Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who has died aged 95, dedicated himself to acquiring and exploiting power over his Zulu tribe in South Africa to such effect that he became an asset to the Afrikaner nationalist administration of the apartheid state and its divide-and-rule strategy for controlling the majority black population. He was the founder of the Inkatha Freedom party, which was tolerated for a while by the African National Congress as an alliance partner in the fight against apartheid. After a breakdown in their relations in 1979, the IFP was a thorn in the ANC’s side, undermining much of what it was attempting to achieve. In the early 1980s confrontation between supporters of the two factions more and more frequently led to physical violence, injuries and deaths.
Key to Buthelezi’s influence in apartheid South Africa was the policy of the white rulers, laid out by the National party prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1959, of “separate development” areas across the country, to which members of various tribes were ascribed, while denying them basic rights in “white” South Africa. One of these 10 homelands – known as bantustans – was Buthelezi’s KwaZulu, which encompassed about 8 million people, one fifth of the South African population.
Buthelezi was appointed head of the KwaZulu territorial authority in 1970, and in 1976 was made its chief minister. He set about accumulating power, recruiting a massive bodyguard and turning the region into a personal fiefdom. Buthelezi went on to seek support in the west from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative US thinktank, which arranged meetings for him with Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr, Margaret Thatcher (who was impressed by him) and the German chancellor Helmut Kohl.
The ANC saw him as a dangerous and unpredictable rival, someone who was bolstering apartheid’s mendacious apparatus and undermining their opposition to the continuance of the bantustans. However, when an assassination squad got him into its sights, Oliver Tambo, then ANC president-in-exile, forbade any attempt on Buthelezi’s life, insisting he had to be defeated politically.
Tambo met Buthelezi for talks in London in 1979, but Buthelezi leaked his version of their discussions to a newspaper, and any idea of a rapprochement was strangled at birth. Buthelezi further rejected several ANC attempts to reduce the tensions with the IFP. Nevertheless he realised at the end of the 80s that the game was up for apartheid, refused serious dealings with the regime until Nelson Mandela was released by President FW de Klerk in 1990, and claimed that Mandela had thanked him for his support after he was set free.
In the government of national unity, announced after the 1994 general election, Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, and Buthelezi was made minister of home affairs. After the general election in 2004 the IFP left the governing coalition and went into opposition in parliament.
Buthelezi was born in the small town of Mahlabatini in KwaZulu to Mathole Buthelezi, chief of the Buthelezi clan, and Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu, sister of the Zulu King Solomon kaDinuzulu. The Zulus held a unique status in southern Africa for having roundly beaten the British army at the battle of Isandlwana in 1879. A British detachment held out against the Zulus in a much smaller clash at Rorke’s Drift, the subject of the 1964 blockbusting film Zulu, in which Buthelezi appeared in a cameo portraying Cetshwayo kaMpande, his great-grandfather, complete with leopard-skin robe and assegai spear.
Educated at local schools, he studied history and Bantu (native African) administration at the University of Fort Hare, a segregated institution for black people in the Eastern Cape province that also nurtured several other future black leaders, including Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Robert Sobukwe, charismatic leader of the radical Pan Africanist Congress.
Buthelezi joined the ANC Youth League and was expelled from Fort Hare after two years for his part in a student boycott. He completed his degree at the University of Natal (now University of KwaZulu-Natal) and then inherited the chieftainship of his clan in 1953, a position he retained for life.
After Buthelezi was appointed head of the KwaZulu territorial authority in 1970, King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu ascended to the Zulu throne in 1971, but Buthelezi made sure his authority was circumscribed, declaring himself to be the king’s prime minister on the British model.
He was aAppointed head of the KwaZulu territorial authority in 1970 and inBy accepting the post of chief minister of KwaZulu in 1976, Buthelezi bolstered and supported the concept of separate development.
He relied on his private army of warriors, whom he used as enforcers when needed. Paranoid about criticism, he would write long letters on an old typewriter and fire them off to his detractors. He was a poor orator who delivered rambling speeches; he earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records with an address to the KwaZulu legislative assembly that ended 11 days after it began.
Although he commanded significant support in his homeland, Buthelezi was not overwhelmingly popular. Some estimates suggest he enjoyed the backing of about half the population, including large numbers of the undereducated and unemployed.
After the election in 2004, Buthelezi stayed on in parliament as a member of parliament and leader of the IFP, retaining his seat and his party leadership in the elections of 2009 and 2014. In 2019 he announced that he would not seek re-election as president of the IFP, although he continued to serve as an MP.
Buthelezi married Irene Mzila in 1952. She died in 2019. They had eight children, of whom three survive him.
• Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, politician, born 27 August 1928; died 9 September 2023
• Dan van der Vat died in 2019
