11 October 2023

I made a small contribution to Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s public life as his private secretary from 2004 to 2010. While there will be a time for each one of us to weigh the decisions he took during the fight against apartheid, I believe Buthelezi was a towering statesman in our democracy. He also, to quote the late Denis Healey, had a deep ‘hinterland’ with interests and experiences beyond politics.

We all stand on the shoulders of others. In my junior role, I stood on the shoulders of three Inkatha Freedom Party grandees. I had worked for the prior four years for Reverend Musa Zondi, the party’s former secretary general and national spokesperson, and reported to the late M.Z. Khumalo, the former general secretary of administration.

Musa is a handsome, suave, and gently spoken Lutheran pastor. With his superb conflict resolution and communications skills, it was widely believed that he would lead the IFP in the fullness of time. M.Z. was a gentleman of the rarest calibre. When his day job ended running the party’s administration, he worked late into the night translating the prince’s speeches. He, like Musa, effortlessly navigated the complex etiquette of the IFP and wider Zulu society. Both were conciliators, negotiators par excellence, and could smooth the roughest edges and egos. The two of them also helped educate an opinionated English boy of questionable talent: me.    

The third grandee was Suzanne Vos, the prince’s strikingly attractive communications expert at the height of the political violence prior to 1994. A polished advocate of women’s and children’s rights, she became one of the party’s most effective parliamentarians and a member of the Pan African Parliament. Her alchemy was to turn party conference deliberations into policy-rich ‘resolutions.’ Suzanne was also very funny in an austere establishment not known for its sense of humour. For two years, I would stay overnight at the prince’s Constantia home in Cape Town, so that I could prepare his breakfast before the aides would drop me off at parliament. Thus, by magic I’d be there when the prince arrived. I ruefully complained to Suzanne one day that the prince had been grumpy that morning when I plated his food. In her motherly way, she suggested that I arrange the ingredients of his breakfast in a smiley face next time. I demurred and asked a friend to prepare the breakfasts instead.

In these three remarkable individuals, the prince enjoyed loyalty, an unstinting work ethic and professionalism. I personally owe them an unpayable debt for all they did for me. It was largely because they had taken the time to ‘invest’ in me, I became the prince’s accidental private secretary soon after he left government in May 2004.  

That same year, not long after President Thabo Mbeki’s government retreated from HIV-Aids denialism and began to roll out antiretroviral drugs, Buthelezi lost two children to the scourge of this disease. He was one of the first major African leaders to publicly reveal that he had lost family members to HIV-Aids. President Nelson Mandela did the same in 2005, and Buthelezi rang him on the day his son died. These two men used their positions as respected statesman and traditional leaders to promote awareness around HIV-Aids. They did this in difficult cultural and societal circumstances where the dreaded disease was under a shroud of stigma and silence. Our respective offices discussed the prince and Madiba addressing a shared platform, but it never happened.

When Buthelezi rang me on August 06, 2004, to tell me that his daughter, Mandisi, had died from Aids, I asked if he was “okay.” I know that sounds odd in print, but no one asked him that enough. “I have just been to see my daughter’s body in the morgue. We need to prepare the speech for her funeral.” I quickly drafted the text with briefing he gave me. I worked in a line about the “glory of the human spirit to rise and rise again.” Nineteen years later, President Cyril Ramaphosa quoted the line in his eulogy at the prince’s funeral, citing a later speech when the line was used again. Buthelezi quickly cleared the draft and rang me back with a few tweaks. When he corrected a grammar error, I laughed shyly. With the tenderness of the father figure that he was, he quipped “who’d have imagined a Zulu leader correcting a young British man!” It was typically kind of him to put me at ease when his heart was broken.  

Four years later, tragedy was to strike again when another daughter, Xolo, died in a car crash. Whenever Xolo walked into a room it was like the sun rising for the first time. She was radiant. She was kind. She was indispensable to her father’s work. The prince would sometimes me call late at night after her death, but this time no voice would be audible. ‘And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace’ wrote Aeschylus.

