The Polish were racist towards Ramaphosa's delegation, fulstop.

 Let me add my two cents worth on this saga.

I find it shocking that the media including South African media are insinuating that Poland did nothing wrong, but rather incompetence by the South African government was the cause of Ramaphosa's security delegation being held up at Chopin airport.

This was the president of a country, therefore it is very likely that all people travelling on the plane would have had diplomatic passports. The plane itself is likely to have had diplomatic status meaning that everything on the plane would have been diplomatic bag.

Diplomatic bag (it is not a literal bag) refers to goods having diplomatic status. Diplomatic bag is not subject to inspection by any other country and goods inside the diplomatic bag are not inventoried for inspection.

Typically diplomatic bag is used to convey correspondence between embassies and their countries. The status is also given to the goods accompanying or belonging to a diplomatic official.

I should also make it clear that transportation of weapons by diplomatic bag is quite normal. The Americans always do it for the Marines who guard their embassies.

The only incident that I know of when diplomatic bag was violated happened when Zimbabwe opened British diplomatic bag in 2000. An entire six tonnes of it.  Read paragraph three of the BBC news report on the incident here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/672786.stm.

Americans have got marines guarding their embassies the world over. The weapons of those marines are conveyed in diplomatic bag meaning they are never inventoried for inspection by the host country.

Besides inventorying weapons meant to protect a national leader could give away the security plan of the leader and should never be done.

So the claim of "undeclared military weapons" is absolute hogwash. If those weapons are part of diplomatic bag so what? They are not meant to be declared.

Secondly, diplomatic passports are so-called because they give special rights to their holders. One of those rights is you do not have to apply for a visa, wherever you are going.

You go to any country and if that country does not like your presence they issue a diplomatic note giving you 24, 48 or 72 hours to leave. If there were people travelling on national passports the practice is to put them back on the plane they came with, but that does not affect holders of diplomatic passports.

I am not sure what Poland means when it says there were undeclared people on the flight. Maybe they mean that the list of people on board did not correspond to the flight plan. But flight plans are a safety mechanism and have got nothing to do with diplomacy.

If Poland had prevented the delegation from leaving airport premises that would be understandable. But preventing them from even coming down the steps of the aircraft is another level of racism. Clearly, the insinuation is that the Africans were going to contaminate Polish soil and buildings with something sinister. Maybe some horror African disease.

Lastly, on the so-called photocopies, diplomatic correspondence is by means of letters between the ministries of foreign affairs. Meaning that the DIRCO in South Africa would have written letters to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland. Travellers would have been carrying copies of those letters because the originals would have been sent to the Polish ministry.

Poland may not have had the time to respond, but at every international port of entry, there are protocol officers to deal with such diplomatic matters. That means Polish protocol officers at Chopin airport would have taken the letters and verified them with their Ministry of foreign affairs if needed.

Protocol officers are there precisely to prevent incidents like this, where diplomatic travellers are inconvenienced due to misunderstandings. Nobody is explaining why the protocol mechanism did not work at Chopin airport.

Poland did not issue any diplomatic notes during this saga which means they did not find diplomatic fault with the delegation or its luggage.

Instead, reasons that apply to non-diplomatic travellers are being given by Polish officials.

By the way, several Western leaders have travelled to Ukraine via Poland and their delegations are usually more intrusive than Ramaphosa's delegation yet we have not had similar issues. The Americans and the British will not allow anyone to inspect the weaponry and security apparatus, yet both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have travelled to Ukraine without this kind of hullabaloo. Not to mention American secretaries of state who typically have a much bigger security footprint than Ramaphosa had.

There is nothing to blame South Africa for as far as I can see. When travelling with such a large delegation it is impossible to get every nitty-grit detail in perfect order. Which is why protocol mechanisms exist at ports of entry.

The Polish were just being racist. It is sad that the white-owned media in South Africa seem to be siding with their racist brethren by shifting the blame to South Africa. By doing that they can then rant about incompetent blacks in their quest for apartheid apologism.

