Phatekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, in
The Mark Gevisser Profile
Nkosi/Advocate Phatekile Holo-misa, as his letterhead reads, is exquisitely tailored, today, in designer-trad linen-and-beads — the perfect attire for a chief of the Nineties. Indeed, if we had a real paparazzi press here, his fabulous December wedding to Princess Nolizwe, daughter of Chief Kaizer Matanzima, would have been splashed all over its pages, up there with the Grimaldis and the Kennedys. Maybe some home snaps thrown in of Pat horsing around with Uncle Bantu in the digs they shared when the one was an advocate at the Umtata Bar and the other was a military dictator. Or even a telephoto shot of a stolen t?te-^-t?te: Pat and Winnie.
Phatekile Holomisa even comes with a ready-made Hello magazine-style sound bite: “Polygamy,” he says, “is the honest way of dealing with the promiscuity of men, because men always want more than one woman at a time.” Stop hogging the covers, Jane Warden and Glenn Hicks, and make way for the real thing: nkosisomething; yuppie royalty with serious sex appeal. Snap him at a traditional ceremony and you might even catch some flesh beneath the animal skins.
Today, though, in Parliament, designer-trad is as far as he will go: “I think it’s inappropriate for me to dress in an African way and give the impression that this is an African institution when it’s not. This is a European Parliament. They’ve stepped right into the shoes of their predecessors. It has to do with the antagonism they have towards traditional leaders. In the process, they lose the essence of African governance and democracy.”
Note the personal pronouns. Phatekile Holomisa clearly no longer identifies with “them”. Like his renegade uncle, he has been the subject of an internal disciplinary hearing as a result of the postion he has taken in the stand-off between the African National Congress and the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa) — – first over local government and now over the Constitution.
The chief was found guilty of bringing the party into disrepute by leading a march on the Union Buildings with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, by suggesting that rural voters should not vote in the local government elections, by taking the government to court over the Local Government Transition Act, and by consorting with officials of the Inkatha Freedom Party. He has been put on probation for a year, ordered to apologise, and told to relinquish all leadership positions in the ANC.
His appeal, in which he urged the ANC to deal with the “political” issue of its antagonism to traditional leaders rather than killing the messenger, was struck down by the ANC’s national executive committee in August; he is now attempting to prove, in the family tradition, that because his judges and prosecutors are the same people, he has been mistried. He will be unsuccessful. In the next few weeks, he will be stripped of his post as chairman of the portfolio committee on land affairs. He will continue to refuse to apologise, and he will be expelled.
The Holomisas: have these two mavericks become the custodians of our morality against the depredations of a new and expedient hegemony, or are they just two wide boys from our own Wild West spoiling for a fight and looking for some action?
Unlike his uncle, Phatekile Holomisa has a history of struggle activism and is an ANC insider. A student activist at the University of Natal in Durban in the mid-Eighties, he sought out the ANC in exile to canvass its opinion as to whether he should take up his hereditary position, as a chief, in the Transkei legislature. The result was that he was recruited into the ANC underground, which set him up in lawyers’ offices in Umtata.
Through Contralesa, he played a key role in bringing the chiefs on board. The seams began to crack, though, almost as soon as they had been plastered: at the World Trade Centre, Contralesa’s delegations insisted on an exemption, for customary law, from the gender equality clause in the Bill of Rights. For men expecting new prestige in the new order, their defeat — by women — was a slight from which they have yet to recover.
Almost as a palliative, the ANC agreed to set up provincial Houses of Traditional Leaders and a national Council of Traditional Leaders. But the final Constitution makes these institutions discretionary rather than mandatory, and in its judgment last week, the Constitutional Court ignored Contralesa’s objections to the new Constitution entirely.
And so Holomisa’s dream of a “House of Lords” has evaporated. Later this year, a Council of Traditional Leaders will probably be set up — and word has it that Contralesa wants Holomisa to chair it. If Buthelezi wins the battle that allows members of Parliament to sit on the council, he will be Holomisa’s deputy.
Holomisa still imagines the council to be a “senate” of sorts; others in the ANC see it as a toothless body they hope will soothe the egos of the chiefs by giving them status and salaries. Holomisa is quite correct when he talks of “antagonism” to traditional leaders from within ANC ranks; he is probably also right, in part, when he ascribes the antagonism to the “jealousy” of a professional urban elite that cannot tolerate the fact that “poor, rural illiterate people still wield such power as chiefs”.
