If there had been no whites (and later no Indians) in southern Africa, I suspect that there would have been no more feared grouping among black Africans than the amaZulu, an imperialistic people par excellence in the 19th century with whom there was no British constitutionalism and no Roman legal order to mitigate the conquerors' offence. f

The amaXhosa, the Basotho, the Batswana all felt the hard sharp point of the Zulu ixwa, as did the peoples of Mozambique and far to the north. Mugabe's Gukurahundi massacres of the amaNdebele in the 1980s were in good part an expression of Shona revenge for this experience of invasion and domination by Zulu-speakers a century earlier. If the current generation of South Africans needs a reminder of fears still present just below the level of consciousness, the depradations of the Inkatha hostel-dwellers in the Eighties and early 1990s should provide it.

The ANC was formed to set a limit both to Zulu expansionism and to the resulting suspicions, hostility and resentment of other tribal peoples, in the politics of black people in a unified South African state. It provided a ring in which differences could be mediated peacefully and constitutionally, without chauvinist behaviour by this or that grouping disrupting a common front against white rule.

If the Constitution of 1910 provided the structural foundation for the current unified South African state, the formation of the Native National Congress (later to become the ANC) in 1912 provided a constitutional forum for all subsequent national, non-tribalist politics by black Africans.

The formation of the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921, which became open to black members by 1926, then created the first and for three decades effectively the only structurally non-racial party in the country.

Following the banning of the CPSA in 1950 and of the ANC ten years later, the Communist Party in exile was able to transform the ANC from within (under the principle of "dual membership" of these two banned organisations), resulting in admission of non-black Africans to general membership of the ANC (but not its National Executive Committee) in 1969 and to formal executive positions in the ANC in 1985.

These set the conditions for the ANC to become formally, and to a high degree actually, the non-racial party of government of South Africa in 1994, under President Mandela. Whites (such as the SACP leader Joe Slovo) and "Indians" (such as the SACP leader Mac Maharaj) played a major part in the transitional negotiations and in Mandela's first government under a non-racial Constitution.

In a general way, this was the evolution of the ANC from its formation in 1912 through its leadership after World War II by Dr AB Xuma, Dr JS Moroka and Chief Albert Luthuli and on through Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and even Thabo Mbeki.

The last three leaders of the ANC, from the early days of exile in the 1960s until the unseating of Mbeki as the party's president last December at its conference at Polokwane, were isiXhosa-speakers. Effectively this was a period of more than 40 years.

It embraced the whole of the exile period and the first 13 years of ANC government. There is no doubt that the overturn of the whole slate of Mbeki supporters at Polokwane represented, among other things, a rejection of a perceived over-long period of Xhosa leadership (some might have said, domination) in the ANC.

There was only one occasion in which a perceived accusation of Xhosa domination received significant political expression in the ANC in exile. This was at the Kabwe conference of the ANC in 1985, when a senior stalwart of the ANC, the SACP and their allied trade union confederation, John Pule Motshabi - a Sotho-speaker - circulated a paper in which he accused the leadership of tribalism.

Motshabi was roundly crushed at the conference (which was very tightly controlled by the SACP and ANC exile apparatus), removed from his positions in the leadership of both parties, and died shortly afterwards. His paper was never published, though it was discussed critically - with no reference to Motshabi's name - in an article by the SACP intellectual, Professor Jack Simons, in the ANC exile magazine, Sechaba (June 1985).

Perceptions of Xhosa dominance were widespread in the ANC in exile, but - apart from the Motshabi episode - never received overt expression. Even in the ANC's detention camps, such as Quatro in northern Angola, where dissident members were sent for punishment, non-Xhosa speakers among the prisoners fell silent when discussing this issue, if a fellow prisoner who was a Xhosa-speaker suddenly arrived on the scene.

That said, however, the ANC's non-tribalist structure and ethos managed successfully to preserve sufficient amity and goodwill for complaints of this nature to be registered more as grumbles than as political dissent.

Clearly, however, something altered in the final period of the Mbeki presidency of the ANC, prior to the election of delegates for the conference at Polokwane. The catalyst for this was fall-out from the arms deal, in which Mbeki had been the principal agent in acquisition of corrupt funding for the ANC and for its leading members, and for which he allotted the role of scapegoat - when the law began to take its course - to Jacob Zuma, then Deputy President of the country, a Zulu-speaker.

The fall-out from this and other fractures in the country and the party resulted in the ANC at Polokwane being transferred wholesale from decades of "tried and tested" Xhosa predominance (to use the phrase routinely attached to Tambo in exile) to an unstable and untested new era of Zulu predominance. Simultaneously, the formerly very tight grip on the party and government of  a small, highly organised ANC/SACP exile apparatus from the period of Tambo's presidency in exile was dislodged, holus bolus.

This apparatus had combined the experience of Stalinist-type rule over the ANC in exile as if it were a one-party state with a pragmatic and Realpolitik accomodation to the realities of South Africa's and the world's capitalist economic order. Its opponents in the ANC who won predominance at Polokwane were by the very nature of this internal conflict in the party "untried and untested". 

