Tambo warned me I was rocking the boat too much – Buthelezi

I MET my exiled leader, Oliver Tambo, many times, in London, Nairobi, Lagos and Stockholm. But our 1971 meeting in Malawi was unique.

He came to warn me: I was “rocking the boat too much”. I should be less visible, less outspoken. I should attack the ANC from time to time. I never heeded this warning. During the unveiling of Tambo’s tombstone in 1998 ANC leader Cleopas Nsibande told of how Tambo and Inkosi Albert Luthuli had sent him to my sister, with a message for me.

They knew that as a loyal ANC cadre I rejected the homelands system imposed on us by the apartheid regime. Nsibande was sent to persuade me not to refuse leadership of KwaZulu, if the people elected me.

Thus I became a so-called homelands leader. I won the full ire of the regime when I refused Pretoria’s “offer” of nominal independence for KwaZulu. I had also done all I could to influence the other homeland leaders against taking independence.

In 1973, we met in Umtata, Transkei, where I proposed a federal formula. Later we had a meeting in Bulugha, near East London, where it was agreed that the homelands would not take independence. But three years later, Transkei took independence, and the others followed suit.

I respect [Kgalema] Motlanthe as one of our liberators but I am sorely disappointed that he would mislead our country. He linked the creation of the Ingonyama Trust Act to what happened in Umtata and Bulugha in 1973. The former president is behaving like Rip van Winkle, because he was an MP when the act was amended after 1994. When he laments the creation of provinces as a “mistake” of our transition, I am reminded of his comment on traditional leaders as “tin-pot dictators”. Evidently, there must be no sharing of power.