The Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party failed to win its home province of KwaZulu-Natal.
The Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi has been found responsible for human rights abuses.
Inkatha and Mr Buthelezi were making the most noise, and needed to be appeased.
Even the patient Nelson Mandela thought Inkatha a pain and found visits to KwaZulu-Natal disagreeable.
But no heavyweights from the Inkatha Freedom Party, which accuses the commission of bias, applied.
But, since then, new evidence has come up about the arming of Inkatha hit-squads by apartheid security forces.
There is another question of political impartiality on which the commission has not yet been tested: the role of Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Inkatha Freedom Party.
Working closely with Mr Mbeki, he helped to bring peace to that troubled province last year through a series of secret meetings with the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party.
Neither the Congress of the People (COPE), a splinter of the ANC, nor the once formidable Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party seemed sure to survive, as their share of the poll plummeted.
Mr Buthelezi, head of the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party, became its chief minister, and some would say its dictator, within the limits of power allowed to him by the South African government.
Mr Zuma was prominent in promoting the ANC among Zulus who had voted for the Inkatha Freedom Party in the first free elections in 1994, and was consistently elected to senior ANC posts.
South Africa's 1994 election was dogged by malpractice: at one point the electoral commission imposed a news blackout on the count amid mutual accusations of cheating by the African National Congress and Inkatha.
Likewise, the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, which got less than 5% and 18 seats in 2009, recently postponed a conference as officials loyal to Mangosuthu Buthelezi, its veteran leader, sought to quash his deputy's bid for the crown.
While the other parties also claim to represent all South Africans, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is mostly backed by Zulus, the Democratic Alliance appeals to English-speaking whites, the New National Party is backed by Afrikaans speakers, both coloured and white, and so on.
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