My most poignant memory of 2004 was when Buthelezi was filmed walking on the edges of his children’s graves. Victoria Macdonald, the social affairs correspondent for British Channel 4 News had asked me if we could arrange this for a piece about the Aids tragedy. I explained, as I understood it, Zulu etiquette around death. At what Indians call “the hour of cow dust”, twilight, I spoke with Buthelezi in his Ulundi office. Picking up a signed photograph of the then Prince of Wales, Charles, and his late former wife, Diana, he recalled the princess greeting him at Highgrove in tennis gear fresh from a game. Remembering her brave HIV/Aids advocacy work, I, aged 31, swallowed my nerves and took ‘the gap.’ I nervously put Victoria’s proposition to him, and he plaintively replied that he would do it — if it helped. And it did.

I will never forget his grace and dignity the following day. Strangely, in our Alice-of-Wonderland reality of the time, it was British and not South African viewers who saw these images. Not for the first time, I reflected on how few of us have any idea of how difficult it had been for our political leaders to lead on this issue. In the context of Mbeki’s denialist views which were elevated to state policy the constant trauma was staggering.

Buthelezi’s relationship with Mandela seemed even more complex than with Mbeki. On April 08, 2002, I interviewed Mandela at Musa’s request. He told me in a wide-ranging interview to camera that, ‘We have used every ammunition to destroy [Buthelezi] and we failed. He is still there. He is a formidable survivor.’ The prince and the IFP immediately seized upon this line as proof that the ANC literally wanted to kill him. In the context of the interview, I believe that Mandela was speaking metaphorically although Buthelezi had undoubtedly faced real danger. It is a pity that no attention was drawn to Madiba’s fulsome praise of Buthelezi’s contribution as a peacemaker and public servant in the Government of National Unity after 1994.

Six years later, on October 28, 2008, I was present at their last meeting. This was the only time I ever saw the prince show any nervousness when meeting a prominent public figure. These encounters ranged from a reverential bow and small talk with the late Queen Elizabeth II to a robust exchange about the Dalai Lama with Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing, and a tragicomical conversation with Cherie Blair, Sir Tony’s wife.

His pace slowed and his shoulders visibly slumped as he approached Madiba’s study. The two elders fondly shared reminisces and spoke about the deep splits in the ANC and the rise of Cope. “Ignore what they say, Shenge. You have done very well,” Madiba told him. Unable to rise from his chair, Madiba raised his hand in a final reciprocal salute as his once opponent took his leave.

I was not, however, an uncritical admirer of Buthelezi, and it led me - as it did others inside and outside of the party - to experience cognitive dissonance. In 2004, two distinguished IFP parliamentarians received cruel correspondence laced with ad hominin attacks from him completely at odds with his courtly bearing and impeccable manners. It left them devasted because they had his - and the party’s - best interests at heart. One of them literally crumpled in pain as he read the spiked missive in the anteroom of the prince’s parliamentary office. “He turns up the heat until your position becomes untenable,” he said tearfully at the doorway. In the ‘floor-crossing’ window period soon after, he left the IFP taking his parliamentary seat with him. It is true that the prince’s inner coterie drafted some of the unkindest correspondence or so-called ‘remarks’ delivered at the party’s meetings, but he did sign them.

Yet the much bigger – and I believe the authentic - side of the enigmatic prince was that, to quote from Macbeth, he overflowed with “the milk of human kindness,” when people made poor life choices or were in strife.

On the evening of Saturday 14 October 2006, we landed at Oliver Tambo International after a conference in Mombasa. My mobile phone immediately rang. It was the Presidency. Mbeki asked if the prince would see him alone the following weekend at Genadendal, the Official Residence of The President in Cape Town. Only two years prior, Mbeki had terminated Buthelezi’s cabinet service with a terse note along the lines of ‘thank you for your service.’ There is usually a frisson in most head of governments residences but not on this spring evening. Mbeki was exquisitely dressed in fine slacks, an open bespoke shirt, and grey cashmere cardigan. The aides and I sat in a side room with the door ajar while they – and we – drank English tea from Royal Doulton cups.

