Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Mr. Aspinall once entertained the chief in the dinosaur chamber of the Natural History Museum. He also regularly attended Inkatha rallies following his declaration in 1991 that he was a 'white Zulu'. Dressed in a dark suit he told a crowd of 40,000 Inkatha Zulus that he had vowed in his childhood to base his values on those of the Zulu ancients. The Zulu ancestors 'gave me a model of how a life should be lived and also how somebody should die,' he said. He elaborated his vision to me on a scorching afternoon several years later when he and his family were the guests of honour at a rally in Durban on 20 August 1995. Flushed with excitement, Aspinall introduced me to David Ntombela, one of Inkatha's most notorious warlords, much to the latter's discomfort.

  'Have you met this man? He is an induna. Tremendous chap.

  He has killed loads of people.' Mr. Ntombela, who has been linked to several murders, muttered something about being a man of peace but Aspinall would have none of it. 'Nonsense. I tell you he has killed lots and lots of people . . . and I would think the worse of him if he hadn't. You should go and visit him one day. He'll give you a fantastic welcome.'

  With the dust swirling, the sun beating down and the air reverberating to the humming of excited warriors it was indeed a dramatic sight. But there was of course nothing glorious about the battle over chiefly politics in Zululand. It was brutish and mean and utterly unlike what British Zuluphiles would like to believe.

  It was a gruelling but magnificent haul to the home of Chief Siphiwe Mazibuko. In a vast natural amphitheatre on the fringes of KwaZulu, his valley of Loskop is Africa at its most serene. As I turned off the main Johannesburg-Durban highway on to the final stretch, herd boys with long sticks skipped past whooping like birds. The sky was diamond-bright against the deep purple outline of the distant Drakensberg hills. It was easy to under stand why a loose translation of KwaZulu is 'in heaven'.

  The chief was an Inkatha traditionalist in the midst of a rural war zone. I had decided to visit him to try to go beyond the rhetoric of party politics to understand the problem. As I descended further into the valley the sun lost its warmth and the whooping faltered. Three women with bright scarves quickened their pace when I asked the way. A queue at a hand pump stopped and stared. Only the local induna stood his ground.

  Alpheus Mazibuko was wheeling a battered old bicycle. With his chestnut tweed cap he could have been a county squire doing his rounds. He was, it transpired, a kinsman of the chief, but now it seemed he was a little upset. It was a difficult time: in the previous ten days nine people had been killed in Loskop and many houses had been burned down. The induna's account was a masterpiece of evasion. The trouble had started over an ancestral feud. Some said it was a cattle dispute, others a land battle. When the sun went down people headed for home. If villagers heard a knock at the door, they stoked their fire and prayed for dawn.

  'Yes,' he added warily, 'the ANC and Inkatha are involved'.

  'And the chief?' I asked. The induna raised his dondolo (walking-stick) from his handlebars and pointed to a cluster of whitewashed huts on a distant hillside. Then he jumped on his bike and pedalled away.

  It came as no surprise that the chief, Siphiwe Frazer Mazibuko, to give him his full name, was waiting for me as I rounded the last bend. He was staring into the middle distance in the direction of the neighbouring valley, the heartland of his opponents, a rival clan including an outcrop of Sothos in a Zulu sea.

  The chief leaned his elbows on his fence. A plastic bag gusted between us and settled in the sheep wire beneath his ample tummy. Behind him a young man in a dirty white T-shirt was tinkering with one of about half a dozen cars, all of which were in chronic need of repair. The chief did not, it seemed, intend to invite me inside. I coughed politely and cast my mind back to a meeting that morning in the local town, Estcourt, just thirty miles east and yet in a different world.

  Frustrated by months of feuding, five of the chief's villagers had taken the extraordinary step of taking their grievance to the 'white man's world'. According to custom they should have gone to the tribal court, which was responsible for community disputes. But that would have meant coming up against the chief, and he was the very man they wanted to bring to book. By chance they were sitting in the ante chamber of the town hall, talking to a local councillor, when I arrived. With its wooden walls, besuited clerks and mountains of paperwork, the setting was cosily familiar, but their tale seemed more at home in the pages of the novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard.