Kalanga and Karanga: Is there a difference?

Kalanga and Karanga are not tribes. If we are to be puritanical both names refer to a religion that was called the Mwari Cult by Europeans, before they later decided to steal the name Mwari and apply it to their god Jehovah (or Yahweh to use the original Hebrew transcription).

Makaranga or Makalanga (just like the names Christian and Muslim) encompass many groups of different ethnic origins that adopted the culture and way of life.

1. Who instigated the first Chimurenga? According to the history you were taught in school it was a Matabele High Priest or the Mlimo of Matopos who sent an emissary to Mashonaland. The British are at a loss as to why the Matebele would send an emissary to the Shona and most books either skirt around the subject or openly admit that they can't explain. The books also do not talk about what happened to the 'Mlimo'.

The Mlimo was assassinated by Frederick Burnham and Bonar Armstrong when he was leading a ceremony at Matopos. That is what brought a quick end to the war in Matabeleland.

The more important question is who was he? According to writings from the time, he was "High Priest of the Mwari, chief rainmaker (Wosana) of the tribe Makalanka." What this means is that he was not a Ndebele as we are taught in our schools but a 'Makalanka'.

If you listen to Kalanga folklore it gives very high prominence to Tjibelo and Tjibundula as important ancestral families of the Kalanga. Now ask yourself where did the emissary send by the Mwari priest go. He went to Mashayamombe and the surrounding people. Where was the Mashayamombe located and what is the area called today? Chivero. Where is Chivero if I may ask you?

Now go back to 1896 and try to find an explanation for why the Mlimo, who was recorded as a Makalanka at the time, would send an emissary to Chivero area. Does the relationship need to be more obvious? Or by the way, to explain Tjibundula let let me just draw your attention to Paul Matavire's song "KwaChiwundura vakandisungaaa!"

You may be asking yourself how come the people of Matopos are called Kalanga while those of Chivero are Karanga. (For now I don't have the time and space to tackle the misrepresentation that Karanga are only from Masvingo. Karanga are found as far afield as Mozambique's Uteve, Barwe and Tavara people. "Rove ngoma muTavara wee!". And possibly Zambia's Lozi people)

2. To answer your curiosity let me introduce you to the topic of transcription, how to represent spoken sounds in written form. When European missionaries came, they grappled with the problem of how to translate the bible into local languages. Local languages did not have a written form.

At first, different missionaries came up with different approaches. A mission station would try and come up with a written form for the language spoken around its location. However given dialectical differences even among mutually intelligible peoples, this resulted in many different transcription systems. An example of a local writing system now defunct is the original Kalanga which used Tj for the Ch sound in Shona or Tsh in Ndebele. This writing system survived in place names which is why many maps had the name Tjolotjo for Tsholotsho.

Even when writing accounts in English or other European language, explorers and missionaries often struggled with how to render given names of places and people. Thus you may find Nengomasha (who was an army general for Munhumutapa Gatsi Rusere) written as Ningomaxa or Ninkomaxa by different authors.

This happened with tribal names as well. Makalanka, Makalanga, Makaranga, Makalaka.

The many transcription systems made printing the bible, especially in those times when letters for lithography presses had to be carefully handcrafted, a very expensive exercise.

Eventually, missionaries started exploring ways to make printing the bible cheaper. To this end, in 1929 they hired a professor of Bantu Languages from the University of the Witwatersrand, Clement Martyn Doke. He spend a year interviewing natives in Southern Rhodesia before he came up with a recommendation.

The missionaries held a conference at Dadaya where Doke presented his recommendations among them a recommendation for Unified Shona. There was some debate on what name to call the language before Shona was agreed upon. From that point on the name Shona was used by missionaries in Southern Rhodesia.

On the other hand, the South African government did not quite agree with Doke's findings, and they used the name ChiKaranga, which they stopped using around 1955.

