REV)EW                                               TRANSFORMATION 13 (1990)
     REVIEW of
    Matthew Kentridge./t/i Unofficial War: inside the conflict in Pietermaritzburg
     (Cape Town & Johannesburg: David Philip, 1990)
                                                                     John Wright
      The war which has swept over much of the Natal Midlands since August 1987
    has generated tens of thousands of reports in newspapers round the world, and,
    on a recent count, over a hundred articles in various periodicals. This work by
    Matthew Kentridge, who is an academically trained political analyst, is the first
   book to be produced on the subject.
     The author's stated purpose in writing the book is to try to capture in detail the
   impact which the war has had on the lives of the people caught up in it. He
   deliberately chooses to avoid the broader political issues. 'There is more to this
   fight than polities', he declares early on. For this reason his aim is 'to seek out
   the specific characteristics which together constitute the unique personality of
   this unofficial war' (1990:2).
     So his book is explicitly concerned with description rather than analysis. In a
  scries of short and usually pithy chapters, it covers a lot of ground and a lot of
  subjects. The reader is whisked at rapid pace from the streets of
  Pietermaritzburg's townships to the Taylor's Halt bus depot to Shongweni to
  Trust Feed to Relief Street; from the comrades to the education crisis to funerals
  to the position of women to the role of the police.
     The author is a sharp observer, and in many respects an informed one. His
 style is that of an alert journalist-cum-academic who has been into the field and
 who has also done a lot of homework on his subject. He writes lucidly, if at
 times irrilatingly, as when he tries too hard for effect, or when the first person
 T obtrudes too much into his account. He provides useful documentation of
 the behind-the-scenes work done by COSATU to bring court interdicts against
 Inkatha warlords; of interviews with several local Inkatha leaders; and of an
 interview with the head of the Pielemiaritzburg security police. Overall, he
succeeds in conveying to an outside readership something of the way in which
the fabric of individual and community life in the Midlands has been destroyed
by the war.
    But the book leaves the reader - this one anyway - bemused and frustrated.
Bemused because it is chronologically fragmented, and does very little to help
the reader make historical sense of the scries of verbal snapshots of which it
essentially consists. The author writes of his own reactions when faced with a
massive pile of documents on the war: '...reading it was a process of learning
and forgetting simultaneously. Each incident super-imposed itself on the one
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TRANSFORMATION                                                               WRIGHT
before, saturating the memory and numbing the senses' (1990:133). His own
work - ahistorical and non-analytical as it is - produces the same kind of effect.
   And frustrated because, in spite of being well aware of the broader political
issues which have given shape to the scenes which he describes, the author
avoids directly confronting them. At this point in the historiography of the war,
and in the historiography of current Natal politics, for the writer of a book-length
commentary on the vicious conflict in the Midlands to avoid analysis of the
political forces which have caused and sustained it amounts to an abdication of
responsibility. The business of explaining the war - its original causes, why it
has persisted for so long, why it has reached such a pitch of violence - has
become ideologically too important a matter to be ignored by any serious writer
 on the subject. In a revealing statement near the beginning of the book, the
 author tells his readers that he look up work on it in preference to working on
 the PhD which he had planned. One cannot help feeling that he was more
 interested in doing a New Journalism job on the war than in making an
 intervention in the crucially important - and heavily contested - process of
 explaining why it has taken place at all.
    To be fair to the author, he does not set out merely to exploit the sensational
 side of the war. Implicit in his account is the argument - which in this reviewer's
 opinion undoubtedly reflects the historical realities - that the war in the Midlands
  is primarily a conflict caused by the aggressions of Inkalha, backed by the South
  African state, against non-Inkatha communities. But this argument is made
  explicit only in the brief conclusion. Nowhere in the body of the text does the
  author attempt to use it to make some sort of meaningful pattern from the
  anecdotes and vignettes which follow one after the other. Readers can work
  through the book, shake their heads over the horrors which it touches on, and
  put it down without having been forced to engage with the broader issues which
  cry out for attention. In focussing on description and eschewing analysis, the
  book compounds the confusion about the causes of the war which has been
   created, deliberately or otherwise, by three years of newspaper reportage. In
   important respects it thus serves - even if unwittingly - to laid support to the
   ideological projects of the forces of conservatism and reaction in whose interests
   the war was started and in whose interests it continues to be fought.
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