Mass resistance in bantustan areas, which had greatly contributed to the pressures obliging the apartheid regime to move towards negotiations, reached a new level after the unbanning of the ANC.
The renewed pressure on the bantustan leaders to align themselves with anti-apartheid forces was initially violently repressed with central government assistance, including the deployment of the SADF.
By the end of March popular pressures had led to political changes or policy shifts in a number of bantustans. In the Ciskei and Venda bantustans military leaders, with the support of the SADF, took over the administrations in attempts to forestall more radical changes.
In the Ciskei, restrictions on organisations were lifted after the military takeover, and trade unions were allowed to organise. The ANC and other organisations were allowed to function in Venda, and the bantustan leaders, like those in the Ciskei, declared themselves open to re-incorporation into the central government.
At the same time, however, there was an intensification of violent repression in other areas. In Bophuthatswana and Gazankulu, popular resistance in support of the ANC and in opposition to the bantustan policy was met with severe repression, including hundreds of detentions. In Bophuthatswana there were also hundreds of injuries and fatalities.
Violence in Natal, initiated principally by forces linked to the Kwazulu bantustan and the Inkatha organisation, assumed even greater proportions than in previous years.
The violence spread during June and July to the Witwatersrand after Inkatha had relaunched itself as the Inkatha Freedom Party and initiated a recruiting drive beyond Natal.
The regular South African Police (SAP) as well as the Kwazulu bantustan police were implicated in the violence. However, despite well-documented evidence, the government failed to take effective action to prevent it spreading. During August it became particularly intense on the Witwatersrand, with over 700 people killed. By the end of the year an estimated 3,400 people had died — more than 2,300 of these deaths were in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging area during the second half of the year.
The pattern of attacks and the weight of evidence led the ANC to accuse elements of the 'security forces' of constituting a 'third force' opposed to peaceful negotiations, and to raise the matter with the government on a number of occasions.
Evidence of the existence of assassination squads was confirmed by the Harms Commission, appointed to investigate allegations of 'political murders'. The commission found that the SADF's Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) was responsible for a number of violent criminal acts, as were individual policemen. Although the SADF said that the CCB was inactive after February 1990 it was subsequently revealed that its operations had continued throughout the year. In the second half of 1990 at least 21 people were killed and 13 injured in incidents which the HRC attributed to hit-squad activity.
