COULD it be true that South Africa's high priest of socialism once belonged to a narrow nationalist political party that helped legitimise apartheid by actively participating in the Bantustan system?

COULD it be true that South Africa's high priest of socialism once belonged to a narrow nationalist political party that helped legitimise apartheid by actively participating in the Bantustan system?

Axed ANC Youth League president Julius Malema believes so; and so does, if unnamed sources at last week's special ANC National Executive committee meeting are to be believed, former guerrilla and convicted fraudster Tony Yengeni.

Yengeni is reported to have come very close to having a fist fight at the NEC meeting with SA Communist Party leader and Higher Education minister Blade Nzimande, after he allegedly accused the latter of being a former Inkatha Freedom Party member who was a johnny-come-lately to the ANC.

Malema, who undoubtedly counts Nzimande among those to be blamed for his expulsion from the ANC, publicly repeated the claim at a youth rally in Thohoyandou, Limpopo, last Friday.

He went as far as to claim that Nzimande - who is regarded in some ANC circles to be to President Jacob Zuma what Essop Pahad used to be to president Thabo Mbeki - of having joined the ANC only in 1992.

What Malema and Yengeni have done with their utterances is to put back in the public domain what has been a source of gossip among Nzimande's detractors for a number of years.

Within the ANC-led alliance, to be accused of being a former member of the IFP is akin to being called a former spy; an apartheid agent and a "sell-out" to the cause of liberation.

Of course the IFP would not agree. Its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, remains adamant that his party, too, contributed to the demise of apartheid.

This column, however, is not about the merits and demerits of Buthelezi's collaborationist approach to the racist system.

I have followed the claims about Nzimande with keen interest over the years, to see if there was any truth in them and whether, if true, this would affect the political standing of one of the most powerful politicians of the Zuma era.

No one, among the politicians who have made the claim to me over the years, seems to have concrete evidence to back this.

Even the man who seems to have started it all, KwaZulu-Natal Congress of the People member Siyanda Mhlongo, admits that his claims are based largely on hearsay.

During a telephone conversation yesterday, Mhlongo told me his suspicions were based partly on an article that, he said, appeared in an IFP-controlled newspaper, Ilanga, in which someone said he recalled Nzimande being a member.

Mhlongo, a blood relative of late ANC-SACP firebrand Harry Gwala, also based his suspicion on the fact that "none" of those who were involved in the underground struggle against apartheid in Nzimande's home town of Pietermaritzburg, seem to remember him participating.

But is Nzimande's non-involvement in the ANC underground enough to then deduce that he was with Inkatha?

Nzimande's account of his history is different.

He told me in an interview once that he became politically conscious following Gwala's arrest, in the mid-1970s, near his home in Dambuza, a Pietermaritzburg township where both Gwala and Nzimande were born.

He said he then became involved in student politics at the University of Zululand, although he was not a prominent leader.

While that, on its own, cannot be enough proof that Nzimande didn't fight on the side of the apartheid regime, one thing is clear: Malema's claim that Nzimande joined the liberation struggle in 1992 is clearly false.

By the mid-1980s, Nzimande was a regular contributor to the left-wing - and fiercely anti-apartheid - journal, the SA Labour Bulletin. He even served on the journal's editorial board.

In 1986, he was part of a delegation of academics who went to Zimbabwe to meet the then-exiled ANC at a Swedish-funded Post-Apartheid SA policy summit.

According to Mbeki's biographer, Mark Gevisser, Nzimande so impressed the then future president during the summit that he "cherry-picked him as one of his personal underground informants, giving him a code name and remaining in occasional contact with him".

Surely Mbeki would not have trusted Nzimande that much if he was a member of a party with such close ties with the apartheid government?

Further evidence of Nzimande's anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s include his involvement with the National Education Crisis Committee - which was an umbrella body for organisations fighting Bantu education - as well as other ANC-aligned structures.

But we should shed no tear for Nzimande. He is not an innocent victim in all of this.

The culture of destroying political opponents with smear campaigns and innuendo is not a new phenomenon in the Congress Movement. It dates as far back as the ANC's exile days.

But the smear campaigns became even more prominent in the run-up to the ANC's 2007 conference in Polokwane.

SACP members, in particular, were never discouraged by Nzimande, and other party leaders, from singing a song that suggested that Mbeki somehow had something to do with the assassination of the popular ANC-SACP leader Chris Hani.

The SACP's youth wing even went so far as to call for an inquest into Hani's death, suggesting that there was more to it than was revealed in the past. Since Mbeki's axing from power, there have been no such calls made.

In his book Eight Days In September former director-general in the presidency, Frank Chikane, talks about a vicious smear campaign waged by certain prominent alliance leaders to discredit ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe during his short tenure as the country's president.

As the date for the Mangaung conference gets closer, such campaigns would become even more ugly as truth is sacrificed in favour of propaganda.