Mangosuthu Buthelezi, historic leader of the Zulu Inkatha party, behind the most significant violence in South Africa before the first multiracial elections in 1994, died on Saturday September 9 at the age of 95, the president announced .
“It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, traditional Prime Minister of the Zulu King and Nation, Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Inkatha Party,” Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement.
“He died in the early hours of the day, just two weeks after celebrating his 95th birthday,” said the Head of State, hailing a “tremendous leader who played an important role in the history of our country for seven decades.”
Born in August 1928 into the Zulu royal family, Mangosuthu Gathsa Buthelezi has long embodied the proud and warlike spirit of the country’s greatest ethnic group. Initially a member of the historical ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), he created the nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in 1975, initially envisaged as a Zulu cultural organization. The rivalry between the two parties will be bloody.
Deadly Territorial Wars
The Inkatha party, which he led for more than forty years, led deadly territorial wars with ANC activists in the townships in the 1980s and 1990s. This violence left more than 5,000 dead.
Buthelezi was accused of playing into the hands of white power by inciting violence against the ANC just before the historic 1994 elections, which could have derailed the liberation movement against apartheid. The Inkatha party has lost a lot of influence over time, between quarrels over its leadership and calls for its withdrawal to make way for new blood.
Having served as Prime Minister of the Kwazulu Bantustan – these pseudo “independent” territorial entities assigned to blacks under apartheid – the Zulu leader has always fiercely denied having collaborated with or been an ally of the white racist regime.
Thin, slender, with rectangular glasses on his nose, Buthelezi often covered himself with leopard skins, a Zulu tradition, to lead parades of Inkhata activists, carrying shields and spears, in his strongholds of Johannesburg or Durban.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi is also in the Guinness World Records for the longest speech to a legislative assembly, in March 1993, spread over eleven days, with an average of two and a half hours of speaking per day.
At the beginning of the 2020s, the nonagenarian was the spokesperson for the customary Zulu king, Misuzulu Zulu also called Misuzulu kaZwelithini, crowned last year.
