OPINION: While former Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi may have been a thorn in the side of the apartheid government, he was certainly not the “anvil on which apartheid was broken”, writes Mary de Haas.
While former Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi may have been a thorn in the side of the apartheid government, he was certainly not the “”, as has been claimed by political scientist Henning Melber in various publications.
The failure to include the specific structural dynamics of regional politics leads to an exaggeration of the power enjoyed by Buthelezi as a homeland leader. The apartheid state had the dissemination of disinformation and a divide-and-rule plan down to a fine art, and may well have used it to fuel tensions through vicious anti-Buthelezi rhetoric, including death threats .In the 1980s, a prominent businessperson explained to me the hurt that Buthelezi had suffered, while showing me a bound volume of the nasty things the ANC had said about him.
Since the run-up to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and continuing long after that, there was a small but vocal minority of English-speaking white people in the then Natal province vehemently opposed to a unitary state. They intermittently rooted for a federal, confederal or even secessionist solution – especially when they felt that their interests were threatened by an Afrikaner-dominated government.
The proponents of the consociational way won enthusiastic support from German academics who presumably foresaw that, given the assiduous promotion of ethnonationalism by the KwaZulu government, any federal solution posed a potential threat to stability. The IFP was initially drawn in when the UDF opposed attempts to incorporate townships in “white” South Africa into KwaZulu, since that would have meant the loss of precious rights to live and to work in “South Africa”. This stance was perceived as an attack on the KwaZulu government and, by extension, the IFP.
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