Going back to 1930 the missionaries agreed that to make printing the bible as cheap as possible, the country would be divided into only two regions along administrative lines used by the Southern Rhodesian government.

Everyone inside Matebeleland province would be taught to read and write Ndebele using the Nguni alphabet, imported from South Africa. Thus the Venda, Tonga, Kalanga, Nambya, etc were all now forced to learn Ndebele even though they didn't natively speak it.

Everyone else (Victoria, Manicaland, Midlands, and Mashonaland provinces) would be taught to read and write in the new Unified Shona that Clement Doke had recommended. The Shangani were thus forced to learn Shona.

As for Unified Shona itself, it was mainly based on Zezuru, Kaanga, and some Manyika. Why? The main missions driving the process, St Ignatius Chishawasha, Domboshawa, and Waddilove were in Zezuru speaking areas, Mogenster and Dadaya were in Karanga speaking areas, St Augstines Tsambe and Mt Selinda were in Manyika and Ndau areas.

I use the name Karanga with reservation. It was not the name used by missionaries for the dialect. Rather they called several related dialects from Victoria Province the Victoria Circle dialects. It is from this where the name ChiVhitori comes from.

The name Karanga itself was considered for the unified dialect but, after some debate, was discarded in favour of Shona. Some entities continued to use it though, which is why you find some of the earliest Shona textbooks may have titles like Chikaranga Chamandiriri.

Now for the last part. As you know the Nguni alphabet does not have R, while the newly proposed Shona alphabet did not have L (despite the R in Chikorekore sounding close to L).

Thus speakers of the same language were taught two different ways of writing the same or similar words. Those in Matabeleland were taught to write Kalanga while those in the rest of the country were taught to write Karanga. To be more accurate, they were simply taught they were Shona with the name Karanga returning to popular use after independence. Even it was used as a replacement for ChiVhitori which is totally incorrect. It should have been used as a replacement for the name Shona itself.

Now add to this mix some Europeans who could not properly pronounce local names, or who did not know how to render local names they found already written. Being British, these Europeans used British pronunciation for letter combinations. Thus the NG in Kalanga became soft like the English letter combination NG. (instead of being pronounced with a hard sound like in "blank" it was pronounced with a soft sound like in "belonging"). Victims of British mispronunciation even include country names Botswana and Uganda. Not to mention the district Buhera (which is why Uhera has become Bhowera?).

That in a nutshell Cde explains the main source of the difference between the names Kalanga and Karanga.

Most of those taught in Shona, except the Shangani, were fortunate that their native dialects were very close to the Unified Shona thus they could still speak them while writing in the new alphabet. Most of the differences are tonal.

For those in Matabeleland, it was a different story. They were essentially forced to abandon their native languages for the vastly different Ndebele.

Given that the people running the system were racist supremacists, they attached the social narrative that everyone had to speak Ndebele because it was the 'superior' language. They did not elevate to the same level as theirs though. When this narrative filtered down to the villages, it was often presented along the lines that if you were Nguni you were superior to those around you.

This is one of the reasons you find that people from Matabeleland are almost insanely fixated with being Nguni.

For the rest of us, it means nothing, if you are a muBarwe you are a muBarwe, and if the next man is a muHera so what? But in Matabeleland, it's a different story. Everyone wants to be Nguni. This was done to entice people away from their native languages under the perception that if you speak Ndebele you get closer to being Nguni.

Remember the main narrative which affects everyone including the Shona to this day, was that if you spoke English and adopted English mannerisms and culture you became superior to the rest of the natives. That is why kutaura Chirungu, especially with near-perfect accent, is considered a social construct of sophistication by the mentally colonized.

But I digress. Kalanga and Karanga are exactly the same thing (keeping in mind that there are many different marudzi in both groups). The divergence was caused firstly by different  alphabets and then by different colonial socialization of communities

Tanzania did South Africa a very huge favour

 According to Bheki Cele Tanzania "requested" that "prisoners" be transported on a privately chartered plane.