The president briefed the prince that his nemesis, Jacob Zuma, was steadily building support among ANC branches. The prince listened sympathetically, with attentive sighs and exclamations at the President’s displeasure. Given the context of their relationship (and that Buthelezi had declined the offer of Deputy President in 1999), it was magnanimous of the prince to listen to Mbeki. The President was gone within the year as President of the ANC. Zuma’s pillage and looting of South Africa was unleashed soon after.      

In mid 2007, Buthelezi called me with an unusual request closer to home. His nephew, the late King Goodwill Zwelithini and his late wife, the Queen, were on their way to Cape Town to go to a family day at the ‘Stepping Stones’ Addiction Treatment Centre in Kommetjie, where one of the King’s sons was being treated for addiction. I was to meet Zwelithini at the airport and support him through the day. As the door at the Centre closed, I caught a glimpse of the father and mother sat ramrod straight, impeccably tailored, and dignified in a circle with other parents and loved ones. The uncle and nephew were similar like that.

I also write from personal experience. In late 2006, my mental health began to unravel: slowly at first, and then, like less cassette tape left on a reel, I spun out of control faster and faster. In early 2009, I overdosed and was admitted to hospital. During my long recovery, some implored the prince to fire me. I now believe they did so to protect his image. Nor was there the understanding of mental health that there is today. Buthelezi, though, never put the ‘boot in’ while I remained in his employ for the remainder of the year. Not once. He never spoke of it. We both knew, of course, the time had come for me to go, and he was one of my three recommenders to go to Harvard University the following year.

Shortly before I resigned in January 2010 to take up a new role in the Western Cape government, I accompanied the prince on a penultimate foreign visit. I had asked the Papal Nuncio through a mutual priest friend, Father John, if the prince could have an audience with the Pope. Unfortunately, the prince’s aides Schengen visa had not been applied for timeously. So, the two of us left alone for Rome, and the aides caught up with us a few days later with Buthelezi’s close friend, adviser-at-large, and IFP MP, the late Mario Ambrosini in tow (the papal encounter overlapped with a parliamentary conference on Tibet).

What fun! He was fun! The prince was fun when we travelled. I have a picture of him grinning boyishly while leaning out of a yellow tuk-tuk taxi in New Delhi. There is another of him swinging his leg onto the dinner table, aged 79, to sing raucously at a dinner of the Royal Welsh Regiment in Britain. He had a wonderful baritone praised by no one less discerning than the late Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s famously politically incorrect husband, Sir Denis.

We made twelve major international trips together. With M.Z.’s knowledge, I would sometimes ask the prince’s corporate friends to make up the financial shortfall so as not to drawdown party funds. They paid for air tickets, drivers, hotels, and, sometimes, other projects. No one ever said ‘no,’ and one would wish to especially acknowledge the generosity of the Oppenheimer family.  

We took taxis everywhere in Rome. Mario curated elegant lunches in the late autumnal sunshine, when the Eternal City looks like it has been inverted and dipped in gold dust. On the appointed day with the Holy Father, the prince bumped into a purple-clad cardinal from South Africa on a winding staircase. The prelate asked the trigger question of when he was going to retire now that he was 80. “After you,” the prince tartly retorted.

When I heard in the early hours of September 9 from a friend in Ulundi that the prince had passed away, I realised two things. The first was that after 14 years of leaving his staff gracelessly, embittered, and exhausted – and having not spent time with him since late 2018 in Johannesburg - I cared for him far more than I knew. The other was that Mangosuthu (who no one called him) was not a great man despite his many contradictions. He was a great man because of them. Now in the Cheshire countryside above the Dee, I’ll remember him with a smile when I hear the American jazz trumpeter and vocalist, Chet Baker, on Spotify or the choral music he loved to play.

And so I give my final salute, as this Zulu sings from the hill, the prince of kings may have surrendered, but his voice fights on ever still

Jon Cayzer was Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s private secretary from 2004 to 2010