As a warlord, Mangosuthu Buthelezi was naturally quick to take offence. The Zulu prince and former chief minister of the apartheid-era KwaZulu black homeland, who has died at the age of 95 and will be buried today, became so upset at my line of questioning about the bloody handiwork of his Inkatha Freedom party in the run-up to South Africa’s first free election in 1994 that he turned his chair around, sat facing the other way and refused to talk. On another occasion he threw me out of his car in the middle of his KwaZulu fiefdom for a similar transgression.
As a foreign reporter, I got off easy. Many of those closer to home who challenged Buthelezi were subject to a campaign of terror and murder.
Not that you would have known it from the way he was feted by Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and US president Ronald Reagan. Not that you would know it now from some of the descriptions of Buthelezi since his death a week ago, claiming that he was a moderate who opposed violence.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, called Buthelezi “an outstanding leader in the political and cultural life of our nation” while tactfully sidestepping his collaboration with apartheid. Others did not let it slide. The chief whip of Ramaphosa’s African National Congress had to plead with its members of parliament to stop posting messages denouncing the Zulu nationalist leader and his many crimes.
Buthelezi’s power base was the KwaZulu black homeland carved out by the apartheid government in 1977. Pretoria made him its chief minister, but he was savvy enough not to allow it to become “independent” like some other of the notorious Bantustans, knowing that it would mark him as an apartheid stooge. He then used KwaZulu’s semi-autonomous status to build a political movement and a private army from among its rural and often poorly educated residents.
Buthelezi founded Inkatha a couple of years earlier, ostensibly as a cultural movement allied with the ANC. But inside KwaZulu, Inkatha created a strange authoritarian cult with children in the homeland’s schools obliged to sing songs and chant slogans in support of Buthelezi, and to join the party. Meanwhile, Inkatha’s leaders were almost wholly reliant on the apartheid regime’s shilling as homeland officials.
Pretoria funded a KwaZulu homeland police force, while the white regime’s security forces trained and armed a militia within Inkatha. Over a decade from the mid-1980s, the two organisations targeted ANC activists and terrorised the broader population by slaughtering thousands of suspected supporters and burning them out of their homes. A good chunk of the Zulu population backed the ANC and, in time, it fought back. The death toll escalated.
None of this seemed to bother political leaders in London or Washington, where Buthelezi knew which buttons to press by denouncing communism and sanctions. He was embraced by Thatcher, who opposed sanctions and the ANC with a lot more vigour than she resisted apartheid. The British prime minister called the ANC “a typical terrorist organisation”, but apparently had no such qualms about the blood on the Inkatha leader’s hands.
Reagan lavished praise on Buthelezi at the White House while Nelson Mandela sat on the US list of international terrorists, where he remained until 2008.
Buthelezi was also beloved by a certain brand of foreign rightwinger – these included the financier James Goldsmith and the multimillionaire zookeeper John Aspinall. Both men helped fund Inkatha.
With Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, what began as a war among Zulus between rival supporters of Inkatha and the ANC spread to the region around Johannesburg.
Inkatha organised inside the grim men’s hostels where migrant workers often lived within, but separate from, the townships. Men armed with spears, machetes and guns poured from the hostels to attack ordinary residents of ANC strongholds such as Katlehong and Thokoza, Kagiso and Boipatong. Inkatha slaughtered people in their homes in the dead of night and attacked crowded commuter trains in the morning.
Early one morning in October 1991 I walked into Soweto’s Nancefield railway station, where about 50 armed men from a nearby hostel had boarded and started slaughtering the passengers. Some escaped by diving out of the windows and on to the tracks. The bodies of others still lay on the platform.
In Phola Park the residents told of police armoured vehicles escorting Inkatha to an attack. South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk, always denied state complicity, but the destabilisation of the ANC suited his National party, and the security establishment was later shown to have armed Inkatha’s killers with guns. No one knows for sure, but it is commonly estimated that in the four years between Mandela’s release and his election as president, more than 15,000 people were killed in Inkatha atttacks.
Buthelezi threatened a boycott of the 1994 vote, aligning himself with Eugene Terre’Blanche’s neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement and promising yet more violence. He finally agreed to participate in the election with just days to go, and only after the ballots were already printed, so his name had to be added to the bottom with a sticker.
The ANC bought him off by turning a blind eye to vote rigging at KwaZulu polling stations. Inkatha was declared to have won more than half the vote in KwaZulu-Natal, giving it control of the provincial legislature.
The violence also bought Buthelezi a seat in Mandela’s cabinet as home affairs minister, although he could not stop the decline in electoral support for Inkatha once the white regime was no longer there to give it cover.
Neither could he erase history. Right to the end Buthelezi portrayed himself as resisting apartheid. But as Chris Hani, the leader of the ANC’s armed wing, noted in 1991, the Zulu chief and his government were funded by Pretoria and remained “unpersecuted by the state” for years while Mandela remained locked up. “Inkatha is a sweetheart organisation. Loved by Pretoria and not harassed at all,” said Hani.
It is that Buthelezi – not the feted, sanitised version – that we should remember today.
Chris McGreal was a Guardian correspondent in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democracy
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