By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 24, 1999; Page A22

JOHANNESBURG, Jan. 23—A controversial opposition politician was assassinated today in South Africa's troubled KwaZulu-Natal, sparking fears of renewed political violence in the province before South Africa's second democratic election later this year.

Long associated with KwaZulu-Natal's bloodshed, was secretary general of the United Democratic Front, an opposition party formed in 1997. Gunmen ambushed him in the rural town of Richmond, his home base, which in recent years has been rocked by political violence that seemed to many to bear Nkabinde's fingerprints.

Nkabinde, who had survived previous attempts on his life, acknowledged the possibility of violent death last year when he told a South African Broadcasting Corp. interviewer, "I know somewhere around this province there is a bullet with my name."

President Nelson Mandela and other political leaders reportedly expressed outrage at the killing, for such was Nkabinde's centrality to recent KwaZulu-Natal conflicts that his death sparked fear that it would be the first shot in a wave of renewed political violence.

Along the Indian Ocean coast, KwaZulu-Natal became known as South Africa's most blood-drenched region because of political violence that raged there through the 1980s and into the 1990s, even continuing after South Africa's 1994 transition from apartheid, or white minority rule, to democracy.

"There is no doubt that the motive was political," said Bantu Holomisa, head of the United Democratic Front. "From which corner, we are not sure yet."

In the complex factional patchwork of KwaZulu-Natal, Nkabinde was a constant thread in the long history of fratricidal violence among Zulu people of different political persuasions.

The region's violence also reflects long-standing differences between the African National Congress, now the ruling party, and the Inkatha Freedom Party, now a member of the unity government. Some of the violence was committed or manipulated by apartheid-era security forces. During those years, Nkabinde, by his admission, was an ANC "warlord." The ANC, however, later alleged that Nkabinde had been a security forces informer. For that, the ANC expelled Nkabinde in 1997.