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Independent Newspapers<\/p>\n
Paramount Chief Buyelakaya Dalindyebo of the Tembu
\nFile photo: Cindy Waxa<\/p>\n
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As a proud African traditionalist who has just built his own Great Place at Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma should be deeply concerned that the traditional leader of one of South Africa\u2019s biggest tribes has turned critical on him. <\/p>\n
Most black traditional leaders in South Africa are meekly deferential to the government, as indeed they were to the old apartheid regime which they served as paid administrators of the Bantustan system. <\/p>\n
Since liberation they have dutifully herded their subjects to the polls to vote for the ANC, in return for which the government has rewarded them by keeping traditional powers in their hands. <\/p>\n
For one of them to step out of line now must come as a shock to Zuma and the ANC. <\/p>\n
Of course, the individual concerned, Paramount Chief Buyelakaya Dalindyebo of the Tembu, has some clouds of his own hanging over his head. <\/p>\n
He is well known to be a heavy dagga smoker, although that is more a tradition than a crime in our country. <\/p>\n
More seriously, he has a conviction of culpable homicide involving the death of a villager in his area awaiting the hearing of an appeal. <\/p>\n
But that aside, Dalindyebo\u2019s sudden emergence as an outspoken critic of Zuma\u2019s leadership and the ANC in general poses a significant threat to the ruling alliance. <\/p>\n
He is an influential figure as the king of the largest tribe among the Xhosa-speaking people of the Eastern Cape, which is the traditional heartland of the ANC but where its support is now on the decline following years of maladministration and deepening poverty. <\/p>\n
Depending on how Dalindyebo plays his cards \u2013 he has said he may vote and perhaps even campaign for the DA at next year\u2019s election \u2013 he could conceivably turn the Eastern Cape into a marginal province. <\/p>\n
At the very least his support would surely be enough to enable the opposition to win the province\u2019s main metropolitan centre, the emblematically named Nelson Mandela Bay Council which encompasses the city of Port Elizabeth, the nearby towns of Uitenhage and Despatch as well as surrounding rural areas at the next local government elections in 2016. <\/p>\n
In 2011 the DA came within a hair\u2019s-breadth of winning the council, gaining 49 percent of the votes to the ANC\u2019s 51 percent. <\/p>\n
Such a coup would be a huge psychological blow for the ANC. <\/p>\n
What makes Dalindyebo such a potentially potent political figure is not only his status as the royal head of the Eastern Cape\u2019s biggest tribe, but the fact that he and his forebears are the most closely connected of all traditional leaders to the ANC \u2013 which likens the king\u2019s actions to the breaking of an umbilical cord. <\/p>\n
Nelson Mandela is Dalindyebo\u2019s great-uncle, while the king is in turn the political icon\u2019s monarch. <\/p>\n
They are also near neighbours: the king\u2019s Great Place, Bumbane, is a stone\u2019s throw from Mandela\u2019s rural home at Qunu. <\/p>\n
More important still are Dalindyedbo\u2019s immediate family connections to the ANC. <\/p>\n
His father and predecessor as King of the Tembu, Sabata Dalindyebo, was acknowledged by the ANC as a hero of the struggle against apartheid. <\/p>\n
This was because of a brave but ultimately futile struggle that he put up trying to block the government of Hendrik Verwoerd from establishing the Transkei as its first black \u201chomeland\u201d. <\/p>\n
This eventually resulted in King Sabata having to flee the country and take refuge with the ANC at its exile headquarters in Lusaka \u2013 where the then leader, the late Oliver Tambo, honoured him by making him an \u201celder\u201d of the ANC. <\/p>\n
Sabata took his young son with him to the ANC headquarters and gave him the name Buyelekaya, Xhosa for \u201cGo Back Home\u201d. Which the present king duly did to assume his father\u2019s throne after liberation, Sabata having died in exile in 1986. <\/p>\n
I knew Sabata well during his campaign against apartheid. As political correspondent of the Rand Daily Mail I travelled to meet him and later covered a session of the Transkei Territorial Authority at which he tried to defeat the government\u2019s plans to put the Transkei on the road to becoming the first black Bantustan. <\/p>\n
This brought him into conflict with his cousin, Kaiser Matanzima. As a Fort Hare graduate, Matanzima was the better educated of the two, but having been born of a lesser wife he was junior to Sabata in the tribal hierarchy \u2013 which galled him. He hated Sabata and sought to cut him down. <\/p>\n
I watched them clash in that tribal assembly. It was a painful sight. With Pretoria\u2019s help, the artful Matanzima was easily able to outwit the brave but unequal Sabata, who became entangled and confused in the web of procedural trickery spun for him. <\/p>\n
To reward their man for his victory, the government recognised a significant portion of the Tembu, called the Emigrant Tembu, as a separate tribe and made Matanzima its Paramount Chief \u2013 thus putting him on an equal footing with Sabata. <\/p>\n
Sabata\u2019s resistance to this erosion of his authority thrust him into direct conflict with the government. Backed by Paramount Chief Victor Poto of the Western Pondo, he formed a political party to fight Matanzima\u2019s plans for Transkei\u2019s independence, but again he was defeated and the process was duly completed in 1979. <\/p>\n
Once Matanzima was president of the Transkei he set out ruthlessly to crush Sabata. <\/p>\n
He had inserted a clause in the \u201chomeland\u2019s\u201d constitution making it a crime to \u201cinjure the dignity of the president\u201d (ironically similar to the clause Zuma seems eager to have inserted into the constitution). <\/p>\n
When Sabata made a speech in 1979 attacking Matanzima for accepting Transkei independence on Pretoria\u2019s terms, he was charged and convicted under this clause. <\/p>\n
It was then that Sabata fled the country, taking his wife, Beatrice, and 13-year-old son with him. <\/p>\n
So it was that Buyelekaya grew up and was educated in Lusaka under the protective hand of the ANC. <\/p>\n
This is the man who has now turned on the ANC, which he accuses of having betrayed the legacy of Mandela and become corrupt under the leadership of Zuma. <\/p>\n
In a speech last week to Tembu chiefs, elders and clergy that echoed the same themes as \u201csushi-king\u201d Kenny Kunene set out in his now famous open letter to Zuma, Dalindyebo berated the president for his relationship with the Gupta family, describing the ANC as \u201ccorrupt hooligans\u201d who were eating out of the Guptas\u2019 dustbins. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou have been corrupted by rich people,\u201d he said, adding that he no longer wanted to be under the ANC government because of the credentials of its leader. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf the ANC continues to govern the country for the next 10 years,\u201d he told his audience, then you should know that your freedom will be compromised. They should be out of power within the next six years, if not at the next election. Let\u2019s take them out democratically.\u201d <\/p>\n
This is astonishing stuff coming from the son of a man who was honoured as an \u201celder\u201d of the movement for his role in the struggle. And he is blaming Zuma personally for the corruption that has caused his disillusionment. <\/p>\n
* Allister Sparks is a veteran journalist and political commentator. <\/p>\n
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers. <\/p>\n
The Mercury<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Independent Newspapers Paramount Chief Buyelakaya Dalindyebo of the Tembu File photo: Cindy Waxa As a proud African traditionalist who has just built his own Great Place at Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma should be deeply concerned that the traditional leader of one of South Africa\u2019s biggest tribes has turned critical on him. Most black traditional leaders […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[8275,953,2143],"class_list":{"0":"post-20874","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-south-africa","7":"tag-durban","8":"tag-newspaper","9":"tag-the-mercury","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}