https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/mangosuthu-buthelezi-traditional-zulu-chief-who-played-an-ambiguous-role-during-apartheid-obituary/ar-AA1gt74X

The Telegraph

Mangosuthu Buthelezi, traditional Zulu chief who played an ambiguous role during apartheid – obituary

Story by Telegraph Obituaries •
5h

Chief Mangosutu Buthelezi, who has died aged 95, was one of the most influential and certainly the most controversial of the black leaders who loomed large on South Africa’s political landscape during the turbulent years that led to the remarkable peaceful transition to democracy in 1994.

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Always an enigmatic, hypersensitive figure, he attempted to reconcile, with varying degrees of success, the dual personalities of a traditional Zulu chieftain with that of a forward-looking, enlightened modern African statesman who, for many years, saw himself as the natural choice as South Africa’s first black president.

One day would find him in a Soweto stadium, clad in leopard skins and loincloth, exhorting with assegai in hand, throngs of chanting Zulus to respect and observe the ferocious warrior traditions of their forebears and the legacies of their proud and bloodthirsty monarchs like King Shaka from whom he was descended.

The next evening, perhaps, he would be guest of honour at the smartest of Belgravia dinner parties, charming and witty in black tie as he held forth eloquently, if at length, on the problems confronting the world in general and Africa in particular.

In both roles, he was an arch conservative, deeply suspicious of communism in any form, a firm believer in the free market and capitalist values and, no doubt because of his royal ancestry, deeply committed to hierarchical, traditional values.

Such views did not endear him to the African National Congress (ANC) then banned in apartheid South Africa with its leaders either in jail or in exile.. The ANC, and its internal surrogate, the United Democratic Front (UDF), were closely aligned with the South African Communist Party. Both regarded themselves as revolutionary liberation movements in the style of the times. Many aspirant leaders were educated and trained military in the old Soviet Union or its satellites.

Successive South African white regimes, clumsily deploying visions of the “red menace” to cloak the Afrikaner’s increasingly desperate and beleagured racial policies, saw in Buthelezi a credible ally with a large and powerful power base among the Zulus, the country’s largest tribal group.

For years they miscalculated Buthelezi’s intelligence, ambition and shrewd grasp of history, in particular the close involvement of his ancestors in nearly two centuries of anti-colonial and anti-settler resistance. The impis of his maternal great grandfather, King Cetshwayo, had outmanoeuvred and crushed the bulk of Lord Chelmsford’s imperial expeditionary army at Isandhlwana in 1879.

Earlier in the 19th century, Zulu warriors had slaughtered the Boer trekker, Piet Retief, and his men as they ventured into the green, rolling hills of Zululand. Both defeats were bloodily avenged but healthy respect for the Zulu people lingered long in memory and legend.

Buthelezi consolidated his grip on Zululand through his Inkatha movement, later to become the Inkatha Freedom Party. Originally an unabashedly tribal grouping, Inkatha dominated every aspect of government, administration and life in the Zulu heartland. Buthelezi was able to exercise to the full his autocratic and arrogant tendencies through an elaborate system of patronage..

And yet he steadfastly resisted the many attempts and lavish blandishments by successive National Party governments to persuade him to accept the spurious “full independence” as Transkei, Ciskei and other tribal homelands had done. He was not, he declared loudly and frequently, going to become a puppet of a white regime’s vision of “grand apartheid”.

His notoriously long winded speeches (one was timed at just over four hours) contained visionary pearls for those diligent enough to stay the course. In the early 1980s he warned that black South Africans faced the stark choice between armed struggle and the politics of negotiation.

“This choice cannot be shelved,” he said. “South Africans will either be liberated by the forces of violence which will go on to form a one-party state and which will be faced with the awesome task of reconstructing this country on a foundation of ashes...or will it be liberated by democratic forces which achieve the liberation of this country through the politics of negotiation which will give rise to a government of national unity.”