After an epoch of Xhosa predominance in the ANC, now swept aside, this leaves South Africa at the mercy of the elements. The internal architecture of the party which led the ANC to the dismantling of apartheid and the establishment of a structure of black government has been almost entirely jettisoned and thrown overboard.

There was a perception in exile that if the ANC were principally a vehicle for Xhosa advancement first of all, the SACP - particularly when Moses Mabhida, a Zulu-speaker, was general secretary - was a more sheltered vehicle for Zulu advancement. From exile, a Zulu-speaking network involving Jacob Zuma (head of Military Intelligence in Umkhonto weSizwe, member of the Central Committee of the SACP and National Executive member of the ANC) stretched into KwaZulu-Natal embracing among others the subsequent SANDF General Siphiwe Nyanda (known in Umkhonto by his travelling name, Gebhuza), today one of Zuma's principal supporters in the post-Polokwane NEC and National Working Committee.

Simultaneously during the 1980s, within KwaZulu-Natal, a formidable apparatus of military resistance to the traditionalist forces of the Inkatha Freedom Party was developed under the direction of the SACP and ANC prison veteran, Harry Gwala. Nowhere in South Africa during the Eighties and into 1994 did warfare between blacks take such a systemic, ingrained form as among the Zulu-speakers of KwaZulu-Natal.

Blade Nzimande, the current secretary general of the SACP, was one of the Zulu combatants in this period of warfare under the authentically Stalinist Gwala, who at one period even threatened to have Nzimande murdered for a perceived minor misdemeanour.

So far there is no evidence that the end of four decades of Xhosa predominance in the ANC has threatened the bond between the tribal groupings formed in 1912. What has come to an end, however, is the pragmatic and experienced acceptance by the ANC of South Africa's capitalist and constitutional order agreed between 1990 and 1994.

It is true that Jacob Zuma played a crucial role in reconciling the principal military commander of the anti-ANC forces in Natal, Daluxolo Luthuli - a Zulu-speaker, commander of the "Caprivi" hit-squads, former veteran of Umkhonto we Sizwe in its 1967 Wankie campaign in Rhodesia, and subsequent colonel in the SANDF - to his own commander-in-chief, Nelson Mandela, in the immediate lead-up to the general election of 1994.

He played this role, however, as a team player within a tight and integrated party organisation that has now fallen apart. In the dangers of exile, Mbeki and Zuma were even prisoners together for several weeks in 1976 in the maximum security prison in Mbabane in Swaziland. This is now changed, changed utterly, in a party riven by faction, a situation now likely to be accentuated by a constitutional provision of the ANC's own making.

The Stalinistic exile apparatus in the ANC and the SACP, headed by Mbeki and others, bears principal responsibility for the anti-democratic electoral law agreed in secret at the last minute in the constitutional negotiations in 1994. 

This crucial but undemocratic keystone in the arch of the Constitution made election to Parliament dependent on an unmediated system of proportional representation which removed any shred of accountability of MPs to local communities, by eliminating representation of constituencies.

Instead, election of MPs was made subject to a party list drawn up by the party bosses, and MPs made removable and replacable in Parliament at will. The ANC and the SACP intended this fatal flaw in the Constitution, in a society with a single dominant majoritarian party, to permit their own party control over Parliament, as near as possible to that in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states.

What the arch-manipulator Mbeki and his cronies never supposed was that this fatal flaw in the Constitution would make their own removal from Parliament, and their present merely residual authority in government, so absolute.

The President's mother, Mrs Epainette Mbeki - widow of Mandela's Robben Island comrade, Govan Mbeki - was right, though too late, in calling after the verdict at Polokwane for a new electoral law with accountability of MPs to real and not merely notional constituencies. Despite the first article of the ANC's Freedom Charter - "The People Shall Govern!" - in South Africa the people do not govern: a single party apparatus does.

Whoever dominates the party apparatus, dominates the state. This despotism of party over Parliament now threatens to become also a despotism over Constitution and the judiciary. Just as Hitler purely constitutionally became master of Germany, so the fatal flaw in the Constitution written by the ANC in 1994 (in collusion with the National Party) threatens an unmediated domination of government by whoever holds sway in the ANC.

With the ANC now in thrall to populist and demagogic rhetoric in the trade unions, with no check to the anti-constitutional drive in the NEC, and with the new party leadership under Zuma dependent on the region with the most extreme recent history of internecine violence, South Africa is threatened with destruction of its economic and intellectual infrastructure. 

Power over party and increasingly over state is in the hands of an anarchic, directionless, unstable and untested leadership, more dependent than ever on the power-play of the Communist Party. It will not be long before the ANC's unease at the party's previous Xhosa hegemony becomes transferred to its new predominantly Zulu leadership (or misleadership).

South Africa's undoing is the undoing also of the principles on which the ANC was founded. Its crisis is a crisis for the ANC. Yeats's words are true now for the ANC as when he wrote them, while Ireland slid towards violence:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

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