Politics is a dirty business. So allegations of Inkatha's involvement in Operation Marion calls for level heads...
EVERYBODY LIES. Or at least, they tell half-truths. That's one of the first rules of politics. For most of us, deciding who to vote for hinges on whose half-truths are least likely to adversely affect us.
So Reuter's story this week that our "friends", the French under Francois Mitterand, sent South Africa kits for 50 Oryx military helicopters through Portugal in the years when a UN arms embargo against this country was in force, should have been no surprise.
People die because of such acts of duplicity. The perpetrators are almost never punished. The best we can hope for is to do our damndest to make sure that the chances of such things happening again are severely restricted.
This is the main reason why I almost never write about Buthelezi. It matters not whether he is the pacifist free market champion he claims to be or whether he is a vitriolic megalomaniac invoking the spectre of the 1949 riots to cower the masses into submission.
What does matter is that the conflict that is ripping this province apart has its roots in subterfuge under the cover of misinformation.
And while Shenge and Madiba affectionately address each other as such in public, the "invisible wound" Madiba speaks about continues to fester and must be lanced if it is to heal.
In A History of the ANC: South Africa belongs to us, published in 1988, the ANC had this to say about Inkatha:
There have been attempts in the West to promote Gatsha Buthelezi, Chief of KwaZulu, as a "moderate" black leader. Buthelezi is the leader of Inkatha, an ethnically based organization which is moderate towards the racists and very violent when it deals with those who oppose the regime — and this includes the UDF. Inkatha claims to be an "African organization", but is far from having an "independent" policy. Its practical policy is sending UDF leaders and ANC activists to long terms of imprisonment, or even killing them. In this respect, Inkatha aids the racist regime and does its dirty work for it...
Another aspect of the level of brutality now common in South Africa is the terrorism unleashed by Gatsha Buthelezi's Inkatha movement against anybody who differs with, let alone, opposes him and his Inkatha. He has used every trick in the book: tribalism, big tribe chauvinism — claiming to lead the biggest tribe, the Zulus — and anti-Indian propaganda. Buthelezi's Inkatha has its own death squads, terrorizing and killing people the way the racist regime does. This is particularly so in Natal. He claims to lead the Zulu-speaking people but he is terrorizing and killing them.
If we interpret these words published in 1988, the current conflict between Inkatha and its detractors is easily explained — a symptom of years of simmering discontent. But go back three years to June 1985 and listen to what Oliver Tambo had to say in his Political Report of the National Executive Committee to the ANC National Consultative Conference:
It was also in this context (of achieving political organization in the Bantustans) that we maintained regular contact with Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of the KwaZulu bantustan. We sought that this former member of the ANC Youth League who had taken up his position in the KwaZulu bantustan after consultations with our leadership, should use the legal opportunities provided by the bantustan programme to participate in the mass mobilization of our people on the correct basis of the orientation of the masses to focus the struggle for a united and non-racial South Africa. In the course of our discussions with him, we agreed that this would also necessitate the formation of a mass democratic organisation in the bantustan that he headed. Inkatha originated from this agreement.
Unfortunately, we failed to mobilize our people to take on the task of resurrecting Inkatha as the kind of organization that we wanted, owing to the understandable antipathy of many of our comrades towards what they considered as working within the bantustan system. The task of reconstituting Inkatha therefore fell on Gatsha Buthelezi himself who then built Inkatha into a personal power base far removed from the kind of organization we had visualized...
What was Tambo saying? We've created a monster, and it's now out of control? We're sorry we didn't tell you we were doing this because we knew you would have objected?
Transparency and accountability are the foundations of political integrity. In this instance, the ANC by surreptitiously bypassing the wishes of its supporters for the sake of political strategy was as guilty of duplicity as representatives of the apartheid government who funded third force activities without informing their electorate.
And distasteful though it may sound, perhaps the only solution to the conflict lies in acknowledging common roots and seeking a merger between the ANC and Inkatha.
Else they may simply continue, like Ulysses, to stuff their ears with wax and strap themselves to the mast.