The ANC, committed as it then was to the revolution and to rendering South Africa “ungovernable”, remained deeply suspicious of Buthelezi, resenting his influence in Natal and among the tens of thousands of migrant Zulu workers living in the barrack-like hostels in townships around industrial Johannesburg and the gold mines of the Witwatersrand.

ANC activists moved in force into Natal, organising underground cells and recruiting on large scale. They found rich pickings among the militant Zulu youth in the urban townships and the universities where non-white students were contemptuous of tribal rituals and the deep-rooted conservatism of the rural elders who formed the backbone of Inkatha.

They were able to exploit the age-old rivalries between Zulu clans. The politicisation of the feuds polarised Zulu opinion in Natal and led inexorably to what was a regional civil war between Inkatha and ANC supporters. In a decade from the early 1980s and estimated 15,000 people were killed in political faction fighting. It was by far the most bloody period in South Africa’s revolution.

The bloodshed was clandestinely and crudely fuelled by what became known as the “third force”, the apartheid government’s security forces supporting and encouraging Inkatha hotheads in an attempt to undermine the ANC. Whether Buthelezi actively sought the help of the apartheid government or whether he tacitly accepted the assistance remained a bitterly disputed point for decades.

The evidence was eventually overwhelming that white police and military units had trained Inkatha’s young militants and that government money had been used to finance Inkatha rallies and the creation of an Inkatha aligned trade union movement.

Buthelezi’s attempts to transform Inkatha into a national political force were bedevilled by the labels of “stooge” and “collaborator” with which the ANC and other revolutionary groups had sought to discredit him. The proud Zulu chief was pushed to the sidelines during the negotiations which led to the transition he himself had advocated as the only real option for a peaceful South African future.

He was petulant and troublesome during the protracted Codesa (Convention for a Democratic South Africa) negotiations, frequently storming out of the talks and forming unlikely alliances with the discredited homeland leaders and even white extremist groups in his quest to secure a federalist system for the country.

Nelson Mandela recalled that Buthelezi was one of the first of the people he contacted when he was finally released from prison to thank him for his long-standing support. “Within ANC circles he was a far from popular figure,” Mandela wrote in his memoirs, with characteristic understatement. “He was a thorn in the side of the democratic movement. He opposed the armed struggle...he campaigned against international sanctions and challenged the idea of a unitary state of South Africa. Yet Chief Buthelezi had consistently called for my release and had refused to negotiate with the government until I and other political prisoners were liberated.”

Mandela took some personal risk, given the hostilities in Natal, by visiting Durban shortly after his release. He addressed 100,000 Zulus, mainly Inkatha supporters, in a sports stadium. “Take your guns, your knives and your pangas and throw them into the sea,” he urged. “End this war now!”. His appeal “fell on deaf ears...the fighting and the dying continued”.

Mandela repeatedly attempted to meet Buthelezi personally in his efforts to bring an end to the violence but the ANC executive blocked his initiative, preferring instead to split the loyalties of the traditional Zulu stronghold by wooing the Zulu monarch, King Goodwill Zwelithini. The self-indulgent young monarch, apart from being Buthelezi’s nephew, was politically naive and anxious only to cling to the lavish trappings of his symbolic office.

By the time the ANC and its allies had won a sweeping victory in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, Buthelezi stood condemned as a “spoiler” and was derided almost as a figure of fun by most of the country’s editorial writers and cartoonists. His chiefly pride had been wounded and his statute as a putative African statesman deeply dented.

Mandela’s own statesmanship eventually provided some salve for traditional pride. The Inkatha movement became the Inkatha Freedom Party to contest the first democratic elections and won political control of KwaZulu-Natal province. The factional violence subsided. President Nelson Mandela invited Buthelezi to join his cabinet as home affairs minister, a post he held for more than a decade after independence.

When Mandela and his then deputy, Thabo Mbeki, made their frequent trips abroad to herald the new “rainbow nation” they were happy to leave the affairs of state in the hands of Acting President Buthelezi. It was the closest the Zulu leader was to come to his long-held ambition to become the country’s first black ruler.

