Facing full ire of Pretoria
I became a so-called homelands leader to undermine the apartheid system from within
IN THE heat of summer in 1971, my wife and I found ourselves guests of President Hastings Banda in Mangochi, on Lake Malawi. President Banda had arranged for me to meet with my exiled leader, Oliver Tambo.
While Tambo and I met many times, in London, Nairobi, Lagos and Stockholm, our meeting in Malawi was significant, for he had come 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 remembered this warning – which I had never heeded – in 1998, when President Mandela unveiled Tambo’s tombstone in Benoni. During the ceremony, Cleopas Nsibande, a prominent Gauteng ANC leader, told 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. But they also knew that the system was not optional. They wanted, therefore, to undermine it from within. Nsibande was sent to persuade me not to refuse leadership of the territory called KwaZulu, if the people elected me. Thus I became a so-called homelands leader.
Ironically, the only reason I was able to meet with Tambo outside South Africa was because I agreed to lead KwaZulu. The regime had confiscated my passport for nine years, for meeting with Tambo. But they had to give it back when I became head of a government they themselves had established!
The moment I got my passport back, I went to see Tambo again. I never had a problem rocking the boat, despite the risks.
The full ire of the regime came down on me when I refused Pretoria’s “offer” of nominal independence for KwaZulu. The idea, which had been successfully implemented in the other homelands, was to take all the land to which blacks had been relegated and excise it from South Africa.
In this way, the regime could deny oppressing the majority, as the majority would no longer be South Africans.
KwaZulu was the last step on the journey. But I blocked it. It was the most powerful way I could find to undermine the system.
I had not expected to stand alone. I had done all I could to influence the other homelands’ leaders against taking independence. In 1973 we met in Umtata in the then Transkei, where I proposed a federal formula to ensure that our country would not be dissected and balkanised into “independent” Bantustans, while still giving the regime its “separate development”. Federalism would enable us to remain within South Africa, as one country.
The very next day we had a meeting in Bulugha near East London, which was attended by leaders of the Progressive Federal Party, including Helen Suzman and Colin Eglin, where we discussed this proposal of a federal formula. In the end, it was agreed that the homelands would not take independence.
Inkosi Matanzima was present at those meetings. Yet, three years later, Transkei was the first to take independence – and one by one, without even informing me, the others followed.
But my refusal to turn the last remaining homeland into a Bantustan derailed the entire grand scheme of apartheid, as (by then former president) FW de Klerk testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When we began constitutional negotiations in 1991, I revived the proposal of a federal formula.
KwaZulu was by then KwaZulu-Natal, for I had brought together the governments of Natal and KwaZulu to form South Africa’s first non-racial, non-discriminatory government: the KwaZulu-Natal Joint Executive Authority.
Long before democracy, I moved KwaZulu away from the apartheid pattern of fragmenting our country.
No one else at the negotiating table was thinking about the form of state. It was all about the transfer of power. But I knew that we ran a serious risk of opening the door to corruption and abuse of power in a new dispensation if we allowed all the power to be held at the top, by a few, in a centralised system of governance.
I and the IFP thus petitioned loudly for a federal system that would allow the devolution of governance powers on the basis of subsidiarity. But federalism was never fully embraced.
At least we secured provinces, which have provided some check and balance to total control by one party.
This, surely, is a boon to multi-party democracy. These are facts of history, although I realise that for some they are inconvenient truths.
I have great respect for former president Motlanthe as one of our liberators, but as former president De Klerk publicly confirmed, “There is no truth that (the Ingonyama Trust Act) was part of (a) special deal to ensure the IFP’s participation in the election.”
When former president Motlanthe laments the creation of provinces as a “mistake” of our transition, his motives are clear. Evidently, there must be no sharing of power.
I believed federalism to be the best way to honour our nation’s diversity