South Africa's post-apartheid era presents conflicting perceptions on issues of governance with regards to traditional leadership, among other things. This is a point of great concern in contemporary times especially for communities in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, which is steeped in tradition with a very strong Kingdom of the Zulu nation. The authority that was in the hands of the chiefs, amakhosi in the old dispensation, is suddenly questionable. Drawing on the work of Mngadi (2006) and using Kurt Lewin's (in Robbins,1996), three step transformation model, a model that could be adopted to explain how societies behave and evolve as well as react in a transforming political context, the discussion looks at the debate concerning what it means to be a traditional leader in post-apartheid South Africa. It interrogates incompatibility between the roles of traditional leadership and that of councillors in areas formerly the sole