As a warlord, Mangosuthu Buthelezi was naturally quick to take offence. The Zulu prince and former chief minister of the apartheid-era KwaZulu black homeland, who has died at the age of 95 and will be buried today, became so upset at my line of questioning about the bloody handiwork of his Inkatha Freedom party in the run-up to South Africa’s first free election in 1994 that he turned his chair around, sat facing the other way and refused to talk. On another occasion he threw me out of his car in the middle of his KwaZulu fiefdom for a similar transgression.
As a foreign reporter, I got off easy. Many of those closer to home who challenged Buthelezi were subject to a campaign of terror and murder.
