They included the fencing and monitoring of migrant worker hostels, regarded as a source of township tension.

Family reunification was a solution to the perceived social threat from foreign workers, single men living in worker hostels or dormitories, with extra money in their pockets.

Journalists were waiting outside a migrant worker hostel in Duduza township on a recent Sunday, anticipating a climactic showdown between Zulu workers and A.N.C. partisans.

When they return home to their villages or to worker hostels around Johannesburg, they are expected to train more - a militia answerable to the Zulu tribal hierarchy.

There is such a serious housing shortage that many newcomers to the city - most of them Azerbaijanis - live in shabby worker hostels or in a crude shantytown on the outskirts.

The violence subsided toward the end of 1990, but many of the townships remained tense, with Government troops patrolling migrant worker hostels where much of the fighting has occurred.

But within those cities they lived in islands, worker hostels for men on their own.

The Record of Understanding identified 24 migrant worker hostels which would be fenced off by Nov. 15.

The killers, witnesses and the police said, came from a worker hostel that is a stronghold of the Inkatha Freedom Party, a predominantly Zulu, pro-Government party.

The police, according to reports in the liberal press, recruit black informants in Inkatha-run worker hostels.