BELA BELA, south africa — The shantytown called Vingerkraal seems trapped in South Africa’s apartheid past. Tin shacks resemble those hurriedly built by blacks evicted from white territory. Women and children are left on their own for most of the year by men working in faraway cities. Poverty lies tucked between game resorts.
But Vingerkraal’s is a different story in the sinister saga of racially divided South Africa. It is the story of blacks who fought blacks in the service of apartheid.
In the two decades since apartheid crumbled, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission has brought about a measure of reconciliation between blacks and their former white rulers. The divisions among blacks, however, engineered or exacerbated by a system of divide-and-rule, often have been slower to heal. Vingerkraal is a glaring example.
Its history begins in neighboring Namibia, once South African territory, where guerrillas were waging a war for independence. Other black Namibians were hired by white-run security forces in a unit called Koevoet, meaning crowbar, and its fighters were paid bonuses for what became known as “cash for corpses.”
Koevoet’s goal, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was to “gather intelligence, track guerrillas and then kill them.” It was, the commission said, “a race war,” and apartheid South Africa lost.
In 1990, with Namibia independent, hundreds of black Koevoet veterans found themselves trapped in the midst of their adversaries. Many fled to South Africa, where their former officers helped them find jobs in security and get South African citizenship.
Four years later, white rule ended, and the black Koevoet veterans were on the losing side again. Some of them retreated to Vingerkraal, near the town of Bela Bela in the north of the country. About 6,000 people now live here, in the dry bush, chronically short of water and electricity.
Sisingi Kamongo, 45, was among the founders of Vingerkraal. Asked about his past, he begins by saying he was just 18 and desperate for work when he joined Koevoet in 1984. Later, he talks about stories he heard of guerrillas kidnapping village children and forcing them to fight.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” he says. “We were protecting the people.”
Slowly, war stories emerge. Kamongo recalls interrogating villagers, being told they had not seen fighters for years, and then coming under attack.
“What do you expect us to do?” Kamongo said. “Of course there’s going to be trouble. We were heavy-handed. But … it was for a reason.”
Namibia was not the only place where whites set blacks against blacks. The so-called bantustans also played a part, set up by the white government as black-ruled homelands to remove their populations from white areas.
Here, there has been reconciliation exemplified by Bantu Holomisa. In 1987 he seized power in the bantustan of Transkei, the homeland of Nelson Mandela, while the leader of the anti-apartheid struggle was in prison.
When apartheid ended and the bantustans were abolished, Mandela’s African National Congress accepted Holomisa as a member. Later Holomisa had a falling out with the party, but he remains a member of Parliament.
John Kani, a leading actor and playwright, explores the personal effects of the divisions among blacks in “Nothing But the Truth,” about two brothers, one of whom dies in exile, a hero of the liberation struggle, while the other stays in South Africa and away from politics.
The 2002 play explores the tensions that arise over who did more for the cause of black freedom. It is a complicated history that Kani says needs to be understood better.
“I’m worried about this collective amnesia. We’re afraid, even in our own house, to talk about dark times,” he said in an interview. “Forgiving is OK. Forgetting, never.”
