Under unusually heavy security, President Nelson Mandela journeyed to the royal house of the Zulu on Friday to discuss ways to end political violence in KwaZulu/Natal, the Zulu stronghold.
The meeting did not go smoothly.There were flashes of anger from Mandela, who told hundreds of Zulu chiefs, "I will read you the riot act if you think you can kill innocent people in this country," and at one point the chiefs shouted at him in Zulu: "Go away! Go away!"
Sore points were raised anew, including the unresolved question of who was to blame for the "Shell House Massacre" of Zulu marchers in 1994 by nervous guards outside African National Congress headquarters. More than 30 people died in the melee, in downtown Johannesburg.
A discordant note was sounded even before the meeting when Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthe-lezi, head of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, criticized the Mandela government's plan to ban traditional weapons at all political gatherings.
From at least the time of Shaka, the 19th-century leader who unified the Zulus, many of the group's political meetings have amounted to war councils, and the chiefs have come in battle dress.
The government argues that the tradition leads to killings. But Buthelezi said that any ban on "cultural accoutrements" would be unacceptable and that the ANC's pursuit of a ban "did not augur well."
Nonetheless, the meeting ended in an air of reconciliation, with the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelethini, offering gifts and Mandela reminiscing about visits from Buthelezi during Mandela's 27 years in prison under apartheid.
The talks, held at the royal palace in Nongoma, about 135 miles north of Durban, were intended to lay the groundwork for a gathering of all the Zulu chiefs, a meeting that has been much discussed as the next step toward ending the political violence in KwaZulu/Natal, which has claimed 15,000 lives in the last decade.
But after Friday's meeting, it was not clear when such a gathering would be held, if at all.