Mangosuthu Buthelezi
Mangosuthu Buthelezi led the Inkatha Freedom Party for nearly five decades and was among the most divisive figures in South African politics — an opponent of apartheid who was also its most useful black interlocutor. Born in 1928 into the Zulu royal house, a great-grandson of King Cetshwayo, he was expelled from Fort Hare University for ANC Youth League activity and became chief of the Buthelezi clan in 1953. He became chief minister of the KwaZulu bantustan in 1970. He refused the nominal independence Pretoria offered, which would have stripped Zulu people of South African citizenship — a genuine and consequential refusal — but by operating the homeland structure at all he gave it a legitimacy the ANC in exile came to see as collaboration. He revived Inkatha in 1975 as a cultural and political movement. He opposed the armed struggle, sanctions and disinvestment, positions that made him acceptable to Western governments and to business while isolating him from the liberation movement. The break with the ANC came in 1979. From the mid-1980s conflict between Inkatha and ANC-aligned organisations killed an estimated twenty thousand people, concentrated in Natal and the Transvaal townships. Evidence emerged, confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that the security police had trained and funded Inkatha hit squads — the third force — though the violence also had its own local logic of chieftaincy and land. He boycotted the 1994 election until eight days before it, then entered and took ten per cent. Mandela appointed him home affairs minister, a post he held for ten years, and he served as acting president on several occasions. He died in 2023.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2023 CE
- Nationality: South African
- Roles: politician
