The article by Mondli Makhanya “Keeping the dream alive” has reference.
I was not surprised by Makhanya’s vilification of me in describing me as a “Bantustan puppet” and “the tetchy and cantankerous chief from Ulundi who was treated with kid gloves and allowed to get away with his tale that he was an anti-apartheid activist when he was living off the fat of the Nats”.
I challenge Makhanya to explain to your readers the following. At the unveiling of the tombstone of the late Oliver Tambo, Cleopas Nsibande, who was at one time the Gauteng interim leader of the African National Congress, made the following statement.
He told all the people assembled at that high-profile ANC function that he was present when the late inkosi Albert Lutuli, then president general of the ANC, and Tambo sent a message to me via my late sister Princess Morgina Dotwana.
He stated that the message of these top ANC leaders to my sister was that they were pleading with me not to refuse to take over the position of leadership of what was then being set up as the KwaZulu government. Nsibande made this statement in the presence of president Nelson Mandela and the whole leadership of the ANC assembled on that occasion.
Tambo and I worked together all the time he was in exile. This ended only in 1979, after our meeting in London. This was a result of the disagreement that I, as leader of Inkatha, and my delegation had.
The ANC delegation included the present president of the ANC and of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. The differences between our delegations were over the issue of the so-called “armed struggle” and the issue of sanctions and disinvestment that the ANC wanted me and Inkatha to embrace.
And we could not do so.
The vilification of me by ANC leaders started and then continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Prior to this we exchanged messages and emissaries with the president of the ANC mission-in-exile, Tambo. We met clandestinely in his home in London in 1963. We met at the Hilton hotel in Nairobi in the 1970s. We met at Mangoche in Malawi in 1971. We met in Nairobi. When I founded Inkatha he approved it on behalf of the ANC mission-in-exile.
The apartheid government took away my passport for nine years, after I had attended the Anglican Congress in 1963 and visited Tambo and his wife in their home in London.
The pejorative of “Bantustan” refers to the grandiose apartheid plan to Balkanise South Africa into mini-states. This is how that term came about.
KwaZulu was never “a Bantustan state”. Yes it was described as a self-governing territory. The apartheid government wanted us to accept the status of “Bantustan”, which KwaZulu would have become if we accepted independence à la Pretoria.
We rejected it.
We were part of South Africa right through because of our rejection of allowing our territory to be fragmented from the rest of South Africa as a so-called “Bantustan”.
Our people were issued with South African passports right through apartheid because we refused to abandon our status as South Africans.
We retained our South African citizenship. Many people in Transkei and Ciskei came to me in order to get South African passports. This was because the passports issued by Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana and Venda were not accepted by the international community.
When your newspaper states that I was “living off the fat of the Nats”, I do not know from which fiscus any funding for Makhanya’s education, for health and other services to our people came from.
There was only one fiscus in South Africa. The salaries that I and my ministers were paid were lower than those of any other so-called self-governing state, let alone the so-called independent states. These salaries were kept low at my insistence and this prompted my ministers to complain that they could not live “on principles” and some actually left because of our low salaries.
I was not convicted by any court of law for a single human rights violation. There is not a shred of evidence that I ever ordered or committed any violations of human rights.
The Truth and Reconcilliation Commission was presided over by someone whose appointment I had objected to in Cabinet since he was a known activist of the United Democratic Front (a front for the ANC).
Can your newspaper explain why president Mandela and I exchanged correspondence throughout his 27-year incarceration?
Mandela’s last letter to me was written in 1989, shortly before his release from jail. The vilification campaign against me was then in its zenith.
Which other leader in these territories did he correspond with, except me? I take strong exception to being lumped together with the so-called “Bantustan stooges” and in fact these averments by your newspaper are defamatory per se.
Can your newspaper explain why the majority of the people of KwaZulu-Natal have given me the largest number of votes in successive elections in 1994, in 1999 and in 2000? Are all these people mesmerised by “the stooge” that your newspaper says I am?
Mangosuthu Buthelezi is president of the Inkatha Freedom Party and Minister of Home Affairs