COLUMN ONE : S. Africa’s Fortresses of Fear : In cold, dreary hostels forbidding as prisons, Zulus play Crips to the young Bloods of the ANC in the surrounding townships as a two-year bloodletting escalates.

As the chill of each winter night grips this township, men with harsh Zulu accents, traditional tribal ways and Inkatha Freedom Party membership cards hunker down in the fort known as the Dobsonville Hostel.

They peer out through the concertina wire that encircles them, watching the people of Soweto return to middle-class homes across the road. And they prepare for the next attack while plotting their own revenge.

The hostel dwellers had good reason to expect trouble a few nights ago, after Inkatha supporters from a hostel miles away massacred 39 people in Boipatong, a stronghold of the African National Congress.

So it came as no surprise when several dozen young ANC “comrades,” as they call themselves, charged into this sprawling, dilapidated compound in the middle of the night, firing AK-47 rifles and swinging machetes. Two hours later, five hostel residents and one of the attackers were dead in a clash so common that it rated barely a mention in the next day’s newspaper.

Hostels like Dobsonville stand at the center of two years of bloody, tit-for-tat warfare between Inkatha and the ANC in townships surrounding Johannesburg. That violence, with allegations of government complicity, has severed constitutional talks and plunged South Africa into a deepening crisis.

Many of the hostels--impoverished, overcrowded housing projects for migrant workers--have become arms factories, warrior training camps, havens for fugitives and fortresses that even the police have been unwilling to enter for fear of attack.

The 100 hostels in Johannesburg-area townships, which are home to 500,000 men, have launched nearly 300 attacks on houses, trains and taxis in the past two years, killing more than 1,200 blacks, according to the Independent Board of Inquiry, a human rights monitoring group.

Fewer hostel residents have been killed in revenge attacks, although the number is unknown.

More than a year ago, President Frederik W. de Klerk promised to phase out the country’s 400-hostel system, the home away from home for more than 1 million South Africans. More than $100 million has been allocated to upgrade hostel buildings and turn them into family units. But De Klerk admits the program has yet to get off the ground.

In the meantime, from Dobsonville to Boipatong to Alexandra, hostel dwellers who support the Inkatha Party play Crips to the young Bloods of the ANC in the surrounding townships. And the spiraling cycle of revenge seems to know no end.

After the militant ANC youth attacked the Dobsonville Hostel in Soweto a few days ago, the neighbors wondered: Would the hostel dwellers retaliate with a random attack on the community?

Sipho Ngubane, the leader of the 250-man hostel, considered that question. A tall, stoic figure, he wore a dirty-green trench coat, and his toes edged out of slip-on blue sneakers. His roots among the Zulus in rural Natal province were plain from his wrists. Around each was a thin bracelet of furry cowhide, a memento of the animal slaughtered to welcome him the last time he visited his wife and five children.

“I am also a man,” Ngubane answered slowly. “When I am attacked, I will not just fold my hands. I will also attack. We have been attacked before. And we have always fought back.”

In fact, the Dobsonville Hostel residents have killed at least 33 people in the neighborhood in 10 attacks over the past two years, human rights monitors say. Ngubane says eight hostel dwellers have died in attacks by the community.

A school across the road, where Ngubane is custodian, was closed recently because of the continuing violence. And neighbors say sniper fire from the hostel makes them afraid to walk at night.

The hostel dwellers, on the other hand, say they don’t walk in the township, either, for fear they will be killed by ANC youths. Some of those youths recently stole a bulldozer and tried to smash down parts of the hostel. And hostel residents often hijack taxi-vans at gunpoint and order the drivers into the hostel--just to avoid the 100-yard walk from the taxi stop.

“I don’t just think they hate us,” Ngubane said. “They do hate us. And they hate us because we are Zulus.”

Township residents, who include many Zulus, say it is fear--not ethnic hatred--that they feel. And they regard the men in the hostel as thugs.

“If I were to walk into the Dobsonville Hostel and they didn’t know me, then they would kill me. That’s for sure,” said Syrpian Ntebele, who lives nearby. “These hostels welcome the criminal element.”

Ntebele lived in another Soweto hostel until last year, when he was forced to leave, abandoning all his possessions, because he refused to join Inkatha. He has no political affiliation.

The violence in Johannesburg-area townships, which culminated in the Boipatong massacre, began in July, 1990, with a major recruitment drive launched by the Natal-based Inkatha Freedom Party of Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

Since the 1970s, Inkatha and the ANC have feuded over how best to end apartheid. The then-exiled ANC, a multiethnic organization, supported sanctions and guerrilla warfare against the white government, while Zulu-based Inkatha chose to work within the apartheid system for change.

