The respected figure of the powerful Zulu tribe, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, historical leader of the Inkatha party responsible for most of the violence before the first multiracial elections in 1994, died on Saturday at the age of 95.
“It is with deep sadness that I announce the death of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, traditional Prime Minister of the Zulu King and of the Zulu nation, founder and Emeritus Leader of the Inkatha Party,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement.
“He died in the early hours of this morning just two weeks after celebrating his 95th birthday,” said the head of state, paying tribute to an “impressive leader who has played an important role in our country’s history for seven decades.”
AFP
Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi was born into the Zulu royal family in August 1928 and has long embodied the proud and warlike spirit of the country’s largest ethnic group.
Originally a member of the historic ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, he founded the nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in 1975, originally intended as a Zulu cultural organization. The rivalry between the two parties will be bloody.
Territorial war
The Inkatha party, which he led for more than forty years, waged deadly territorial wars with ANC activists in mostly black townships in the 1980s and 1990s. The violence claimed more than 5,000 lives.
Buthelezi has been accused of playing into the hands of white power by inciting anti-ANC violence ahead of the historic 1994 elections that could have derailed the anti-apartheid liberation movement.
AFP
As prime minister of the KwaZulu Bantustans – those pseudo-“independent” territorial entities allocated to blacks during apartheid – the Zulu leader has always vehemently denied having collaborated with, or been an ally of, the white supremacist regime be.
Buthelezi wore thin, slender, rectangular glasses on his nose and often covered himself in leopard skins, in keeping with a Zulu tradition, to lead parades of Inkhata activists with shields and spears in his strongholds of Johannesburg or Durban.
The Inkatha party has lost much influence over time due to disputes over its leadership and calls for its withdrawal to make room for offspring.
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Mangosuthu Buthelezi is also in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest speech to a Legislative Assembly in March 1993, spread over 11 days with an average of two and a half hours speaking each day.
At the beginning of the 2020s, the ninety-year-old spokesman for the traditional Zulu king was Misuzulu Zulu, also known as Misuzulu kaZwelithini, who was crowned last year.