We Are Fighting the World - Gary Kynoch New African Histories

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of evidence provide little information on the inner workings of the Marashea but are particularly valuable in situating the Russian gangs in a political context. Documentary evidence clearly indicates that the apartheid regime not only discounted the Marashea as a threat to white rule but that the police made common cause with gangster and vigilante groups as early as the 1950s in their campaigns to undermine the ANC and its affiliates. In this way the state was directly responsible for sponsoring episodes of conflict in the townships long before the politicized violence of the 1980s and 1990s.

      Gathering oral testimony from current and former Marashea was the only way to probe into issues of culture and gender relations, to better understand how the gangs fit into their environment and how they perceived of and represented themselves. The major limitation to this approach is that one does not get an outsider’s view of the society. I interviewed a handful of mineworkers, police, and mining officials, but, for the most part, outsiders’ perceptions are examined only through the claims of Marashea themselves.

      Between April 1998 and June 1999, seventy-nine Marashea (sixty-three men, sixteen women) were interviewed in Lesotho, in the townships and informal settlements of Gauteng province, and in Marashea settlements surrounding the mining towns of Klerksdorp, Virginia, Carletonville, and Welkom.4 These seventy-nine individuals span six decades of experience as Marashea. Some respondents spent the majority of their adult lives as Marashea while others were members for only a year or two. The ages of those informants who knew their birth dates ranged from twenty-eight to eighty-four. With the exception of two respondents who spoke very good English, all interviews were conducted in Sesotho.

      The foremost difficulties involved gaining access to active members and women. Meetings with current Marashea visiting Lesotho led to trips to Russian settlements in South Africa, where additional interviews were conducted, including one with BM, the leader of the Matsieng faction in the Free State. In the end my research assistants and I spent time in four different Marashea settlements, and a total of nine active Marashea participated in interviews. Moreover, informal conversations yielded information about protection arrangements, rental agreements with white farmers, the demographics of the camps, business ventures, living conditions, social practices, and relations with mineworkers.

      BM refused our request to interview women, saying that women did not know history and would say silly things. The same experience was repeated in the other Marashea settlements. As a result, only one active woman, a relation of an intermediary, was interviewed. Marashea women in general were difficult to identify, especially in Lesotho. Former Marashea women who have returned to Lesotho tend not to advertise their status and, despite exhaustive efforts, female informants made up just under 20 percent of the total interview pool.

      Interviewing people who had experience with Marashea was often problematic. It would have been valuable to consult with more police officers, but I decided against this because of the extensive connections Marashea groups have with police. If it was discovered that I was asking the police about the Marashea it is possible that avenues would have been closed off. Consequently, I did not pursue any police contacts in South Africa until near the end of my fieldwork, although I discussed the Marashea with a few police officers in Lesotho. Several mineworkers were also interviewed during the initial stages of fieldwork in Lesotho. Although a number of South African mining officials refused to discuss the Marashea, staff at Harmony Mine in the Free State were very helpful. An NUM representative enthusiastically participated in an interview, as did a former liaison division employee of the Employment Bureau of Africa. In the 1950s Johannesburg gangs attracted a great deal of public attention, primarily because of the massive street battles in which they engaged. Unfortunately, many of the lawyers and township officials who came into contact with the Johannesburg Russians are deceased. With the exception of one advocate who represented Russians in the 1960s and 1970s, I was unable to track down any members of the legal profession or government service who had done business with the Marashea.

      Not surprisingly, some Marashea informants were evasive or refused to discuss certain topics. Questions concerning relationships with the police, criminal activities, conflicts with ANC supporters, and links with political parties in Lesotho were the most likely to elicit such responses. The political turmoil stemming from the May 1998 national elections in Lesotho, which eventually led to military intervention and occupation by a South African–led force in September 1998, made discussions of political affairs extremely sensitive.

      Problems of accuracy and reliability are two central issues that oral historians continually confront. This study was no different and gathering testimony from respondents who were involved in a range of criminal activities rendered these concerns even more salient. The formulation of collective memory in oral testimony has been commented on by many practitioners. Discussing the testimony of Holocaust survivors, Deborah Lipstadt observes that “lots of survivors who arrived at Auschwitz will tell you they were examined by [Dr. Josef] Mengele. Then you ask them the date of their arrival and you say, ‘Well, Mengele wasn’t in Auschwitz yet at that point.’ There were lots of doctors . . . somehow they all became Mengele.”5 In this instance it seems that larger societal perceptions influenced how people remembered and related their stories. Mengele became a symbol of evil, representing the horror of the concentration camps, so some survivors appropriated his presence to make sense of their own horror and to perhaps better express it to others, including the interviewer. This raises the issue of the construction of memory, or as Alistair Thomson suggests, the composure of memory. “In one sense we ‘compose’ or construct memories using the public language and meanings of our culture. In another sense we ‘compose’ memories which help us feel relatively comfortable with our lives, which gives us a feeling of composure. We remake or repress memories of experiences which are still painful and ‘unsafe’ because their inherent traumas or tensions have not been resolved. . . . Our memories are risky and painful if they do not conform to the public norms or versions of the past.”6

      Marashea informants recited careful constructions of particular events and personalities. One of the defining events for Marashea active on the Rand in the 1950s and 1960s was a series of battles between combined Marashea forces and Zulu hostel dwellers that took place in 1957. The fighting raged for days between hundreds, if not thousands, of combatants, and the Dube Hostel Riots, as the conflicts came to be known in official parlance, were the subject of a government inquiry and extensive media attention. Virtually all the men interviewed who were members during this era claim to have taken part in these battles and recite details that have obviously become embedded in popular lore. It is extremely doubtful that all these informants actually participated in the fighting. For example, some men date their arrival on the Rand after 1957. Given the confusion with dates this is not absolute proof they were not present, but the likelihood that they all were is extremely remote. The Marashea’s image as defenders of the Basotho resonates very strongly among these men, and the Dube Hostel conflicts provide the foremost example of the Marashea rallying to the defense of fellow Basotho during this era. It was also a great victory for the Russians, and informants wished to be associated with an event that reinforced their identity as champions of the Basotho and successful warriors. Philip Bonner notes a similar development in discussions of a 1940s clash between Basotho and Zulu in Benoni: “A host of other informants claim to have witnessed this latter episode. I am almost certain that for a number it was hearsay.”7

      The collective memory phenomenon also emerges in the strikingly similar accounts of the Dube Hostel conflicts. Informants’ recitations of the beginning of the conflict in which a Russian named Malefane was castrated by Zulu men in the hostel’s shebeen has the feel of a story that has been many times in the telling. The same sort of mythologizing surfaced in testimony surrounding the famous leader Tseule Tsilo. Again, it is unlikely that all the men who claimed to have witnessed Tsilo’s feats and interacted with him could have done so. Rather than invalidating such testimony, these responses speak to the power of the myth of Tsilo. Once such developments are recognized, they can be used as windows to interpret the ideals and worldviews of informants instead of simply dismissing suspect statements and stories as falsehoods. As Allesandro Portelli argues, “Oral sources tell us not just what people did but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did.”8

      Kathleen Blee’s experience gathering testimonies

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