  'He should never have been the chief,' ventured one of the villagers. 'His mother was the old chief's third wife. He was the third choice and one of the conditions of succession was that he had to marry one of the daughters of the immediate family.'

  'And then he sold a piece of land without consulting the elders .. .' continued another.

  'The Amangwane [the rival clan] had had enough,' interrupted a third. 'There were some deaths in a faction fight over the dagga [marijuana] trade and they complained that he failed to do anything about it. The Amangwane thought he was behind it .. .'

  'And then there was the massacre ...' There was a long pause for effect punctuated by loud exhalations. 'It happened at about four in the morning. The killers hid behind the trees and blazed away. The bodies were everywhere. To escape we hid behind the trees. And after that the Amangwane boycotted the tribal court and set up a rival chief, a distant cousin.'

  Zulu storytellers are not to be hurried. An hour of colourful history later I had only the haziest idea of the plot. It would have taken a day of cross-questioning to draw up an accurate picture. But later I was able to confirm some of the episodes, including the massacre. What was clear was that to some at least of his people the chief was a tyrant whose overthrow was long overdue.

  With hindsight it was remarkable that Mazibuko agreed to see me. His ancestors had been chiefs in Loskop for generations. His word was literally law. Once a week, like tens of thousands of chiefs all over Africa, he went to his tribal court, one of the few brick buildings in his territory, to dispense justice according to the customary law. Land, livestock, lobo/a (bride price), inheritance disputes, in short the important things in life, all came under his jurisdiction. He drove one of the few privately owned cars in his valley. His sullen stare gave nothing away. He was a man at the peak of his powers and yet he was all but under siege.

  'I don't understand it. I was chosen to be chief in 1966 when many of my opponents had not been born. Now they are growing up and they want someone else. Last week they burned down my tribal court and they shot dead a friend of mine driving my car thinking it was me. One of my houses was burned down last July.

  'They say I am not the rightful chief. But if that is the case how come the whole community paid a bride price for my wife? Would they have done that if I was not the chief? My house was paid for by the community's money. No one said we will build your house but you're not a chief .. .'

  Leaving him to his lonely vigil I drove back to the main road, stopping on the way at the local police station. In the wake of the recent fighting it had been fortified with new rolls of head-high razor wire. There were at least twenty policemen milling around their prefabricated quarters. Indians, whites, blacks, they all seemed miserable in their remote posting. They could have been a Roman garrison posted to a far-flung province. They were desperate to know what I thought was going on in their area of responsibility but too terrified to leave the compound unless in an armoured convoy. I shrugged and headed back to the twentieth century.

  For the ANC in the region the situation in Loskop was very clear-cut. The party's regional leader, Harry Gwala, was a self avowed Stalinist and as ruthless a warlord as any of the Inkatha chiefs. I met him late one night in his township home outside the regional capital, Pietermaritzburg. His arms were flapping at his side as he suffered from motor-neurone disease. Half a dozen teenagers in T-shirts and tatty jeans mounted a star struck bodyguard. In his string vest he would not have been out of place in a meeting of the Socialist Workers' Party circa
1930. Indeed, he quoted at length from a range of European Communist Party texts. His uncompromising stance fostered his cult among the disenfranchised youth in the informal settlements that mushroomed in the mid-Eighties as apartheid's restrictions began to collapse.

  'We have liberated our people from white tyranny,' Gwala explained. 'Now it is time to free them from rural oppression. There is no ANC branch in Loskop. Every time we march forward they [Inkatha and the chiefs] retaliate. But we shall not fail.'

  His certainty smacked of the interventionist approach of many of the post-independence governments to the north. Gwala was clearly an expert on dogma, particularly the history of European Communism. But it was equally clear that he had failed to study Communism's unfortunate record in Africa. In that respect he was following in the footsteps of the colonists who tried to impose their own vision on the continent in blithe disregard for the realities on the ground. Loskop's villagers were unhappy with their chief, but they looked blankly if you asked whether they would prefer to live without one.

