TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 4

Subsection 12

Inter-family conflicts

96 Conflicts that arose because of the apartheid system led to tension within some families, sometimes spilling over into violence. At the Pietermaritzburg hearing (19 November 1996), Father Timothy Smith told the Commission that Mr David Ntombela, a feared induna (headman) in the Pietermaritzburg area, is alleged to have killed his own brother in full view of members of the community.

97 Ms Ndamase described how she left home to go to Durban in search of a job and joined the forces against apartheid. When she returned home in 1991 with the intention of launching a branch of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in her village, she was arrested. She described the consequences at the Lusikisiki hearing:

My children are uneducated; I abused them by joining the struggle. But today I don’t see anything happening to me. There was conflict in my family because of all of this. The government is doing nothing for me.

98 Politics entered the Phillips family home because of divisions between the ANC and IFP. Mr Moses Ntsokolo Phillips, an ANC member, was hit in the face with the butt of a gun by his cousin, an IFP member. He was then taken to the home of his uncle who was also an IFP member and further assaulted.

99 Other family conflicts were intergenerational. Parents did not support their children’s activism because they feared for their lives. Often, too, they were concerned about disruptions to their children’s education. Misunderstandings and conflicting interests strained intergenerational relationships. Mr David Ryder Mabeka was a youth activist in Barkly West in 1986. At the Kimberley hearing, he spoke about the tensions between some of the politically active students and their parents:

I realised that many parents at that time thought that I ... didn’t want to go to school. And they thought that I would take their children out of school. There were lots and lots of allegations from the parents. I think it’s because they didn’t understand quite well the political situation at that time.

100 Intergenerational conflicts also occurred in white families involved in defending the apartheid status quo. Mr John Deegan, a South African Police (SAP) Security Branch conscript and later a member of Koevoet, described his attempts to communicate his traumatic experiences to his more conservative father:

Although I tried to tell him that there were incidents that I was involved in that caused me great guilt and remorse, he would not believe that his son could have been involved in anything so dishonourable.²³

101 Emerging young leaders challenged traditional patriarchal hierarchies and elders increasingly lost control over the activities of younger people. Mr Morgan Sabatha Phehlani was a councillor whose home and business were burnt down by youth in intra-community conflict in 1991. In his view:

That’s the trouble that we are having in the smaller towns, you know, that you find these youngsters - they call themselves ... young leaders; they are leading a section. But looking at them, you find they are so terrible; they are hooligans; they are undisciplined.