frontline base in Swaziland. He was first sent there to assess the political landscape in January 1975, under the cover of attending a UN conference. As part of this reconnaissance trip, he and his colleague Max Sisulu spent time with S'bu Ndebele, Max's sister Lindiwe Sisulu, and their associates in the Black Consciousness movement, which at the time was ascendent in neighbouring South Africa. Mbeki made a positive report to the ANC executive, and he was sent back to Swaziland to begin establishing the base. In Swaziland, he lived at Stanley Mabizela's family home in Manzini. Working with Albert Dhlomo, Mbeki was responsible for helping to re-establish underground ANC networks in the South African provinces of Natal and Transvaal, which shared a border with Swaziland. His counterpart inside South Africa was MK operative Jacob Zuma, who ran the Natal underground. According to Gevisser, the pair developed "an unlikely rapport." Mbeki was also responsible for recruiting new MK operatives, for liaising with South African student and labour activists, and for liaising with Inkatha, which was becoming dominant in Natal. However, still another part of his duties was to act as the ANC's official representative in the country, and to maintain good diplomatic relations with the Swazi government. In March 1976, the government discovered that Mbeki was involved in military activity inside Swaziland, and he and Dhlomo – as well as Zuma, who was in the country illegally – were detained and then deported, though they managed to negotiate their deportation to the neutral territory of Mozambique rather than to South Africa. Mbeki's management of the Swaziland base later became a point of contention between him and Mac Maharaj, with whom his relationship has remained acrimonious decades later. In 1978, Maharaj and Mbeki argued at a top-level strategic meeting in Luanda, Angola, when Maharaj, who had been tasked with running the political underground, claimed that Mbeki's records from the Swaziland office were in fact "just an empty folder." 1976–78: Nigeria After being deported, Mbeki returned to Lusaka, where he was made Duma Nokwe's deputy in the ANC's Department of Information and Propaganda (DIP). In January 1977, he was posted to Lagos, Nigeria, where he was to be – as in Swaziland – the ANC's first representative to the country. Although there was some debate about whether the appointment was a signal that he had been sidelined, Gevisser says that Mbeki performed well