Beginning in 1984, that disagreement flared into war between Zulus supporting the ANC and other Zulus supporting Inkatha, leaving more than 5,000 dead in Natal. And when the ANC was legalized in 1990, the blood bath quickly spread to ANC-controlled townships in Johannesburg, where Inkatha’s support was centered among migrant Zulus in the hostels.

The hostels are cold, dreary, prisonlike facilities, where residents are called “inmates.” Ten-foot-square rooms often are packed with as many as 12 men, who share a hot plate or cook over an open fire outdoors. Hundreds share each toilet, and the stench of sewage and garbage can be overpowering.

Those conditions, and the alienation of hostel dwellers from the rest of the township community, have created fertile ground for forced recruitment and the rapid mobilization of men for armed attacks. Violence monitors say they have received thousands of complaints of abductions, rapes and murders allegedly carried out by hostel dwellers.

The ANC contends that the hostels make it easy for right-wing police to find blacks willing to carry out attacks on townships--in hopes of undermining support for the ANC, the country’s largest anti-apartheid organization.

“It is an ideal place to plan attacks without being overheard by the community,” said Linda Molotsi, a researcher for the Independent Board of Inquiry. But, Molotsi acknowledged, “Many of the people in the hostels have no alternative accommodation.”

The hostels are a relic of apartheid. They were designed to house the thousands of men who came to work in the mines and the cities in the 1970s. In those days, the white-minority government considered all blacks sojourners in the cities and refused to build new houses for them, hoping to discourage newcomers from bringing families and putting down roots.

As a result, the housing shortfall for blacks in South Africa today is estimated to exceed 1 million units. And hostel dwellers, themselves victims of the engineers of apartheid, now face calls for the demise of the only homes they can afford.

The ANC, representing township residents angered by regular attacks from hostels, wants the hostels destroyed. (Although a few hostels are ANC strongholds, most are Inkatha strongholds.) But the Inkatha Freedom Party and hostel residents’ associations strongly oppose that solution.

“The ANC is bent on destroying the only home for thousands of people,” the Transvaal Hostel Residents Assn. said recently. “If hostels were demolished, what will happen to them, with the housing crisis in our country? We foresee more chaos and conflict.”

In breaking off talks with the government this week, the ANC demanded that the government fence off the hostels, conduct regular searches for weapons and begin to replace hostels with family units. If the government refuses that and other demands, the ANC says it will not return to the negotiating table.

The government’s plan to phase out the hostels has been hampered by the housing shortage and stiff opposition from Inkatha, one of its key allies.

And some Inkatha leaders are using the ANC demands to exploit hostel dwellers’ fears that the ANC has a sinister plot to deprive them of the only homes they have in a hostile environment.

Humphrey Ndlovu, Inkatha secretary general for the Johannesburg area, says the ANC is trying to rid the region of Zulu migrant workers as a political ploy to strengthen its own support base.

“I say, keep the hostels but renovate them and make them good places,” Ndlovu said. “Don’t convert them to family units. Some of the men have five wives and 40 children. How are they all going to come and live here?

“They don’t want to lose their land at home in Natal,” Ndlovu added. “They want their wives and children to stay there.”

But the Boipatong massacre has strengthened the ANC demands by focusing attention once again on the central role of hostels in the ongoing violence. That attack began near midnight June 17 when 200 men emerged from a three-story hostel about a mile from Boipatong, a township of 5,000 south of Johannesburg. They raided shacks in the township, slaughtering 39 men, women and children in one of the largest massacres in South African history.

The bloodletting created a world outcry. Witnesses have alleged police complicity in the attack. Although the government denies the accusations, past instances of government-Inkatha collusion are well-documented.

The Boipatong attack was launched from the KwaMadala Hostel, an Inkatha stronghold, and six residents already have been arrested. That hostel, home to iron-factory workers, has been implicated in 11 attacks and 89 deaths in Boipatong and other nearby townships in the past two years.

But police complain that witnesses have been unwilling to testify against the residents. A week ago, seven unemployed men from the KwaMadala hostel were acquitted of murdering 38 people at an ANC funeral vigil in Sebokeng township in January, 1991.

Lawyers for the Sebokeng victims’ families blamed a shoddy police investigation but said the case was weak because witnesses were reluctant to testify in a courtroom filled daily with Inkatha supporters.

“We couldn’t persuade them to come forward because of fear,” said Anton Steenkamp, a lawyer for the families. “This is a fairly small community, and they are afraid of what will happen to them when they get home.

“In the end, if a witness is not prepared to testify, there’s not much you can do about it.”