  I had little sympathy for Mazibuko. He reminded me of the caricature medieval robber baron of school history books. On a later visit I encountered him outside his tribal court. A long line of clansmen was queuing up for his services. He was sitting on the bonnet of his car snootily indifferent to their needs.

  And yet elsewhere in the continent and indeed South Africa there were 'good' chiefs whose style of leadership suggested that if there was peace in KwaZulu, Buthelezi's traditional ways of government could be brought into line to play a constructive role.

  If anyone can support such a thesis it is Paramount Chief Linchwe II of the Bakgatla tribe. Indeed, were Africa's chiefs ever to decide to invest in public relations, they should pay a call on his village of Mochudi, thirty miles north of Botswana's capital, Gaborone. I met him there early one morning as the locals made their way to his presence for a tribal assembly. Most squatted on the dark red soil under the shade of a giant jacaranda, rubbing their hands against the pre-dawn chill. A few had brought deck-chairs. The odd pith helmet and golfing umbrella lent an exotic touch to the display. All rose respect fully when the chief appeared, but he did not stand on ceremony for long. The moment of truth had arrived. He had come to present two guests to his people. He had called on Scotland Yard to solve a ritual killing that had traumatized his tribe. It was time for the kgotla (tribal council) to assess what these latterday Solomons had to offer.

  The sight of Detective Supterintendent Douglas Campbell and Detective Inspector Jim Marshall standing up before the kgotla lent itself to satire. With a purple silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and a spotty bow tie fanning from his collar the former cut quite a dash. He drew appreciative murmurs when on cue from the chief his thick Dorset burr negotiated a formal greeting in seTswana, the local language. Not since the kgotla had met to seek an end to the long recent drought had its members been so entranced.

  The men from the Yard threw themselves into their task, promising confidentiality if anyone came forward, and assuring the people that they had no axe to grind. But the real hero of the hour was the grey-suited chief, a former ambassador to America, who had led the tribe for more than thirty years. When a group of schoolgirls had found the mutilated corpse of one of their colleagues the repercussions shook the entire country. First the village tried to lynch a suspect. Then, when the police released three suspects whom locals believed to be the killers, Gaborone, one of the few African capitals with a peaceful record, erupted into the worst riots since the British ceded independence in 1966. Into the breach stepped the chief.

  'The last ritual killing here was in the Forties,' he said. 'So when the body of Segametse Mogomotsi was discovered every one went mad. My duty was to control the people to tell them that there is a law that must be obeyed. I said the police must investigate. But I was misunderstood. People said I was protecting the murderers. We came to address the people and people started screaming at me.

  'So I said we will call in professionals, either FBI or Scotland Yard. After consulting councillors and political leaders we settled on Scotland Yard because we are a former British colony, and we sent a delegation to the British High Commission to see what they could do ...'

  The detectives eventually left none the wiser. After thirty-five years in the force, OS Campbell willingly accepted the humorous side of their assignment. 'Most people think we come from a yard in Scotland, and that's not much of a compliment seeing how they keep their yards.' He chuckled as he recalled walking into the home of a sangoma (soothsayer). 'It would have taken the Yard's top forensic team ten days to do that house, just two rooms but all those herbs, jars and potions .. .'

  The case was unsolved, but it did not matter. With his under standing of the old and the new Africa’s and his acceptance by both, the chief had defused the situation. His great-grandfather, Linchwe I, had evaded the Boers in the last century and led his people to Mochudi. He had, it seemed, a worthy descendant.

  Inevitably, it was not always so easy for traditional leaders. But Linchwe was convinced that as long as chiefs steered clear of politics they had a vital role to play in Africa. Only they, he said, could be an authoritative bridge between the traditional and the modem. They could also, he added wistfully, be the link to the mystical past that African leaders are so desperate to find.