To quote "Minister of Police Bheki Cele told Parliament the request to transport prisoners on a privately charted aircraft came at the behest of the Tanzanian government."

What he could have more accurately told MPs is "I am clueless about international law and diplomatic protocols."

South African sovereignty ends at the South African border line. South African state institutions such as the police, therefore, have no authority whatsoever beyond the borderline. That applies to each and every country in the world.

In short, SAPS cannot effect an arrest on Tanzanian soil. SAPS cannot take custody of any person whether South African or not on foreign soil, e.g. Tanzanian soil. The only places where South African sovereignty is recognized outside of the borders are the premises of accredited embassies, high commissions, and consulates.

However even if Bester and that oh-so-beautiful woman were placed in an embassy and SAPS took custody of them there, they would still need to cross sovereign Tanzanian ground to get out of the country, so that is not practical at all.

Secondly, Bester is not was never a convicted prisoner in Tanzania. So Cele should be made to understand that while in Tanzania Bester was not an escapee. He was just another illegal immigrant.

That gave Tanzanian authorities the right to arrest him and his chick BASED ON TANZANIAN LAW. Tanzanian state institutions were the only ones with the authority to take custody of him on Tanzanian soil.

In short Tanzanian police could effect an arrest. Tanzania had the right to try the duo for any crimes committed in Tanzania before handing them over to South Africa.

However, like most countries, Tanzania chooses to deal with illegal immigrants administratively by just deporting them.

Here is the key thing that Cele needs to understand, deportation from Tanzania is affected by the Tanzanian state using its state personnel, in this case, the Tanzanian Immigration Department. No country in the world uses the personnel of a foreign state for functions such as deportation.

Deportees from Europe come accompanied by immigration officials from the deporting country. Therefore insinuations that Tanzanian officials wanted a free ride to South Africa are nothing but ignorant insults.

That is Tanzanian Immigration Department officials needed to take custody of deportees and hand them over only when they arrive at the receiving country's port of entry.

That procedure is an international standard. It is not Tanzania asking for a free plane ride from South Africa.

In fact, Tanzania did South Africa a very very big favour. The norm is that deportees are sent back to the country they ARRIVED FROM.

Bester and Nandipha were travelling by road. So chances are they entered Tanzania via Malawi at Mbeya or via Zambia at Tunduma. Although they were being assisted by a Mozambican, there is no chance they would have travelled through the violent Cabo Delgado or Nassa provinces which are the Mozambican provinces that border Tanzania.

So if Tanzania had wanted to be technically correct, they would have insisted on handing Nandipha and Bester to Malawi, or Zambia. Then they would then have had to be handed to Mozambique or Zimbabwe before making it back to South Africa.

So Tanzania did South Africa a huge favour by politely asking, instead of invading Tanzania with their police, if they could send a private jet to expedite the deportation. Otherwise, they could have had to buy commercial tickets out of Dar es Salam.

I do not think airlines would have agreed as Bester had no valid documentation. Not to mention the complication of arranging transit visas as there are almost no direct flights between SA and Tanzania. A transit visa for Bester would have been impossible.

Yes, members of a state armed wing entering another country IS AN INVASION. That is why, on borders like between China and India, India and Pakistani, Israel and Lebanon, or Israel and Syria we regularly read of violent clashes, that are caused by police or soldiers from one side straying onto the other, leading to exchanges of live fire.

So Tanzania was simply asking South Africa to follow international law and diplomatic protocols.

I know South Africans like to think they are more special than their African brothers. However when contrasted with how Dubai handled the matter of deporting the Guptas, how Tanzania handled the Thabo Bester should have taught South Africa a very important lesson that a brother is a brother. If Bester had made it out of Sub-Saharan Africa South Africa would never have got him back as easily as they did.