Sipo Mzimela, the Minister of Correctional Services and IFP national deputy chairman, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
IF KwaZulu-Natal premier Frank Mdlalose is the bluff country doctor of Zulu ethnicist politics, then the Reverend Sipo Mzimela is its fire- breathing priest. He looks like the archetypal avuncular Anglican cleric, right down to his ecumenical sideburns — a flock of lost sheep grazing down the margins of his empathetic face. But put him in front of an Inkatha meeting, and you’ll see the preacher-man lurking within.
Last year, the IFP’s Constitution was amended so that he could be appointed as Mdlalose’s national deputy chairman, thereby elevating him above the party’s moderate secretary general, Ziba Jiyane, and putting him directly in the line of succession. Given that he was an ANC loyalist until 1985, and that he only joined the IFP in 1990, he has gone far indeed. His ticket: the Hard Line.
Back from 33 years of exile (the last few as the IFP’s American connection), he made his entree into IFP consciousness when, at its 1993 national congress, he was asked to open the proceedings with a prayer.
He had just published a book, Marching to Slavery: South Africa’s Descent to Communism, in which he prophesied that an ANC government would mean “the end of civilisation in all of black Africa”. His thesis was that a cabal of white and Indian communists was using the blacks in the ANC to further its aims, marching gullible blacks to a slavery worse than apartheid, sponsoring black- on-black violence to render the country anarchic.
Their prime stooge, since the days they set up Umkhonto weSizwe, was Nelson Mandela, “perfect” because he was “ambitious, power- hungry, reckless, and opportunistic”, with no support base and “no legitimate authority”; now, since his release, a senile “buffoon”, a “laughing stock” with a “sick mind”, “despised, scorned, and publicly humiliated even by the youth of the organisation he leads”; “the Father of Terrorism in South Africa”.
These passions powered his prayer at that conference in 1993: no one in the IFP has ever forgotten the performance of the man who is without doubt the finest orator in the current Parliament. He denounced Mandela and the ANC leaders as false prophets; De Klerk he consigned, more neatly, to the seventh circle — without even the option of purgatory. He was “born a liar, lived a liar, will die a liar, and he’ll lie in Hell!”
A mere three years later, Sipo Mzimela and I are driving around Northern KwaZulu-Natal, talking about the murderers, rapists and other felons in his ministerial care. He is explaining why he is trying to move South Africa’s prisons from brutal and sadistic places of punishment to humane centres for rehabilitation. “Yes,” he says, “some people might be lost, but they must be found. As a cleric, I have learned that no one is beyond redemption …”
We have come from a defunct coal mine outside Newcastle, which the minister of correctional services is transforming into his first pilot youth development centre. Funded by the private sector to the tune of R45-million, it will house 600 juvenile delinquents in a nurturing and relatively free environment. It is Mzimela’s passion, his legacy to South Africa. By resocialising the young offenders and teaching them skills, he hopes it will show the world that humanity can bring the “lost generation” back from the brink. By using private sector nous to complete a “three-year job in 11 months”, he will prove his main political point too: a small decentralised government is best.
We are on our way, now, to the old Newcastle Prison, where Mzimela will do one of his renowned tours, interrogating the kitchens, inspecting the cells, and talking to the prisoners in a tone that is stern and even aggressive sometimes, but clearly concerned, and with more than a little humour: “So you like it here in this, my hotel?” he says to a third-time offender.
He started these prison visits “because I am not 16 years old, and when my staff in Pretoria painted a rosy picture of the prisons, I knew I needed to see things for myself. Let me tell you, things are not rosy.” Cameras that followed Mzimela on his missions caught the genuine shock and outrage on his features, particularly when he was confronted with abused children. In Transkei, he closed some facilities on the spot. “I don’t know how people could work in them, and keep other people there. Except of course that they were trained to use prisons to punish and not to rehabilitate. And when you punish, you want the inmates to sleep on the floor and eat dirt. You want to beat them up.”
At Newcastle, they’ve been expecting the minister for two weeks, and so things are ship-shape. Nonetheless, his face folded into characteristic disdain, he frequently expresses irritation with the warders showing us around. A boy awaiting trial complains of having been assaulted by a warder; Mzimela curtly interrogates the prison head, and orders the child off to the doctor for treatment.
The disjuncture between Sipo Mzimela the prisons boss and Sipo Mzimela the IFP leader is so severe it is shocking: his wards in the prisons are never beyond redemption, but his political opponents go straight to hell. His engagement in national politics has been absolute and extreme. He, along with Walter Felgate and Mario Ambrosini, was responsible for advising Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi to stay out of elections and to form alliances with the right wing. He, too, is largely responsible for the fact that the IFP is not in the Constitutional Assembly. Through an arcane IFP committee he chairs called Pocola (the Portfolio on Constitutional and Legislative Affairs), he — along with Felgate, Ambrosini and other hardliners – — determines the constitutional debate in KwaZulu-Natal too. On at least one occasion he has overridden an agreement between the ANC and the more moderate provincial IFP in the province.
