South African Zulu leader and key figure in helping end apartheid Mangosuthu Buthelezi has died at age 95.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a towering figure in South African politics and outspoken Zulu chief, has died at the age of 95.
During the racist apartheid regime, he founded the Zulu Inkatha [Freedom] party after becoming disillusioned with the African National Congress (ANC).
Thousands were killed in clashes between supporters of the two parties in the early 1990s.
But he was later welcomed back into the fold, serving as President Nelson Mandela’s minister of home affairs.
Chief Buthelezi was a shrewd but controversial politician, who disagreed with the ANC’s tactics of armed action against white-minority rule and trod a moderate path as leader of an ethnic-Zulu homeland.
He was opposed to international sanctions on South Africa, arguing that they would only harm the country’s black majority.
Buthelezi was a key figure in ending apartheid, not only as ancestral leader of the Zulu nation, the largest ethnic group in South Africa, but also as elected leader of the (at the time) KwaZulu bantustan homeland. Both he and his Inkatha Freedom Party were strongly pro-Western, pro-capitalist and anticommunist, as opposed to the ANC, who were unabashed allies of the South African Communist Party. The ANC itself was riddled with communist sympathizers, including Mandela’s wife Winnie, who was a real piece of work, and who advocated “necklacing” ANC’s political opponents by setting fire to gasoline-filled tires around their neck.
Despite this, Buthelezi insisted that Nelson Mandela’s release was a precondiction for a political solution in South Africa.
For decades, the Soviet Union had been funding communist revolutionary organizations around the world, the economic strain of which was one of the many factors (along with communism’s horrible economic inefficiency and low oil prices) that forced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to institute perestroika and glasnost. Those dire economic straits meant the Soviets could no longer afford to fund their “franchise for totalitarianism” program for communist parties in Africa and elsewhere.
The combination of Soviet bankruptcy, Buthelezi’s insistence on a peaceful, democratic and capitalistic post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s moderation, and South African President F. W. de Klerk belief that apartheid was unsustainable all came together to allow South Africa a peaceful transition to majority rule.
For all the troubles South Africa has experienced over the last 40 years, it has fared far better than the like of Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola, and Buthelezi’s influence was a big factor in making South Africa’s transition a peaceful one.
I met Buthelezi at a 1987 Dallas-area conference put on by the Landrum Society, a conservative group founded (I think) by Dallas Morning News columnist William Murchison. Buthelezi struck me as a smart, dignified man.
In addition to his political work, he also got to play his own ancestor in the classic film Zulu. How cool is that?
Tags: African National Congress, anti-communism, Apartheid, Communism, F. W. de Klerk, Inkatha Freedom Party, KwaZulu-Natal, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Nelson Mandela, Obituary, South Africa, South African Communist Party (SACP), Soviet Union, Winnie Mandela
The Soviet Union was in dire economic straits, not straights.
Fixed.
Arguable whether or not the transition from apartheid was peaceful, or even if it is over yet. South Africa seems to be experiencing a multi-decadal slow-motion disaster. I doubt it will be a functioning civilized country in another decade or so. It certainly isn’t fully functional now.
SA is busy driving out or killing white farmers. I predict that in less than 10 years they’ll be as hungry and bankrupt as Zimbabwe ever was.
“He struck me as a smart, dignified man.”
Compare him to the vampire elite of South Africa’s present-day polity and it becomes immediately evident that the wrong faction prevailed.
And for a synchronicitous convergence of the streams between that movie and today’s date courtesy of Laughing Wolf blog:
https://www.laughingwolf.net/2023/09/11/september-11/
The weird thing is I remember as a kid reading/hearing about South African politics and hearing this guy mentioned a lot, and every single journalist made it absolutely clear that Mandela was saintly but this guy was THE BAD GUY.
Wait, did I say that was weird? That’s … not weird at all.
Anyone familiar with southern Africa in the past 30 years realizes the disaster that has overtaken South Africa. Angola, Mozambique are basket cases. Zimbabwe is a leper colony filled with black loons and communists. The white leader leadership of South Africa betrayed the entire nation and allowed communists to seize control. The rest of the world shares the blame.