Xhosa Tribe

When Walter Sisulu was running the African National Congress offices almost single-handedly 40 years ago, young black students would often drift by to chat. And he always seemed to have time for them. "You wouldn't go to Nelson Mandela to just talk. He suffered fools very badly," remembers Dr. Nthato Motlana, one of those students and an early member of the ANC. "But you could always go to Sisulu and talk about the little things. He was a real uncle." In those days, Sisulu was the ANC.

The portrait of a bearded African prince in wire-rimmed glasses occupies an honored position in tens of thousands of shacks on the storied, sodden hills of Zululand. It's very humbling, Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi says, that his subjects love him so. And not only his subjects. An American admirer sculpted a bust of the prince recently and brought it here, half a world away, to personally unveil it for Buthelezi. Buthelezi beamed with pride. "See," he told a reporter.

Political badges, bumper stickers and T-shirts were outlawed Wednesday in Cape Town in advance of the opening session of the South African Parliament on Friday.