But the fact remains: despite the support of Winnie Mandela (Contralesa’s treasurer), the traditional leaders have few powerful friends. The feminists and democratic rationalists who rule the ANC simply do not buy the Contralesa line that hereditary African leadership is inherently democratic: they are, as Holomisa correctly identifies them, Western-style liberal democrats.
“It’s not so much that our policy [towards traditional leaders] has changed,” says one senior ANC constitutional negotiator, “as that we have grown up. We’re more comfortable with our democracy now than we were in 1993, more confident of our support and less inclined to believe the traditional leaders when they say we can’t rule without them. Our experience is proving otherwise. And on top of this, Holomisa has pissed everyone off royally by engaging in stand-off politics, like marching with Buthelezi and calling for an election boycott.”
For his part, Holomisa says he has had no choice: he has tried, repeatedly, to get the ANC to deal with the issue and it has ignored him. Indeed, one ANC source says, “it’s true we have no real policy on traditional leaders — except that if we ignore them, perhaps they’ll go away.”
They won’t go away. A notoriously fractious bunch, however, they might self-combust. Holomisa seems to have won an internal power struggle but, within this institution corrupted by colonialism and apartheid, battles of ethnicity and usurpation still rage.
Holomisa’s approach to the ANC is to present himself, quite contradictorily, as the civilised man keeping the barbarians at the gate: “I might serve as a bulwark for some time,” he wrote in an acerbic memorandum to the ANC in August, “but in the course of time I may … be pushed aside and somebody else whose loyalties are elsewhere may take the leadership of Contralesa. Far be it for me to blow my own trumpet, but it is a fact that the potential might of Contralesa is of gigantic proportions … You, as a collective, bear the onerous responsibility of averting the creation of a Renamo or a Unita in this land.”
His critics in the ANC view him as an anti- democratic wolf in designer-trad sheeps’ clothing. Others point to his history as a student activist, and feel he buys in to the New Society values of the ANC and is trying to reconcile these — unsuccessfully — with the prerogatives of his birthright.
He does, indeed, present himself with a curious admixture of arrogance and diffidence. During our few hours together, I don’t think he once looked me in the eye: I took this, however, as a consequence of chiefly distance rather than shiftiness. There is something quite proper about him, a propriety he frequently subverts with gentle self-deprecation: “I notice,” he says, when I ask him whether he’s treated differently in Parliament to the way he is back home, “that you didn’t salute me when you entered.”
Back home, he is, in fact, not yet the chief of the amaHegebe, a branch of the Thembu: the tribe is ruled by a regent. He has not taken up his position yet, he explains, because of study, work, bachelorhood, and now national obligation. Later, he tells me that “One reason why the ubukhosi [chieftainship] is so old is that many young people are staying away from taking up their posts until they see what happens — they are watching us very closely indeed.”
Phatekile Holomisa is precisely one of those young people biding his time. If you were a snappy, clever postgraduate with connections and possibilities, would you roll up your sleeves to deal with the drudgery of tribal authority in an area that’s not even in MTNzania yet?
He is not unlike many modern Africans in carrying these dilemmas with him. He is often the rational face of chieftainship — sincere, I am sure, when he talks about the need for traditional leaders to revisit some gender inequalities (like making a widow the ward of her husband’s brother), and excellent at contextualising what often appears, to Western-trained eyes, the rationale for apparent iniquity.
But there are blind spots which betray his contradictions. Does he think women should be accorded the prerogative of polygamy too? “No. First, it would be immoral, and then it would pose certain practical problems.” He easily, and quite convincingly, explicates the practical problems: it would tear apart patrilinear clan identification.
The moral problems, on the other hand (which are, remember, the primary ones), are more difficult to explain. He goes shy. “I might be forced to say things I wouldn’t like to be heard to say. Like it has to do with the physical act.” I press: why is polygamy immoral for women and not for men? “People use names on women who have more than one partner – — they’re not flattering. Women themselves use these names. You talk of whores, or sluts. No one ever uses that language against men.”
Phatekile Holomisa’s old-fashionedness is distinctly at odds with his image of suave urbanity. I sense, in him, a longing for decorum quite puzzling in a man so young and so hip.
“I miss it here!” he says, when I ask him about the deference accorded him back home. “Here, everyone in the ANC is chief! It’s `chief’, `chief’, `chief’.” He presents this comment with his trademark affable humour — even his opponents go out of their way to tell you how nice he is — but that, perhaps, is the problem with the modern-day ANC for a man like Phatekile Holomisa: everyone’s a chief.