The Safety and Security Ministry’s gamble in banning traditional weapons paid off this week when IFP marchers left their pangas and spears at home, writes Eddie Koch
A COMBINATION of firm policing and delicate negotiations with moderate groups in the Inkatha Freedom Party defied fire-and- brimstone predictions that the ban on traditional weapons would cause chaos at Thursday’s march in Johannesburg.
By midday, some 10 000 Inkatha supporters converged on the Library Gardens to commemorate the killings at Shell House in 1994, without any serious incidents of violence. Almost all of them were armed with sticks and knobkerries — with few spears and pangas in evidence.
Some of those who carried sharpened steel rods had covered the tips with empty beer tins, signifying that the crowd had moved away from the brazen mood that characterised earlier Inkatha marches.
There is little doubt that both sides in this week’s row over traditional weapons will claim victory. Inkatha demonstrated it can mobilise a massive show of disciplined strength in the heart of Johannesburg — all of them kitted out with sticks and shields.
But Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi’s firm stance on the carrying of dangerous weapons clearly also produced results.
The Mail & Guardian has established that officials in the office of Gauteng Premier Tokyo Sexwale held extensive discussions with hostel indunas and Inkatha Freedom Party members loyal to a moderate faction of the Zulu nationalist movement in a bid to woo them away from the party’s more bellicose national leadership in the run-up to Thursday’s march.
“We held talks during the week with the hostel leaders and an Inkatha group in the Transvaal loyal to Musa Myeni, and worked on an agreement that the marchers would carry only sticks and shields,” said one of Sexwale’s colleagues.
“We knew all along that the way in which the march was conducted and its outcome was going to depend on whether another faction headed by Themba Khoza [an IFP hardliner who may shortly be charged in connection with receiving arms from third force agents in the police] would be able to win more support in the hostels where Inkatha organises.”
The IFP in Gauteng now has two rival factions after a bitter leadership clash between Myeni and Khosa and his allies erupted last year.
At provincial elections last year, Khosa lost his leadership of the party and was replaced at the time by a German-born businessman, Dietmar Lang. Neither Khoza nor fellow hardliner Humphrey Ndlovu were elected to the IFP Gauteng executive. This election saw Myeni, who had disappeared from sight during the violent run-up to the election, re-emerge from obscurity.
The softly-softly negotiation approach with Inkatha’s rank-and-file and middle order leadership was clearly designed to supplement Mufamadi’s hardline stance in his television debate with KwaZulu-Natal Premier Frank Mdlalose on Tuesday night — a position that was repeated by his provincial counterpart Jessie Duarte on Wednesday, when she said marchers who violated the ban would be arrested.
Duarte’s staff have also been working hard to win the confidence of junior police officers in an effort to ensure that the police force becomes a willing instrument of government policy. This approach received encouraging signals during the run-up to the march, when two police unions issued statements saying they would enforce the ban.
The national and provincial police ministries also won an important skirmish in their war of words with Inkatha when Gauteng Police Commissioner Sharma Maharaj announced at a press conference that the ban would be enforced before and during the march.
The government’s concerted effort to undermine an Inkatha lobby determined to whip up resistance and confrontation over the ban — an approach epitomised by IFP official Ed Tillet’s fiery warnings about the consequences of enforcing it — derives from evidence that national legislation was deliberately changed by FW de Klerk’s government so that IFP members could arm themselves with spears and pangas at the height of political violence in the country.
The carrying of dangerous weapons by Inkatha members, far from being a long-established tradition, was prohibited by law until De Klerk stepped in to ensure the Natal Code of Native Law was amended in 1990 — a time when internecine strife was spiralling to levels higher than the country had ever experienced.
The National Party government’s action was clearly taken in close consultation with Inkatha, as the KwaZulu homeland followed by amending its own statutes in line with De Klerk’s amendments.
Evidence emerging from the Malan murder trial and the case against Vlakplaas police commander Eugene de Kock indicate that the traditional weapons measures coincided with far more serious programmes to arm paramilitary commandos inside Inkatha.
Evidence collected by Zulu historians also shows that traditional leaders regularly enforced bans on the carrying of spears and other sharp weapons, especially at ceremonial and commemorative functions where women and children could get hurt by mishaps.
“Zulu men do have a tradition of carrying weapons but, when circumstances made it neccessary in the pre-conquest, independent Zulu kingdom, Zulu tradition and culture demanded that spears were not to be carried for fear of accidents,” says Jeff Guy, an expert on Zulu history and author of the book The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom.
Guy believes the current effort to mobilise support around the cultural weapons issue — and to portray the new government’s efforts to move back to a situation that had already existed before 1990 — is part of a strategy to whip up “provocation in the name of tradition”.
l While attention was focused on the march in Johannesburg, it was in KwaZulu-Natal that the most serious violence erupted. Anne Eveleth reports that police there confirmed four people were killed and six injured in six violent incidents in Durban’s Umlazi township on Thursday morning. Residents, who struggled to get out of the township for work in the morning, said an attempt was under way to enforce a stayaway.