On Sat, 9 Sep 2023 08:16:40 -0700 (PDT), That Derek
<thatderek@yahoo.com> wrote:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/mangosuthu-buthelezi-traditional-zulu-chief-who-played-an-ambiguous-role-during-apartheid-obituary/ar-AA1gt74X

The Telegraph

Mangosuthu Buthelezi, traditional Zulu chief who played an ambiguous
role during apartheid – obituary

Story by Telegraph Obituaries •
5h

Chief Mangosutu Buthelezi, who has died aged 95, was one of the most
influential and certainly the most controversial of the black leaders
who loomed large on South Africa’s political landscape during the
turbulent years that led to the remarkable peaceful transition to
democracy in 1994.

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Always an enigmatic, hypersensitive figure, he attempted to reconcile,
with varying degrees of success, the dual personalities of a
traditional Zulu chieftain with that of a forward-looking, enlightened
modern African statesman who, for many years, saw himself as the
natural choice as South Africa’s first black president.

One day would find him in a Soweto stadium, clad in leopard skins and
loincloth, exhorting with assegai in hand, throngs of chanting Zulus
to respect and observe the ferocious warrior traditions of their
forebears and the legacies of their proud and bloodthirsty monarchs
like King Shaka from whom he was descended.

The next evening, perhaps, he would be guest of honour at the smartest
of Belgravia dinner parties, charming and witty in black tie as he
held forth eloquently, if at length, on the problems confronting the
world in general and Africa in particular.

In both roles, he was an arch conservative, deeply suspicious of
communism in any form, a firm believer in the free market and
capitalist values and, no doubt because of his royal ancestry, deeply
committed to hierarchical, traditional values.

Such views did not endear him to the African National Congress (ANC)
then banned in apartheid South Africa with its leaders either in jail
or in exile. The ANC, and its internal surrogate, the United
Democratic Front (UDF), were closely aligned with the South African
Communist Party. Both regarded themselves as revolutionary liberation
movements in the style of the times. Many aspirant leaders were
educated and trained military in the old Soviet Union or its
satellites.

Successive South African white regimes, clumsily deploying visions of
the “red menace” to cloak the Afrikaner’s increasingly desperate and
beleagured racial policies, saw in Buthelezi a credible ally with a
large and powerful power base among the Zulus, the country’s largest
tribal group.

For years they miscalculated Buthelezi’s intelligence, ambition and
shrewd grasp of history, in particular the close involvement of his
ancestors in nearly two centuries of anti-colonial and anti-settler
resistance. The impis of his maternal great grandfather, King
Cetshwayo, had outmanoeuvred and crushed the bulk of Lord Chelmsford’s
imperial expeditionary army at Isandhlwana in 1879.

Earlier in the 19th century, Zulu warriors had slaughtered the Boer
trekker, Piet Retief, and his men as they ventured into the green,
rolling hills of Zululand. Both defeats were bloodily avenged but
healthy respect for the Zulu people lingered long in memory and
legend.

Buthelezi consolidated his grip on Zululand through his Inkatha
movement, later to become the Inkatha Freedom Party. Originally an
unabashedly tribal grouping, Inkatha dominated every aspect of
government, administration and life in the Zulu heartland. Buthelezi
was able to exercise to the full his autocratic and arrogant
tendencies through an elaborate system of patronage.

And yet he steadfastly resisted the many attempts and lavish
blandishments by successive National Party governments to persuade him
to accept the spurious “full independence” as Transkei, Ciskei and
other tribal homelands had done. He was not, he declared loudly and
frequently, going to become a puppet of a white regime’s vision of
“grand apartheid”.

His notoriously long winded speeches (one was timed at just over four
hours) contained visionary pearls for those diligent enough to stay
the course. In the early 1980s he warned that black South Africans
faced the stark choice between armed struggle and the politics of
negotiation.

