Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Belatedly the ANC realized that to win over the chiefs they had to court Buthelezi himself and they moved from confrontation to flattery. Mandela and other ANC leaders embarked on a concerted attempt to woo the chief, culminating in the masterstroke of appointing him as acting head of state when Mandela and his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, were out of the country. Buthelezi could barely restrain his delight when he was accorded this honour. Indeed, in the last two years of Mandela's presidency, Buthelezi frequently forsook the role of political rival and endorsed the ANC's record, particularly when it came under attack from white parties.

  The second factor in the ANC's softer stance on chiefs was political pragmatism. Chiefs influence millions of rural voters whose support could prove vital in elections in the twenty-first century as the inevitable apathy and disillusionment with the post-apartheid order grows. A series of protests linking the Zulu amakhosi with chiefs from the Transkei, the home of the Xhosas and a traditional ANC stronghold, made clear that the issue transcended party politics. Moreover, in many rural areas as well as townships, the youths who had led the 'struggle' were no longer held in high esteem as residents watched them prancing around with high councillors' salaries and cellphones, patently far less efficient at building up an order than they had been at pulling one down.

  The third factor in the ANC's shift of stance went to the heart of African identity and culture. In the days of the anti apartheid battles, progressives viewed African tradition with deep suspicion as part of the white government's attempts to divide South Africa. But as the 'new' order developed, many in the ANC appreciated they had more in common with chiefs than they had previously been willing to accept. Although Buthelezi's feudal policies remained beyond the pale, his fusion of Western and traditional African styles was recognized as a part of the quest to break from the 'old' South Africa and find a 'middle' non-European way. When Winnie Mandela, the arch populist, started to espouse the chiefs' cause it became clear that Buthelezi's traditionalist vision was no longer on the fringes. Indeed his West African garb became mainstream chic for many of the intellectuals who were trying to articulate a new South African identity.

  The power of chiefs is a huge obstacle to democracy and also to land reform, one of the most pressing issues in post-apartheid society. ANC activists rightly argue that liberation from white minority rule means little when millions of people are still subject to a medieval system of land tenure. But dealing with the chiefs and their powers is a long-term issue which requires sensitive handling. On paper, democracy and accountability are entrenched at all layers of authority, from Mandela's office in Pretoria through central and provincial governments down to the most isolated local council. Chiefs are relegated to an ex officio capacity on the councils; 'adapt or die' was the ANC's warning to the chiefs in the campaign for the first democratic local elections in 1995. But without ever officially changing its policy the party began to acknowledge that chiefs are a part of the landscape. Hundreds of chiefs and headmen will continue to be paid irrespective of their merits. To liberals this is a shabby compromise. But the tacit assumption is that, provided they do not abuse their power, they are there to stay.

  Khaba Mkhize, the regional manager of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in Durban, is in his image and outlook as far as you can get from the caricature Zulu of British folklore. In his former capacity as assistant editor of the Natal Witness, South Africa's oldest independent newspaper, he was for many years one of the most prominent and outspoken journalists in KwaZulu-Natal. He is one of the last people in the region you would expect to espouse a traditionalist's view, and yet four years after the election that is exactly what he seemed to be doing. Sitting in his glistening corporate office, he explained that he was going so far as to back plans for a controversial 140-foot Shaka statue in Durban harbour in order to help the region and Zulus come together.

  'Just a year ago things were so bad that the ANC had its own Shaka Day, but now the young guns are growing up and embracing tradition. There is a Zulu saying that when a king farts it's not his fault, it's the poor man's fault. We Zulus have to unite together to confront the difficulties of the transition from white rule.'

  His closing call for unity has delicate ramifications for the 'new' South Africa. The appeal is understandable given South Africa's troubled past. Mkhize argues passionately that to move away from the recent discord Zulus have to emphasize everything that they have in common. But the risk of stressing African tradition is that it will encourage black nationalism and anti-white sentiment, which could be disastrous for South Africa's hopes of entrenching a vibrant democracy. Speculation among senior ANC and Inkatha leaders of a long-term partner ship exacerbated such fears, although an alliance would at least entrench peace. Traditional leaders, however, see the boosting of old ways in a much more straightforward light.

  Bhekezizwe Luthuli, a descendant of the Nobel Peace laureate ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli, and the fourteenth head of the Emathulini clan, is a busy young chief on the southern coast of KwaZulu-Natal. He is quietly confident that despite the hullaballoo over chiefs, his son and grandson will in due course assume his responsibilities. He was elected to the Cape Town parliament in April 1994 as an MP for Inkatha. But he loathes the sedentary existence of backbench life. There are no telephone lines in his valley so he guided me to his home on his mobile phone, the latest in breast-pocket design with a mock mahogany case. I was travelling with my sister and brother-in law and their two-year-old son. The chief insisted on inviting us all in and and having a three-way chat. It was, he explained, little different from his usual routine.

  'Early in the morning my people come here and I allow them to talk. Being an nkosi [chief] means you have to accommodate others. You foreigners love to say we are undemocratic. But if you want to see democracy you should come to see our tribal courts and our assemblies. There is a whole lot of reading I have to do before I pass judgment. I have to use my brain. And we are very fair, we never charge more than two goats. Things are different here, you see. It is not London and England.'

