Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a veteran South African politician, Zulu prince and controversial figure during the liberation struggle against apartheid, has died, the presidency said. He was 95.
Buthelezi, who founded the Inkatha Freedom party (IFP), served two terms as minister of home affairs in the post-apartheid government after burying the hatchet with the governing African National Congress party in 1994.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said in a statement: “I am deeply saddened to announce the passing of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the prince of KwaPhindangene, traditional prime minister to the Zulu monarch and nation, and the founder and president emeritus of the Inkatha Freedom party.”
Buthelezi had a procedure for back pain in July and was later readmitted to hospital when the pain did not subside, according to South African news website News24.
He founded the IFP in 1975 as a national cultural movement that became a political force in what is now KwaZulu-Natal province, and his party was embroiled in bloody conflicts with the ANC in the 1980s and 1990s.
His last-minute decision to participate in the first post-apartheid election in 1994 brought peace between the two parties. The vote brought the ANC and its leader, the late Nelson Mandela, to power.
Buthelezi was a champion of his people and a prominent figure in the struggle against apartheid but his rivalry with the ANC led to fraught days and much bloodshed before South Africa was able to elect its first black leader.
Critics described Buthelezi as a war lord but to his legion of followers in the rural Zulu heartland, he was a visionary.
For a decade before the end of white rule in 1994, Buthelezi – dressed in leopard skins and waving a short silver-topped stick – was a familiar sight at rallies while Inkatha was embroiled in conflict with the ANC.
About 20,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes as fighting raged in Natal and in men’s hostels built to house migrant labourers who toiled in the goldmines near Johannesburg.
The price for peace was Buthelezi’s participation in a government of national unity as minister of home affairs – a ministry that became a byword for graft and incompetence under his watch.
“It’s not pleasant, it’s not easy for me. Neither is it easy for President Thabo Mbeki [Mandela’s successor] to have me and my colleagues in the cabinet. We did it to end a low intensity civil war,” Buthelezi told Reuters in an interview in July 2003.
He was also cast in other roles away from politics.
Buthelezi played his own great-grandfather King Cetshwayo in the 1964 film Zulu, which immortalised the 1879 defence of Rorke’s Drift by British troops against thousands of Zulu fighters but also spread the image of the Zulus beyond South Africa as a mighty warrior race.
He stepped down as the IFP’s leader in 2019, aged 90.
He was married to Irene Mzila, a nurse, eschewing the polygamy followed by many Zulu chiefs. They had three sons and four daughters.
GettyImages-1135666461.jpg?mbid=social_retweet)
English (US)