“This choice cannot be shelved,” he said. “South Africans will either
be liberated by the forces of violence which will go on to form a
one-party state and which will be faced with the awesome task of
reconstructing this country on a foundation of ashes...or will it be
liberated by democratic forces which achieve the liberation of this
country through the politics of negotiation which will give rise to a
government of national unity.”

The ANC, committed as it then was to the revolution and to rendering
South Africa “ungovernable”, remained deeply suspicious of Buthelezi,
resenting his influence in Natal and among the tens of thousands of
migrant Zulu workers living in the barrack-like hostels in townships
around industrial Johannesburg and the gold mines of the
Witwatersrand.

ANC activists moved in force into Natal, organising underground cells
and recruiting on large scale. They found rich pickings among the
militant Zulu youth in the urban townships and the universities where
non-white students were contemptuous of tribal rituals and the
deep-rooted conservatism of the rural elders who formed the backbone
of Inkatha.

They were able to exploit the age-old rivalries between Zulu clans.
The politicisation of the feuds polarised Zulu opinion in Natal and
led inexorably to what was a regional civil war between Inkatha and
ANC supporters. In a decade from the early 1980s and estimated 15,000
people were killed in political faction fighting. It was by far the
most bloody period in South Africa’s revolution.

The bloodshed was clandestinely and crudely fuelled by what became
known as the “third force”, the apartheid government’s security forces
supporting and encouraging Inkatha hotheads in an attempt to undermine
the ANC. Whether Buthelezi actively sought the help of the apartheid
government or whether he tacitly accepted the assistance remained a
bitterly disputed point for decades.

The evidence was eventually overwhelming that white police and
military units had trained Inkatha’s young militants and that
government money had been used to finance Inkatha rallies and the
creation of an Inkatha aligned trade union movement.

Buthelezi’s attempts to transform Inkatha into a national political
force were bedevilled by the labels of “stooge” and “collaborator”
with which the ANC and other revolutionary groups had sought to
discredit him. The proud Zulu chief was pushed to the sidelines during
the negotiations which led to the transition he himself had advocated
as the only real option for a peaceful South African future.

He was petulant and troublesome during the protracted Codesa
(Convention for a Democratic South Africa) negotiations, frequently
storming out of the talks and forming unlikely alliances with the
discredited homeland leaders and even white extremist groups in his
quest to secure a federalist system for the country.

Nelson Mandela recalled that Buthelezi was one of the first of the
people he contacted when he was finally released from prison to thank
him for his long-standing support. “Within ANC circles he was a far
from popular figure,” Mandela wrote in his memoirs, with
characteristic understatement. “He was a thorn in the side of the
democratic movement. He opposed the armed struggle...he campaigned
against international sanctions and challenged the idea of a unitary
state of South Africa. Yet Chief Buthelezi had consistently called for
my release and had refused to negotiate with the government until I
and other political prisoners were liberated.”

Mandela took some personal risk, given the hostilities in Natal, by
visiting Durban shortly after his release. He addressed 100,000 Zulus,
mainly Inkatha supporters, in a sports stadium. “Take your guns, your
knives and your pangas and throw them into the sea,” he urged. “End
this war now!”. His appeal “fell on deaf ears...the fighting and the
dying continued”.

Mandela repeatedly attempted to meet Buthelezi personally in his
efforts to bring an end to the violence but the ANC executive blocked
his initiative, preferring instead to split the loyalties of the
traditional Zulu stronghold by wooing the Zulu monarch, King Goodwill
Zwelithini. The self-indulgent young monarch, apart from being
Buthelezi’s nephew, was politically naive and anxious only to cling to
the lavish trappings of his symbolic office.

By the time the ANC and its allies had won a sweeping victory in South
Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, Buthelezi stood condemned
as a “spoiler” and was derided almost as a figure of fun by most of
the country’s editorial writers and cartoonists. His chiefly pride had
been wounded and his statute as a putative African statesman deeply
dented.