  To prove his point- not that the last remark needed proving - he whisked us into his Mercedes for a guided tour of his domain. Stopping on a rise we gazed over an expanse of rolling green hills as he outlined his development plans.

  'Over there I am building a supermarket for my people. And that spot there is to be a stadium.' Sensitized by the Western school of environmental protest, we found it hard to repress a murmur of concern at the thought of this beautiful unspoilt wilderness being straitjacketed in concrete, but we were of course missing the point.

  More than four years after my audience with Buthelezi in Ulundi, I attended a briefing he was giving in Cape Town on his ministry's legislative programme for the forthcoming year. Top of the agenda was a new identity card system to counter the tidal wave of illegal immigrants flooding into South Africa. It was worthy nation-building stuff, but about as far from his old obsession with chiefs and kingdoms as you could imagine. At the end of his talk he read out a list of countries whose citizens had outstayed their welcome. When he reached the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of the Netherlands he stopped and laughed. 'I have a soft spot for kingdoms ...' he explained. For all his disagreements with the ANC, the chief had found an accommodation with the new order. But it is not always so easy to marry the old and the new, as I was to find across the border in Swaziland in the court of the former British public schoolboy who runs Africa's last absolute monarchy.

  8 - From SherbornetSwaziland - The King of the Clouds

  King Mswati of Swaziland - Magic, Ritual and Rite

  From a distance the gathering looked like a typical village meeting in the African bush. Heads down, the villagers filed along the rutted pathways between their huts making for the barren stretch of ground at the top of the hill which doubled as schoolyard and local parliament. They could have been discussing the peanut harvest or the lack of rain. It was only when they started speaking that their grim purpose bec
ame clear. The people of Sekororo in South Africa's Northern Province had come to decide the fate of Johannes Baleaga, an 81-year-old cripple who had fled his home a few days earlier after being accused of being a witch. As the sun set over the distant northern Drakensberg Mountains, the people bowed their heads and mumbled a prayer. The trial could begin.

  The 'evidence' was to be found in the corner of the schoolyard, a misshapen tree with a blackened branch. No one was hurt when the lightning hit, but in the remorseless logic of the region, a 'witch' was responsible. In remote communities all over Africa Christianity ends at sunset and anything out of the ordinary, a flood, the failure of a harvest, a financial bonanza, a chance encounter with a baboon, has people reaching for their money to send for a soothsayer for advice. Lightning is particularly ominous, even in regions where electrical storms are commonplace. Baleaga stood accused of causing the schoolyard strike. If found guilty, he faced exile or death. Baleaga's misfortune had been to 'hobble' on the wrong day.

  The day after the tree was hit, a group of villagers had sent a delegation to a local nyanga (a thrower of bones), who decreed that one of the 'witches' walked with a limp. The delegation recorded the verdict on tape and played it at the next village meeting. When Baleaga woke the next morning and tottered as usual to the nearest standpipe for his morning pail of water he became a pariah. He had spent all his life in Sekororo but suddenly people whispered in his presence and passed by with downcast eyes.

  Somehow he made his way to the nearest police station more than twenty miles away. He was lucky to escape with his life. More than a hundred people, mostly elderly, had been lynched as suspected witches in the Northern Province in the previous year in a horrific sequence repeated daily all over rural Africa. After three miserable days sheltering in the cells Baleaga's family brought him home to see if he could ever live there again. Colonel Ferdi Jansen, the local Afrikaner police commander, had guaranteed his safety. The colonel however was the first to concede that his side of the bargain might be hard to keep: Sekororo had neither telephones nor electricity.

  'Belief in witchcraft here is like Father Christmas is for children,' he explained as I set out for Sekororo with one of his black sergeants, a plain-clothes detective sporting jeans and a tatty straw hat, who was said to specialize in witchcraft. 'All we can do is push through dockets.'

  Standing beside the scorched tree trunk, the school science teacher, Abram Saishago, explained that every household had contributed to pay the nyanga to identify the 'witch'. Saishago was young and well-educated and seemed an obvious confidant. So how, I asked hesitantly, did he reconcile the community's belief in witchcraft with his scientific training and what did he teach his children? He was as baffled by the question as a teacher in the West would be if someone queried the existence of gravity.

  'I tell them that witchcraft exists. We have all seen plenty of evidence of that.'

  Not for the first time in rural Africa I felt like a wraith. I was travelling with an American colleague in the heart of Lebowa, a former tribal homeland seldom visited by whites. As we passed by, the word mlungu (white man) skipped ahead on the wind preceding our coming. People spoke to us when addressed but otherwise we were ignored. All the while the witch-sniffing business drew to its numbing conclusion.

  Saishago directed us to Baleaga's homestead, although he shrank from the risk of being tainted by entering the gate. Two low clay houses, three rounded huts and a cattle kraal joined by a earthen wall encircled a smooth clay yard. Baleaga sat in one corner by himself, little more than a bundle of bones and skin. Three women squatted to one side rocking on their haunches. The community meeting had not yet begun but all seemed resigned to their fate. For several minutes no one spoke. Then their fears and frustrations poured forth in a torrent. It was clear that if anyone else had been fingered they would have been in the thick of the crowd baying for blood. It was not that the community was wrong in looking for a 'witch'. It was just that the old man was innocent.

  A very human motive for Baleaga soon emerged - it just happened that he was a successful farmer. His main accuser was a young smallholder whose crops were not doing well and who would stand a good chance of taking over the Baleaga plot if the family was banished. I had heard the argument many times before. A friend who ran a community group was accused of witchcraft by local youths when her market garden flourished. Sensibly, rather than hiding away, she confronted her denouncers, brought them to her home and taught them the merits of trench planting. 'Go home and do this,' she told them. 'Then you too can be witches.' Unfortunately no one seemed willing to listen to the Baleagas' defence.

  'We were never given a chance to respond,' said Harris, the old man's youngest son. 'We wanted to put our side of the story at the first village meeting. We were shocked, but when the others saw we were a relative of someone pinpointed as a witch we were told to sit down.' There was little to say. We stammered our sympathies and left.

  In the old days the chief could have stayed their eviction.

  But his authority had long since been swept aside in the clamour for change in the closing years of apartheid. The youths had taken charge and in good revolutionary style had reintroduced summary justice in the name of progress: the days of the chief's shilly-shallying were over; witches were to be burned or driven from their homes. Even chiefs might be at risk. We came upon Chief Joshua Mongadi nervously minding his own business on a battered old deck-chair. No, he was not going to attend the meeting, And if we could be so kind, could we leave, as he was rather busy.

  The meeting was over within twenty minutes: the Baleagas had to leave. The villagers melted back into the night as quickly as they had come, no doubt anxious to return home and bar their doors. As the last few lingered, we buttonholed David Sekgobela, the unofficial chairman of proceedings, an urban sophisticate who had recently returned from Johannesburg. He looked at me wryly when I suggested that we had just witnessed a gross injustice.

  'And what if I stand up and talk them into letting these four stay here, and someone goes to their house and bums it down and kills them? Would that be any better?'

  Maake, the detective, made no attempt to intervene in the drama. Instead he watched and listened. To do his job well required an understanding of witchcraft belief and also a conviction in the primacy of the law. He certainly had the former, but just as many a lapsed Christian hesitates to deny the existence of God, he seemed far from convinced in the textbook police world view. The problem, he suggested, as we headed away from Sekororo, was not one of ignorance but rather that South Africa's nyangas had lost their forefathers' powers and could no longer cope with the problem.

  'I think today they do not have strong magic to stop the witches,' he explained. 'In East Africa they must still have strong magic. That is why you don't hear of witch-burnings there.'

  So can such beliefs be reconciled to the modem state? In a bid to resolve an issue that bedevils sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa appointed a commission to investigate witchcraft killings. The chairman, Professor Victor Ralushai, a celebrated anthropologist, knows all too well the potential of sangomas and nyangas for humbug or mistakes. During the Second World War his cousin, who was serving with the British army in North Africa, went missing, presumed dead. His family consulted a sangoma, who pointed out a neighbour as the 'witch'. The neighbour had to pay three cows as compensation, a vast sum in those days, until one day the 'dead' man returned from a prisoner-of-war camp, emaciated but very much alive. The falsely accused neighbour was given five cows in compensation, the sangoma was humiliated and the young Ralushai gained a lifelong scepticism about 'indigenous customs'.

  Ralushai however is the last person to mock belief in witchcraft. My American colleague and I met him in March 1996, in an ultra-modem hotel in Venda, the northernmost of South Africa's tribal homelands, by repute the most superstitious part of the country. We had come from an interview with a sangoma who had recommended that his 'hunting dog medicine' was the best medicine for sniffi
ng out witches, and were looking for a more sober view. Sitting by the hotel swimming pool, sipping coffee, we- were in another world from the medieval drama of Sekororo. But the professor gently chided my obvious impatience with the reluctance of the regional authorities to condemn the belief.

  'If you say witchcraft does not exist, you will be ignored in the villages,' he explained. 'The message of the missionaries merely strengthened the hand of the traditional churches. Once you educate people properly they will realize that it is not true, but that takes time. My aunt was a well-known traditional healer and late at night you would see well-known public figures visiting her house.'

  The Ralushai Commission recommended tougher sentencing for lynch mobs, _ tighter regulations for sangomas to outlaw out-and-out charlatans, and an extensive public education programme. But the report also came close to implicitly recognizing witchcraft, as it all but endorsed the argument that Shakespeare would not have introduced witches in Macbeth if they had not existed. Professor Koos van den Heever, an Afrikaner anthropologist, indicated later that he was convinced that he and Ralushai were the only members of the commission who did not believe in witchcraft.

  The approach of the Ralushai Commission has a relevance throughout Africa. The colonial powers condemned indigenous beliefs as barbaric. But it will take more than Western disapproval to change a culture. While Christianity is finding more converts in Africa than in any other continent, most of these are not to the established Western churches but to African denominations that find no contradiction in a belief in Christ, the worship of ancestors and visits to sangomas.