We lived like animals, always scared.

This is a story of communal trauma. Residents of Katlehong and Thokoza contended with four years of violent conflicts and, although some areas were more directly affected than others and the intensity of the conflict varied, the ANC–IFP fighting and all the associated violence persisted for the duration of the transition period. Its impacts were felt in many ways by different groups of residents, but a consistent theme appearing in survivor narratives is the inescapability of violence: ‘If you lived in the townships, you were automatically involved. It was better for those who had money, they simply found new places to stay.’ The accounts of those who remained provide an impression of what people endured and how life changed during the conflict.

Duma Nkosi, the chairperson of Thokoza's ANC branch, relates an incident that indicates the scale of the carnage. Police regularly collected corpses and transported them to mortuaries. Nkosi explained that the local ANC kept a record of such bodies in the hope of notifying relatives:

A father whose son had been shot and killed and whose body had been taken away by police approached Nkosi for assistance in locating his son's remains. After several inquiries, they were directed to one of the local mortuaries: