its first vote in national affairs. Buthelezi has said he will join the negotiations.

Ethnic divisions caused by the homelands system have begun to disappear in urban areas such as Soweto, but that doesn’t mean African customs are forgotten in Soweto.

A growing number of marriages across ethnic lines have cemented, rather than divided, black South Africans. In fact, African societies have for centuries encouraged intermarriage between royal families. One of Mandela’s daughters, for example, married a man from the Swazi royal house.

Many Xhosa boys here still become men by the rite of circumcision, although some prefer the hospital to circumcision school. And, because Zulus do not practice circumcision, a Xhosa woman who marries a Zulu may be teased by her family for “marrying a boy.”

Cultural Exchanges

Goats, sheep and oxen are still slaughtered for weddings, funerals and family celebrations. In February, when Mandela was released from jail after 27 years, his relatives sponsored a traditional feast to thank their Thembu ancestors for watching over him.

The marriages and funerals in Collet Mangesi’s family in Soweto are still carried out in the traditional Xhosa ways. But, lately, the Mangesis have celebrated marriages with Zulus and people from other ethnic groups.

“If my son marries a Zulu girl, the Zulus will demand all the things according to their custom when he’s in their household,” said Mangesi, 49, a clerk in a Johannesburg insurance company. “And, when she enters into our family, we will practice according to our customs.

“When you go across to their side, you dance to their music,” he added with a shrug. “We feel both cultures must be maintained.”

Cultural identity “gives a black person dignity,” Mangesi added. “If you don’t have any tradition, any culture, then you cease to be a person. As much as we love to educate our children to Western things, that doesn’t mean we throw away everything we have.”

Some traditions have undergone adjustments, have become what many here call “Soweto customs.”

Time was when Wilson Zitha would have courted his bride by arriving with all the men in his family, singing and dragging several cattle to be offered as a lobola , or dowry. After some negotiation, the wedding celebration would have begun.

But when Zitha proposed to Isabel, he sent a letter notifying the bride’s father of his intentions and making a cash offer as dowry. Although one of Isabel’s brothers was worried that Wilson, being a Xhosa, might be too crafty to have as an in-law, the rest of the family prevailed and granted approval.

Traditional stereotypes, such as the belief that Xhosas are manipulative and that Zulus are warlike, remain part of how black South Africans see themselves and each other.

In a recent interview, Chief Buthelezi said that “warrior blood courses my veins.” And he admitted that there is truth in the widely held notion that Zulus are a combative people.

“Our people, quite apart from the violence that has been politicized now, have always had that problem,” Buthelezi said. “Even sometimes at an innocent wedding, you’ll hear that a fight took place and someone was killed. It is true that there is something about us Zulus.”