How will history remember Buthelezi?
Former IFP leader wants to ‘set record straight’ on relationship with ANC
How will history remember former IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi? Not in the way he would like.
At 91, having stepped down as head of a party he founded and led for more than 50 years, the prince — a direct descendant of the great Zulu king Dinuzulu — says he believes history has treated him unfairly. For a peaceful death, he wants the chapters in which he featured to be revised.
It is a long, bitter and bloody story, stretching back to the 1950s when Buthelezi — like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and chief Albert Luthuli — was a committed member of the ANC.
After the banning of the ANC in 1960, with Tambo in exile, Mandela on trial and Luthuli banned and confined to his home town, Buthelezi — an ANC Youth League member, a devout Anglican and a traditional leader — remained free.
“After 1960 there was nothing. It was so quiet that noone could even cough,” he said, in an interview at his parliamentary office earlier in September, which still bears the signage of “IFP leader”. Though he has stepped down as IFP leader, he remains a conscientious MP.
With political opposition suppressed, Buthelezi’s church involvement opened up opportunities for contact with the wider world. In 1963, while en route to an international gathering of the Anglican
church, he visited Tambo’s wife, Adelaide, in London.
Adelaide got in touch with Tambo in Lusaka immediately and a meeting between the two was arranged.
It was the beginning of almost two decades of undercover co-operation between Buthelezi and Tambo during which Buthelezi, acting on instruction from “his leaders”, revived the Zulu cultural organisation Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe as a cover for legal political activity. But over this time, though Buthelezi consulted with Tambo every step of the way, Tambo, it appears, was careful to avoid any public association or contact with Buthelezi.
HOMELAND SYSTEM
It was on getting the OK from Tambo, he says, that in 1972 he entered the homeland system in the first place, despite the ANC’s stringent opposition to the policy. All the while, Buthelezi shunned full independence but used the political freedom it brought him to travel internationally and speak out against apartheid.
And travel he did. As well as visiting African heads of state in Tanzania and Zambia — the most generous hosts of the ANC — Buthelezi was soon feted by Western leaders, who saw in him the prospect of a more moderate leader for SA.
Buthelezi is proud of the reception he got from the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and says that: “I took the government at their word and used my freedom of speech.”
He concedes that while this took place, a greater geopolitical war played out above his head — the West looked for moderate alternatives to the ANC as it and the SACP drew inexorably closer to the Soviet Union — but he insists today, as he always has: “I was never an agent for the West.”
That Tambo supported Buthelezi’s endeavours to use the guise of Zulu cultural pride to keep the spark of African nationalist resistance alive resonates with the ANC’s version of the history of the time. Buthelezi says that when the idea of forming a membership organisation was first suggested to him by Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda at a meeting in 1974, he was in a dilemma.
“I thought to myself: now how do I do this? How do I start an organisation to compete with the ANC? So I consulted with Tambo and he said go ahead. So I assumed that this was a front for the ANC. We adopted the colours; we said that this organisation was built on the principles, as articulated by the founding fathers of the ANC. All along I was in communication with Tambo,” he says.
Tambo also gave his support to Buthelezi when, on his first fundraising mission to Scandinavia, donors rebuffed him until Tambo stepped in and urged the Europeans to fund the new organisation.
After 1976, though, the political terrain began to change. The ANC was infused with new blood and new militancy as young people, part of the black consciousness movement, flooded its ranks. These youngsters had been at the coalface of confrontation with apartheid authorities, particularly the urban version of the homeland system that governed township areas.
The ANC stepped up its offensive. A visit of the leadership to Vietnam in 1978 was seminal. From there emerged the ANC’s famous Green Book, a comprehensive strategy of militant resistance as well as international pressure and the beginning of the “people’s war”.
He said that in 1979, as their strategies diverged, Tambo suggested to Buthelezi that they meet in London.
“We talked for two and a half days,” says Buthelezi. “They wanted me to change my stance on economic sanctions, which I opposed; and wanted me to accept the armed struggle. Of course, we did not agree, but it was not acrimonious,” he said.
While Buthelezi says he was under the impression that they had agreed to disagree, it was not long after the 1979 meeting that the political attacks on him began. First came Soweto leader Nthato Motlana, who called him a traitor.
Next came ANC secretarygeneral Alfred Nzo in 1980, who called him a careerist.
The former IFP leader says he was still reeling in shock from this turn of events when a story appeared in the Sunday Times, exposing the fact that Tambo and Buthelezi had met up in London.
“To my shock, Tambo issued a statement that no such meeting ever took place. He accused me of leaking it to the Sunday Times.
“Then I was attacked in Sechaba (the ANC journal) and on Radio Freedom where ANC NEC member John Nkadimeng called me a snake that must be hit on the head. I was vilified all over the world.”
As resistance to apartheid grew inside the country, ANCaligned activists launched the United Democratic Front, “which all anti-apartheid organisations were welcomed to join except Inkatha”, he says. These were some of the seeds of the bloody war of KwaZuluNatal, which during the 1980s and 1990s left an estimated 10,000-20,000 dead — more than those who died at the hands of the apartheid state fighting for liberation.
As in all wars, there were no innocent parties. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report describes atrocities and culpability by both sides in the conflict.
When the ANC launched the people’s war and the township youth of KwaZulu-Natal mobilised against school and local authorities, they invariably came into violent conflict with the IFP.
Buthelezi proposed the training of a paramilitary force for KwaZulu “to deal with riots” as early as 1980, says the report. In 1985, after threats of assassination, the IFP requested help from the apartheid government to covertly train and equip a battalion in the Caprivi, later implicated in numerous killings.
Throughout the war and still today Buthelezi is adamant he has never contravened his deeply held principle of nonviolence. “The ANC imposed that war.
“My response was that it was the inalienable right of people to defend ourselves.
“I stuck to the 1912 [ANC founding] principles of nonviolence; everything was done in self-defence. Yes, there was violence, there was counterviolence and there was pre-emptive violence, but it was not orchestrated by myself.
“Not a single meeting of the IFP ever called for violence.”
But that view is not the one that emerged from the TRC, in which Buthelezi and the IFP declined to participate, until just before its very end. The commission found that Buthelezi and the IFP had “institutionalised violence”; “had dramatically escalated the conflict” with the Caprivi trainees; and that “the SA government had provided Inkatha with a hit squad”.
In his final speech as president at the IFP congress in August, Buthelezi made no reference to the IFP-ANC war, but traversed his history with Tambo, lamenting: “I am left with only one regret. What was done to me by one of my leaders, Mr Oliver Tambo, opened a wound that has yet to be healed.”
His wish, he said, was to “achieve reconciliation between the two organisations”.
By this he does not mean the ANC and the IFP should turn the clock back to 1979 and merge into one movement. He is not looking for acknowledgment, he says, but for a common understanding of history.
“They should just be honest about the history of our country. Although I became chief minister of KwaZulu as a cadre of the ANC, instructed by Luthuli, the way they portray me is not right.”
As not many today know Buthelezi was once an ANC cadre, loyal to Tambo and Luthuli, his complaint is not entirely without grounds. But, as many other protagonists in history have discovered, it is not your choice to determine how you are remembered.