Ondonga King Fillemon Shuumbwa Nangolo says he refused to sign documents to crown the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi as the ‘King of Kings’ of Africa.
In 2008 at the Africa Union (AU) summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Gaddafi got 200 African traditional leaders to declare him the continent’s ultimate king.
“We want an African military to defend Africa, we want a single African currency, we want one African passport to travel within Africa,” Gaddafi said at the time.
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BBC News, however, reported that some of the royals were against the autocrat’s plans.
Nangolo was one of the leaders who attended that summit on behalf of former Ondonga King Immanuel Eliphas Kauluma.
The incident re-emerged on Tuesday when political analyst Joseph Diescho at the 26th annual meeting of the Council of Traditional Leaders in Namibia accused some African kings and chiefs of signing documents to grant Gaddafi the title ‘King of Kings’ of Africa.
The meeting took place at Ondangwa.
The Ondonga traditional leader, however, clarified what transpired.
Nangolo, who was in the Namibian Defence Force (NDF) at the time, says he and eSwatini’s King Mswati III refused to sign the documents at the gathering.
“We refused to sign the documents and they chased us out of the venue,” he says.
Nangolo says they were placed under hotel arrest for about three weeks after the incident, with their passports being confiscated.
“We were only allowed to leave our hotel rooms to go get food and come back. After three weeks, Mswati III and I went to the hotel reception to request a one on one with Gaddafi because we were tired of the mistreatment,” he says.
“We demanded to see Gaddafi or else they should hand us our passports. We were then flown to some hotel in a different city to meet up with Gaddafi, and there we found him seated while surrounded by his heavily armed bodyguards,” he says.
Nangolo says Gaddafi, who referred to himself as ‘Brother Leader’, asked them why they refused to grant him the title.
“King Mswati III told him (Gaddafi) that he is not God and he will never be the king of all kings in Africa as only God is the king of all kings. Gaddafi got angry and he chased us away” the Ondonga king recounts.
According to him, they were escorted by taxi to the airport the next day to return to their countries.
“The journey was not so smooth, but we navigated through and we came back home safe,” he says.
Diescho at the Tuesday event told the traditional leaders that only then King Goodwill Zwelithini of the Zulu nation in South Africa refused to sign the documents.
“He did not want to sell his people out and he was not greedy like other African tribal leaders. The problem with our African tribal leaders is poverty.
“Our kings and chiefs are poverty stricken and they depend on the government for survival. It was not like this in the past because the kings were sustained by the resources of the communities,” Diescho said.
He said kings and chiefs cannot be traditional leaders if they are on the payroll of the government.
“You are a government employee and you cannot be a leader. You cannot bite the hand that feeds. We all have this dilemma here and we are trapped in the post-colonial era,” he said.
Diescho thanked Nangolo for correcting his statement, saying African leaders should be able to write their own stories while they are still alive to avoid misinterpreting facts.
“Thank you, Tatekulu Omukwanilwa [king] for the correction. We don’t often tell stories of our leaders, because what is recorded is recorded by other people to make our leaders look bad.
“What is written in Libya is other than what our leaders and kings have written here themselves. Thank you for telling your story while still alive, thank you so much,” he said.
Gaddafi ruled Libya with an iron fist from 1969 until his assassination by rebel forces and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in 2011.
The Guardian reported that Gaddafi’s ambitions, however, often failed to match political realities on the ground: All seven regional integration schemes he attempted in Africa failed.
While using his oil wealth to buy influence within the African Union, many governments took his money, but did not necessarily support him.
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