DoC The long career of 89-year-old Mangosuthu Buthelezi appears to be experiencing a revival, says the writer. File photo: Siyasanga MbambaniThat the IFP leader is now “a voice of reason” in Parliament shows how low standards have dropped, says Mcebisi Ndletyana.
Johannesburg - Typical of a theatre it now resembles, the fifth Parliament has destroyed reputations, revamped others, while also introducing debutants into political life. What becomes of debutants remains to be seen. It is the performance of veteran MP, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, that has intrigued me.
The long career of the 89-year-old appears to be experiencing a revival. This is a conscious effort on Buthelezi’s part to remake his place in history, but the shambles that parliament is also aids his attempts at revising history.
Amid the parliamentary chaos Buthelezi has emerged as a calming voice. He has repeatedly stood up in defence of reason and civility. This is yet another interesting twist in our post-apartheid narrative.
Buthelezi has not always been synonymous with civility. This is an entirely new side, largely a post-1994 reinvention.
A pre-1994 Buthelezi was the South African equivalent of Mozambique’s Afonso Dlakama. Just like Savimbi’s Unita in Angola, Buthelezi’s IFP was propped up by both the apartheid regime and Ronald Reagon’s administration to obliterate liberation movements in Mozambique and South Africa respectively.
They terrorised supporters to scare them away from the liberation movements and deny the latter organisational presence among communities.
Trained by apartheid security forces, under their protection and using weapons provided by them, IFP warriors hunted urban centres killing innocent residents in their homes and in the trains as they made their way to places of work.
These were surrogates of an apartheid-killing machine, under the command of a warlord, to maintain a white supremacist state.
This is how most of us in the urban centres within the black community experienced Buthelezi and his IFP. The gratifying joy of freedom has not erased those horrible memories. Our recollection goes beyond April 27, 1994. We continue to remember it to this day.
Buthelezi’s speeches in parliament, however, suggest a conscious attempt to revise history as we experienced it. In a carefully crafted narrative, told repeatedly in Parliament especially in the last three debates of the State of the Nation Address, Buthelezi presents himself as a victim of a bloodthirsty ANC, a pacifist that remained true to the founding values of the ANC. Speaking in Parliament on February 18, 2014, he said: “I am from the generation of leaders like Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Rowley Arenstein, Alpheus Zulu, Zami Chonco, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko and Joe Matthews.” Because he claims a similar stature as these heroic figures, Buthelezi went on to stun some MPs: “By circumstances of history, Mr (Andrew) Mlangeni and I have become the custodians of a political era in which integrity, morality and righteous leadership prevailed.”
Admittedly, Buthelezi’s claim to having links with the anti-apartheid struggle is valid. He was a founding member of the ANC Youth League at the University of Fort Hare in the 1940s, and even acquired a reputation as a radical. He administered punishment to a fellow student, by soaking his bed with water, for going against a students’ decision to boycott a visit of the governor-general, Brand van Zyl, to the university. That earned him an expulsion. He appealed in order to write his final exam, which was granted, but refused to apologise for his actions. “There is nothing to be ashamed of as far as I am concerned”, he wrote to the university. “I felt and still feel that Mr WM Chirwa’s behaviour was very cowardly and mean in the extreme… I was not a member of any ‘pressure group’… The only case I know is that of Chirwa and the reasons are those I have stated above, his cowardly and mean behaviour… I am not apologising for this.”
Buthelezi’s links with the ANC remained beyond Fort Hare. He met the then-exiled ANC, for instance, repeatedly within the first 20 years of the party’s banning.
Oliver Tambo, as his biographer Luli Callinicos explains, took a strategic decision to maintain (and forge) relations with the then emerging rulers of the Bantustans. The aim was to create friendly areas that would be used to infiltrate ANC guerrillas back into the country.
Buthelezi was not the only Bantustan leader Tambo was courting. He was also in talks with, among others, Kaizer Matanzima and Lucas Mangope, whom he had taught at St Peter’s.
Fresh from visiting Tambo in London in 1972, Matanzima even declared that, as all six Bantustan leaders, “we want one nation and not weak tribal groupings divided along ethnic lines”.
The demand went against the apartheid design of divide-and-rule, and echoed the ANC’s wish for unity among Africans. The apartheid government quickly squashed the idea by cutting down on Matanzima’s perks, which he couldn’t live without and thus forcing him to comply.
Tambo’s strategy was quite delicate. He wanted the Bantustans to earn the trust of the regime, while maintaining their loyalty towards the objectives of the liberation movement. And Buthelezi maintained that balance, at least for a while.
Tambo’s strategy included endorsing Buthelezi’s proposal to revive the old Zulu elite cultural movement that had been formed in the 1920s, Inkatha kaZulu. The organisation was reconstituted in 1975 and renamed Inkatha YeNkululeko YeSizwe with ANC colours and anthem.
Tambo explained the ANC’s endorsement: “Being illegal itself, the ANC encourages the people to form legal organisations and use them to advance the cause of liberation… In the course of our discussions with him, we agreed that this would also necessitate the formation of a mass organisation in the Bantustan he headed. Inkatha originated from this agreement.”
Buthelezi seemed to have different intentions, though.
His ambition got the better of him. He couldn’t countenance other internal resistant organisations other than his own, and considered his party the substitute of the exiled ANC.
His claim that the relationship broke over disagreement on the use of violence is a ruse.
When he asked for the ANC’s endorsement to form Inkatha, the party had been waging an armed struggle for almost 20 years, during which time he was in contact with Tambo.
Why ask for the ANC’s blessings, then turn around to denounce it as bloodthirsty? It was an opportunist request to legitimise Inkatha, but without any intention of advancing the cause of the liberation movement. And Inkatha’s subsequent ethnic chauvinism and terrorism against progressive forces further distanced it from the ANC lineage. It emerged as an aberration, not an offspring of the ANC.
That Buthelezi is now “a voice of reason” in Parliament is simply an indication of how low standards have degenerated.
Leadership is clearly wanting. And it’s not surprising that Buthelezi seeks to revise history. Old age makes individuals get pre-occupied about how they’ll be remembered once they’ve gone. Because none wants to evoke unpleasant memories, they then seek to make amends. That’s why people on their deathbed confess their dastardly deeds and seek forgiveness from those they have wronged. Others, as in Buthelezi’s case, simply seek to rehabilitate their place in history.
To accept Buthelezi’s version of history, however, is complicity in a lie. It would be an endorsement of denialism that perpetuates a refusal to grant justice.
History must be told as a reminder of the debt owed to the victims of apartheid barbarity.
You sir, Buthelezi, are no Robert Sobukwe!
* Ndletyana is head of the political economy faculty at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra).
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Sunday Independent
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