Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s highs and lows

The retirement of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi after 44 years at the helm of the Inkatha Freedom Party is a milestone in the history of the party.

He founded the party back in 1975 and led it with a firm hand without any challenge – even under democracy when leaderships had to be contested. But his was not a leadership covered in glory.

One can bet that two people who came to know him at different times – one before 1994 and another post our democracy – would tell contradictory stories about his leadership. There is a dark side and a great side to it – and I am sure he is not proud of the former.

On the good side, he participated in the liberation struggle, starting with the ANC Youth League and became an ANC member. The prince rubbed shoulders with the likes of Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo.

He appeared to have been closer to Tambo because he does not stop telling anecdotes about their early days and how the late ANC leader respected him. He will use every platform to relate his relationship with OR. While not implying that they had no cosy relationship, I must say it is difficult to believe Tambo would have liked a leader whose organisation massacred many people in KwaZulu-Natal, at Gauteng townships like Boipatong, Soweto and Thokoza, and in metro trains in and around Johannesburg on the eve of their freedom.

But if you listen to the prince like I used to, he would tell you that by rejecting the Pretoria-prescribed independence for the KwaZulu homeland he helped to quarantine his people against being deprived of their SA citizenships.

The Inkatha, as it was known in its early days up to the ’90s until it tactically changed its name to IFP to cover its blood-soaked image, was an ANC project that went completely wrong. The exiled ANC hoped to use a Zulu cultural movement to spread its influence among Zulus. But it backfired when the Nationalist Party outmanoeuvred the ANC and succeeded to have Buthelezi change his allegiance towards the enemy.

He was labelled inter alia as “sell out” or “impimpi”, and “puppet” within the liberation movement. The then exiled ANC’s mouthpiece, Radio Freedom, had a field day lumping justifiably Buthelezi with other Bantustan advocates such as Kaizer Matanzima, Lucas Mangope, Patrick Mphephu and Lennox Sebe and their bedfellows from Gazankulu, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele, Lebowa and Qwaqwa.

All Bantustan leaders kept the people in demarcated barren land where eking a living was a daily struggle for survival. And they operated trigger-happy police forces who harassed activists and opponents.

Buthelezi was so convinced of his power that he pulled out of the constitutional negotiation process at Kempton Park prior to the historic settlement tactically merely to extract some compromises from it. But he was forced to board hastily when he realised the freedom train was never going to stop for him.

Until the very last hour, the IFP was excluded from the 1994 ballot paper and the IEC had to print a separate “IFP sticker” to insert it on the ballot paper at polling stations.

We are just hoping now that Buthelezi is no longer the president of the IFP, he will give space to his successor, Velenkosini Hlabisa, to lead the party without having to look over his shoulder all the time.

With a new title of Emeritus President, we hope the prince will allow democracy to reign in the IFP with regular leadership elections.

Eric Naki

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