 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Washing old spears
By Gamal Nkrumah
Last Saturday, an estimated 1,000 police and troops were deployed in the normally sleepy KwaZulu-Natal town of Richmond, not far from where the provincial capital of Pietermaritzberg nestles in the lush foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains.
Despite the beauty of the bucolic setting, the occasion was not a happy one for the Rainbow nation. The African National Congress (ANC) had gathered to bury its dead -- supporters of the movement who were massacred in reprisal for the assassination of rival United Democratic Movement (UDM) leader Sifiso Nkabinde.
Political violence is nothing new to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa's most populous province and second-largest regional economy. Under the apartheid government, the ANC was long engaged in a bloody running battle here with the rival Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a traditionalist and predominantly ethnic Zulu grouping. Since the transition to black majority rule, this particular tension has largely subsided. Nevertheless, political violence in the province has still claimed the lives of 60 people in the past three months, of whom 13 died last weekend.
When Nkabinde's body was found, it had been riddled by no less than 80 bullets. Nkabinde was a Zulu. But that does not, in itself, explain who would have wanted him dead. A warlord who commanded a large and well-armed private militia, as an aspiring politician he had no ideological convictions and a less than impressive track record. He began by flirting with the Communists, and the late Zulu Communist leader Harry Gwala was, at one stage, his political mentor. He moved on to the ANC, from which he was expelled in 1997. Nkabinde then offered his services to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's IFP, on condition that they give him a senior position in the party hierarchy. When Inkatha turned him down, he began to pay court to the UDM. There he finally obtained the post he had coveted. He was now a rising star, but in a party whose future was far from certain.
The UDM was founded by Bantu Holomisa, former president of the bantustan of Transkei, and himself an ANC defector. The deputy leader is Roelf Meyer, an Afrikaner former minister of constitutional development for the National Party (NP). With the appointment of the Zulu Nkabinde as secretary-general, Holomisa, himself a Xhosa, hoped to position the UDM as a genuinely multi-racial and multi-ethnic alternative to the ANC, able to appeal equally to all three of South Africa's main ethnic groups. But even before Nkabinde's death, his plan was looking shaky. The triumvirate he had assembled may have had the right racial credentials, but they were all three interlopers, rejected by their respective tribes, who had more in common with each other than with their own.
Many observers play down the significance of the most recent round of violence. "A flash in the pan," is how South Africa's ambassador to Egypt, Frank Mdlalose, national chairman emeritus of the IFP, described it. "There is a vast difference between the level of political violence five or ten years ago, and the isolated incidents of today," he told Al-Ahram Weekly.
But how, then, are these incidents to be explained? South African President Nelson Mandela, who is due to step down later in the year, has spoken accusingly of a sinister "Third Force". But ANC National Chairman Patrick "Terror" Lekota, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, disagrees. "This violence is not political. It is being carried out by a few criminals -- some of whom are in the police force," he explained. "They have been creating the impression that the ANC and the UDM are killing each other in Richmond."
While that impression may yet prove to be erroneous, there is a lot of circumstantial weight behind it. Internecine violence has been a constant feature of South African political life since the days of apartheid, and nowhere more so than in KwaZulu-Natal, where it was grafted onto a powerful substrate of tribal rivalry. Tribal politics still counts for a lot today. The Zulu, after all, were the only African people to inflict a humiliating defeat on the British colonialists, at Isandhlewana in 1879. This history explains, in part, their reputation as the "Black Spartans" -- a reputation of which the recent violence in the province has served as an unfortunate reminder.
The coffin of UDM Secretary General Sifiso Nkabinde arrives for his funeral service in Richmond, South Africa, on 31 January. Nkabinde was shot dead by unidentified gunmen on 23 January (photo:Reuters)
Only two of nine South African provinces are not controlled by the ANC, and one of them is KwaZulu-Natal. (The other is the Western Cape, the NP's fiefdom.) Ethnic Zulus comprise 30 per cent of the country's population, and 80 per cent of them live in KwaZulu-Natal. Since the NP withdrew from the ruling coalition, the ANC has had to rely increasingly on the IFP as its principle parliamentary partner. As a result, the politics of the province have reasserted their centrality to the national political agenda.
Despite its relative ethnic unity, KwaZulu-Natal is riven by deep historical divisions between town and country Zulus. Westernised Zulu-speakers were long called by the pejorative term, "Natal Kaffirs", to distinguish them from their fellow Zulus who lived under traditional law in the Kingdom of Zululand, where they were seen by the whites as "Noble Savages". Today, these divisions have become somewhat blurred. Nevertheless, ANC supporters are still widely regarded as the modern embodiment of the "Natal Kaffir", while the KwaZulu's "Noble Savages" are seen as the forerunners of the IFP traditionalists.
Tribal customs and loyalties play an ambiguous role in modern South Africa. While they are often blamed for black on black violence, they are also often cited as one of the few things holding rural black society together. The constitution embodies this received wisdom, and seeks to protect the role of traditional rulers in the modern political structure. "The president may recognise or appoint any person as a chief of a black tribe and may make regulations prescribing the duties, powers, privileges and conditions of service of chiefs so recognised or appointed, and of headmen, acting chiefs and acting headmen," it states. Tribal law is also recognised by the constitution through the category of the "tribal decision", which is, in the case of any tribe, "a decision taken by that tribe in accordance with the indigenous law or customs of that tribe."
Partly as a result of this constitutional protection, customary law, covering a variety of matters ranging from marriage to succession, continues to play an important role in post-apartheid South Africa. Today, some 800 traditional authorities effectively control 13 per cent of national territory, through those areas which, in the apartheid era, were designated as bantustans. Then as now, these were effectively labour reserves. They are still home to over one half of South Africa's black population.
This is the system that is now beginning to show signs of stress. If customary law and traditional legislation were to collapse, their demise could well lead to the destruction of the entire black social fabric over much of rural South Africa. However, in the view of some commentators, the real problem lies elsewhere -- in intractable long-term unemployment and grinding poverty.
Since the end of apartheid, social inequality, already considerable, has been expanding inexorably. If the whites have continued to prosper, it is above all because the blacks have been divided. It was always part of the ANC's mission to try and stamp out these divisions. But, alas, it was a task to which some of the organisation's Zulu leaders were not well-suited temperamentally.
Many observers already saw the IFP-ANC clashes of the 1980s and 1990s as the first fruit of this failure. Today's battle between ANC and UDM supporters may well prove to be part of the same bitter legacy.
