The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report was ”very kind” to Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, says his erstwhile aide and close confidant Walter Felgate.
In an exclusive interview with the Mail & Guardian at his home in Greytown, Felgate revealed, among other things, that Buthelezi had in 1994 personally instructed him to set up a military camp with the aim of ”sabotaging” the first democratic election. Felgate said he had given information on this and other aspects of the IFP’s paramilitary activities to the TRC during its in-camera hearings. Former TRC officials confirmed the claim.
”I was instructed by Buthelezi to form [the camps] to sabotage elections. In 1994, when the final breakdown between the IFP and the African National Congress took place, it became clear that the ANC was going to go ahead with elections without Buthelezi.
”The camp was to train people in destruction of the mechanisms of election, and in sabotaging communications and ambushing officials. I was called to Ulundi and instructed to disband the camp after Buthelezi decided to participate.”
The media exposed the existence of the camps, at Mlaba in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, just before the election.
Felgate also said evidence in the murder conspiracy trial of apartheid defence minister Magnus Malan was ”correct”. Malan was accused of training IFP hit squads in the Caprivi Strip. One of the squads later carried out the notorious 1986 massacre at KwaMakutha. Malan won his acquittal on technical grounds, Felgate said.
”The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report as it was first drafted was very kind to Buthelezi, actually. The [Malan] trial evidence was correct. Caprivi was everything the Malan trial made it out to be.”
Felgate was subpoenaed to give in-camera testimony to the TRC in 1998 about the Mlaba, Indunazulu and Caprivi training. He was not indemnified and had never spoken of the training in public.
Buthelezi took court action to have Felgate’s evidence about the training excised from the TRC’s final report. But the evidence stands, in terms of an out-of-court settlement last month, which included an annexure in which Buthelezi states his case and disputes the TRC’s findings.
Felgate (72) is known to be gravely ill. Clean-shaven — he once sported a beard — he wheezed frequently as he described his experiences while a senior IFP official and Buthelezi’s close confidant and speech-writer for 20 years.
The former anthropology lecturer and lay preacher crossed from the IFP to the ANC in 1997. He quit his seat as an ANC member of the KwaZulu-Natal legislature this week to make room for other floor-crossers. He refused to discuss his feelings about having to vacate his seat, but confirmed he had been on sick leave for a while.
Giving background to the Caprivi training, Felgate said Buthelezi was head of security in the former KwaZulu homeland and was being fed ”all kinds of information and misinformation about assassination attempts by the ANC”. Buthelezi approached Malan for assistance to set up a ”home guard” and the Caprivi training camp was born.
The year of the training, 1986, was a turning point for the Inkatha leader, Felgate said, because his international and domestic popularity had begun to ebb in favour of the ANC. ”Everyone was rallying around the ANC, which had established diplomatic missions across the globe. Buthelezi had in the past been described as the possible first black president of South Africa.”
Felgate does not mince his words in describing Buthelezi’s autocratic style as IFP leader. ”If you crossed swords with him and did not toe the line, you had no future in the party,” he said
About his defection, he said: ”I had to get out of the IFP. I was angry at the IFP’s intransigence, I was angry with Buthelezi and the national council. I could not just resign from the IFP and sit in an apple tree and do something else. I owed it to the ANC to publicly say I was wrong and they were right. How else could I do it but by joining the ANC? Floor crossing was a statement.”
He does not deny his role in the formation of the Indunazulu camp. Until that point, he said, Buthelezi had been certain that the ANC would not hold elections without him.
Asked how he justified participating in violence, given that he had chosen the IFP over the ANC in the 1970s because Inkatha had chosen a non-violent path, he said: ”It is a very difficult question. In a struggle you accept you would do things you would not do in your normal life. The church could accept the violence.
”You accept sabotage is part of the struggle. You also accept that if somebody wants to assassinate you, you take pre-emptive action.
”I wasn’t thinking whether the IFP was using the wrong or right tactics. This was the name of the game of revolution, of freedom fighting. It was the name of the game in Zimbabwe and in Algiers. I was playing the game.
”When it came to camps, I was still playing the game by those rules. It wasn’t a decision I made personally — I was participating in an era of South African history.”
Felgate said the ANC had brought members of the apartheid secret police and military intelligence into its fold for the same reason, ”as recognition that those kind of things take place. If you don’t do them, you have no business to be there — you should sit sanctimoniously under a tree and condemn all violence.”
Felgate said he had come to political awareness when one of his black high school friends was imprisoned.
Initially drawn to the church, he was dejected by the racism he found in church circles and approached former ANC president, Albert Luthuli. ”He rejected me outright, asking me to join the [white] Congress of Democrats [COD]. He said I had come to a Zulu branch with a motor car, a phone and the freedom to speak and move around. He said: ‘You are richer than them. Soon you will be the chair of the branch and will dominate them.”’
”I found the COD was not my cup of tea. With the exception of Bram Fischer, the so-called communists who dominated it were very affected, pseudo, fringe personalities. The Communist Party was nothing outside the ANC.”
His first contact with Buthelezi came in the early 1970s, while reviewing labour practices at Phalaborwa as a consultant for Rio Tinto Zinc.
”Buthelezi was a very impressive person,” reflects Felgate.
Concerned by the ”vacuum in democratic struggle” left by the ANC’s shift to military tactics, Felgate said he contacted then-ANC president Oliver Tambo through Frelimo in Mozambique.
”I went to London where I met Johnny Makhatini, then the ANC representative at the United Nations, but was opposed by [SACP leader] Joe Slovo.” He then tried to set up a meeting between Buthelezi and Tambo in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1979.
Felgate said the IFP leader had been using ANC songs to build support for Inkatha. ”When he would have the people together he would attack the ANC for its pro-sanctions position.” he said
The meeting between the two leaders finally took place later in the year, but ended in a slanging match, Felgate said. Tambo then called Felgate into his office and asked him ”to destroy the IFP”.
”It was understandable,” Felgate said. ”The ANC could not afford to have these other organisations working in South Africa. But I could not smile at someone and then stab them in the back.” So he joined Inkatha.
Felgate said it was as the IFP’s chief negotiator at the World Trade Centre talks in 1993 that he became aware of Buthelezi’s autocratic manner and the undemocratic way the IFP was run.
”ANC members came from a culture of debate and our delegates could not hold their own,” he said.
During a discussion on the role of black local government, the IFP delegation — Felgate, and now Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Ben Ngubane and KwaZulu-Natal Premier Lionel Mtshali — reached a compromise with the ANC.
”We took the deal to Buthelezi, who slammed it in the national council. Every one of the members of the delegation who had agreed with the compromise spoke against it. They knew that if they opposed Buthelezi, the chance of becoming a minister [in the new South Africa] was nil.”
Felgate said his relationship with Buthlezi gradually became more confrontational. The IFP leader began meeting him only in the presence of other national council members, making it difficult for him to argue his case.
He said he defected to the ANC after becoming increasingly alienated and isolated in the IFP.