And yet his understanding of correctional services is rational, measured and — with a few glaring exceptions, like the refusal to countenance condoms in jails as a measure against the spread of HIV — classically progressive.
Certainly, there are problems: sources in the sector say he is skittish and erratic and has alienated both the human rights lobbies and his own department. This week, he and Carl Niehaus — the chairman of the portfolio committee on correctional services — are clashing over whether children should be held in prisons. On the surface Mzimela is progressive and Niehaus reactionary, for the former wants to keep children out, while the latter wants to put them back in. But Mzimela is not looking at the context — at the fact that, since thousands of children were released from prisons into places of safety last year, many have escaped because of low security and committed more crimes, and the welfare department has said it needs at least a year to jack up security.
With certain reservations, the human rights lobby has backed Niehaus. Mzimela claims only he is respecting the rights of chidren. If his compassion for prisoners comes from his life as a pastor (he worked in Harlem, Atlanta and Kenya) and as an intellectual (he has a PhD in ethics from New York University), then his extreme politics comes from his history as an ANC member who “saw the light”. He is a classic dissident: embittered, unsparing of the ideology that deceived him. Marching to Slavery gives us a clue. In his particularly harsh chapter on how the ANC has created the “lost generation”, he writes that “to [14-year-old] immature minds, Marxist slogans are in fact attainable goals. I thought so too, until I went to study in Czechoslovakia in 1963. That is when I discovered that communism is not just worse than apartheid; it is a thoroughly evil system.”
Mzimela, the son of an uneducated carpenter from Durban, became a teacher and a devotee of Albert Luthuli. Angered and radicalised by Sharpeville, he left the country and landed up in Czechoslovakia, where, he says, he realised he had been conned. The Czechs were unfree and miserable. One cannot fault Mzimela for his discovery, but it remains unclear why he waited two decades — during which time he actually helped set up the ANC’s United Nations office — after the revelation to leave the movement.
He claims he quit the movement in 1985 when the ANC formally united with the SACP at the Kabwe Conference. As late as 1987, though, he is reported in American media campaigning for sanctions. Two years later, he was slamming sanctions. Then, shortly after the unbannings of 1990, he came home, met Buthelezi, joined the IFP , and went back to the United States a fervent convert.
Something clearly happened to Sipo Mzimela in the mid-1980s. An old comrade believes it had to do with a clash with his superior in New York, Johnny Makathini, followed by a two-year church mission he did in Kenya: “Sipo came back a bitter man, virulent and angry.”
Mzimela says that, while in Kenya, he met “hundreds of South Africans. I heard the stories of the torture and human rights abuse in the camps. I heard how badly things were going. I was particulaly upset by the tales of black-on-black violence.” Perhaps being back in Africa, back home in a way, threw all the painful issues of separation, loneliness and betrayal into sharp relief, forcing a crisis that could find its only resolution in a rejection of the ANC. Upon returning to the United States, say those who know him, he started talking about the ANC’s domination by Xhosas.
Even today, back in South Africa, there is something about Sipo Mzimela which is unrooted. When in Pretoria, he lives out of a hotel. His only current home is his ministerial residence in Cape Town. “There is a gap I need to fill,” he says. “People have developed and grown. The world is different to the one I left in 1961. I don’t have roots any more. So I am building a house in Umhlanga.”
Politically, too, he seems to be searching for a place to build his house. He is adamant that he joined the IFP for “political reasons, and not because I am Zulu”. I suspect that he is right: deracinated, he is more like the white anti-communist ideologues of the party than the Zulu traditionalists. The fact that he is a black man, a Zulu speaker, to boot, only adds to his potential as an ideologue leader.
There are signs, though, of Mzimela’s softening. One ANC insider notes that President Mandela, with his usual acuity, has worked hard to win Mzimela’s loyalty — and has succeeded, in part, with the Newcastle youth project, originally Mandela’s idea, now given to Mzimela as a way to prove himself. It’s interesting to note that Mzimela is clearly embarrassed by his book, even though he will not go so far as to disown it, rather making excuses for it (“those were difficult political times”; “it was written for Americans, not South Africans”, etc.) He has also, for the first time, made some public noises about finding a way through the current constitutional deadlock other than international mediation.
Last year, at the height of the tension between the hardliners at Parliament and the moderates trying to run KwaZulu-Natal, Frank Mdlalose offered to resign. The man picked by Buthelezi to replace him was Mzimela. The two apparently dislike each other intensely. Country doctors use science and caution. Fiery preachers work, rather, with moral absolutes: damnation and redemption. One senses, though, that in the Newcastle district — where Mdlalose was coincidentally once a practising medic — Sipo Mzimela is discovering, through his youth centre, the country doctor in himself.