  *

  It was never going to be easy to achieve that balance in the 'new' South Africa. In the countdown to the April 1994 election, far from steering their people away from trouble, Buthelezi and his KwaZulu chiefs seemed determined to lead them into it. His firebrand Zulu nationalism threatened to plunge the region into ever more intense warfare, making visits to Zululand a depressing routine of chronicling massacres until two vital turnarounds occurred. First, Buthelezi at the eleventh hour agreed to take part in the poll, the very pledge Judge Kriegler had tried in vain to secure from his jeering chiefs. Second, and possibly as significant for the region's future, as the dust settled after the election the ANC subtly changed its tune on chiefs.

  Buthelezi's decision to take part in the election, the last piece in the post-apartheid jigsaw, bore all the hallmarks of a chief clinging on to the remnants of his pride and trying to hold out until the last possible moment. The breakthrough came just ten days before polling when he listened to a last-minute proposal from a Kenyan mediator, Washington Okumu, who had stayed on in South Africa after the collapse of a delegation led by Lord Carrington and Dr Henry Kissinger. Buthelezi later claimed his climb-down was the work of God, that shortly after taking off to Ulundi from Johannesburg's Lanseria Airport an instrument failure had forced him to return to the terminal, where the Kenyan was waiting for him. It is in keeping with his touchy ego that he would be more likely to listen to a fellow African than a Briton or an American. But as credible an interpretation is that he had always intended to take part but had wanted to strut the stage and keep the world guessing. On the night of his climb-down, Inkatha's presses started churning out election material, hardly the work of a last-minute change of heart. Whatever, the first crucial step had been taken towards peace. A month later the chief assumed his seat as minister of home affairs in Mandela's first cabinet.

  There were still many obstacles to be overcome before the new and the old could be brought together, as Mandela found out when he was humiliated by the Zulu chiefs in the royal plain outside Nongoma. The new constitution effectively fudged the role of chiefs. Nominally it accorded them a role in the new dispensation, but the ANC assumed that they would have only a token authority. As, however, the ANC came to grips with the realities of power, so some of its leaders grew to appreciate that their dream of transforming the socio-political landscape overnight might have to be moderated and they might instead have to reach an accommodation with the chiefs, until, over time, their powers withered away.

  There were three main factors in their change of heart. The first was the failure of their attempt to woo the Zulu chiefs through King Goodwill. The Zulu king is not
known for his political perspicacity but he commands a devotional respect in rural areas and even urbanized Zulus are reluctant to insult him. In a conspiracy worthy of the days of Shaka, who was murdered by his half-brother, the ANC plotted to destroy Buthelezi's rural support base by winning the king over to their side. They made their move in September 1994 just before the annual celebrations marking Shaka's death. The first public signs of trouble in the royal house came over protocol. To the outrage of Buthelezi the king invited Mandela to the Shaka Day commemoration without consulting him in his capacity as traditional prime minister. Then one morning it was noticed that there had been a change of the guard at King Goodwill's palace. Inkatha-aligned policemen were no longer at their posts but had been replaced by men from central government. The rift was formalized when Inkatha youths rioted outside the palace and stoned the windows.

  The ANC were cock-a-hoop. With the king on their side they thought Buthelezi was finished. But they had underestimated their rival's skill at Zulu politics. Not for nothing had a Buthelezi always advised the Zulu king.

  Buthelezi was in Cape Town to meet John Major, who was in South Africa to cement British ties with the new government. The chief was a model of charm when he met the British delegation, but his mind was hard at work dealing with the far more ticklish problem in KwaZulu-Natal, the post-apartheid province encompassing the KwaZulu homeland and Natal. The Westminster press pack was somewhat nonplussed when Buthelezi slipped into traditional mode and explained to them he had sent a special head of cattle to the king as a peace offering. Buthelezi probably appreciated the cattle would not win back the king from the ANC, but he knew the form. The way was clear to tell his people that he at least had behaved by the book. Within days he held a Shaka Day rally without the king. His speech was couched in his usual careful wording: the king's absence was a source of sorrow; he would of course always be respected and welcomed back into the fold, but in the mean time he had been inveigled away by traitors in the royal house.