After becoming involved in anti-apartheid politics through the Christian Institute, Felgate rose to prominence through his affiliation with the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
In subsequent months, he implicated Buthelezi in state-sponsored political violence, including in testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
[3] However, his studies were disrupted by his marriage; with his wife, he went to live in Ndola, in what was then Northern Rhodesia, and then moved to the South Coast of Natal, where he worked as a railway clerk for seven years.
[2][3] Felgate later said that he had approached Albert Luthuli about joining the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) but had been rebuffed and directed to the Congress of Democrats (COD), the ANC's white-led ally; he said that he was not attracted by the COD, which he found to be dominated by "very affected, pseudo, fringe personalities" from the South African Communist Party.
[3] As part of his research, Felgate was stationed as a participant observer in a managerial office at Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ), an Anglo-Australian mining company with operations in South Africa.
[3] By the time of his departure from RTZ,[3] Felgate had joined the Christian Institute, a progressive ecumenical organisation which advocated for racial justice and opposed NGK's pro-apartheid religious doctrine.
He bought Ravan Press and Zenith Printers from the Christian Institute, and from 1975 to 1977 he published The Nation, the unofficial newspaper of Buthelezi's Inkatha movement.
He said that he had been driven to leave by the IFP's lack of internal democracy and by the party's recent decision to withdraw from an IFP–ANC peace process in KwaZulu-Natal.
However, he remained in the public eye: in subsequent months, he testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, implicating Buthelezi in state-sponsored political violence between the IFP and ANC.
Among other things, Felgate told the commission that Buthelezi had been meeting regularly with operatives from the Bureau for State Security since 1973, and that he had been involved in a secret conspiracy, annulled at the last minute, to disrupt the 1994 general election by triggering a civil war.
[14] Felgate later provided the same newspaper with further details in a 2003 interview, adding to the election sabotage claims the allegation that both Buthelezi and apartheid-era defence minister Magnus Malan had been involved in state-sponsored training of IFP hit squads on the Caprivi Strip.
[4] The IFP's national spokesperson, Musa Zondi, said of the 2003 interview that Felgate "could be a case study of delusion from after-politics isolation and oblivion...