Away from the public eye and the outgoing cultural ceremonies of the Zulu people, Mangosuthu Buthelezi was a reserved figure, and his faith was important to him. His Christianity was that of a member of the Anglican Church of the province of South Africa, and I first met him four decades ago while spending six months as a priest at All Saints’ Church, Melmoth, in KwaZulu-Natal.
He was not given to exuberant Evangelical outbursts, but lived out his faith day to day, expressed in what he saw as his duty to the people around him and thus to the nation he led.
His New Year sermon to the City of London in the early 1990s was a model of quiet, confident faith, and he instituted regular prayer breakfasts in Durban on the American model to which up to 100 people would be invited.
