When I was a kid growing up in Ginsberg, Steve Biko’s hometown, there was a song whose lyrics went like this: “mZulu, mXhosa, mSotho hlanganani, izophela i-apartheid.” What I find instructive about that song is that it did not deny the existence of our respective ethnic identities. All it asked was that such identities do not come at the expense of our national aspirations as black people.
Biko defined blacks as “all those who are by law and tradition, politically, socially and economically discriminated against and identify themselves as a unit for the realisation of their aspirations”.
The latter part of the definition is important because at the heart of nation building is identification. As the great scholar Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, the nation “could only arise when substantial groups of people were in a position to think of themselves as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people, if never meeting and yet proceeding along the same trajectory”. He noted how between 1500 and 1800 this national solidarity imagination developed and spread through various technologies, particularly print media such as newspapers.
Readers of this newspaper in Limpopo are connected to those in Eastern Cape by the fact that most of what is reported here affects us all, and we can assume a common understanding of the stories that are being told.
France is a good example of the idea of the nation. Most groups who lived in France did not recognise themselves as French until the late 19th and early 20th centuries — 200 years after the French Revolution. It took education, infrastructure that connected different parts of the country and the system of education to enable the Bretons to see themselves as French.
A balance between regional and ethnic identity and national identification is critical for the stability of any multicultural society
A balance between regional and ethnic identity and national identification is critical for the stability of any multicultural society. As political philosopher Michael Walzer argued: “Civil religion is more likely to succeed by accommodating than opposing the multiple identities of the men and women it aims to engage. Its aim after all is not full-time conversion but political socialisation.”
From its inception in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the African nationalist movement represented this political socialisation in the values of building an inclusive society that are now articulated in our constitution as our civil religion. The homeland system was meant to prevent the realisation of such a vision.
Biko laid bare how the apartheid government established the homelands as part of its strategy of divide-and-rule. In an essay titled “Let’s talk about the Bantustan” he described the homelands as “the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians” and noted how “Bantustan leaders [were] subconsciously siding and abetting in the total subjugation of black people in this country”. He then trained his eyes on Mangosuthu Buthelezi: “For me as a black person it is extremely painful to see a man who easily could have been my leader being so misused by the cruel and exploitative white world.”
A few years later, Buthelezi was chased away from the funeral of his best friend at university, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. Were it not for Archbishop Desmond Tutu putting his body between him and the crowd, Buthelezi might have been killed. To them he was actively undermining the very idea of pan-African unity that Sobukwe had worked so hard to bring into being.
It is for all of these reasons that I was shocked by Bongani Ngqulunga’s paean to Buthelezi on these pages last week. I was taken aback by the reference to Buthelezi as an African nationalist, given the author’s own argument that he had decided to sup with the devil to attain a sectional, tribal interest — the restoration of the Zulu house. In this formulation “he was caught in the dilemmas of a Zulu nationalist cause on the one hand and the broader African nationalist on the other”.
He continues: “For better or worse he made the decision to pursue his life’s political mission of restoring King Cetshwayo’s throne by working within the institutions of an oppressive state.” I fail to see the “better” in that decision and its calamitous results for so many people. In plain English, the argument seems to be that it did not matter what the oppressive state did to most black people as long as the Zulu throne was restored. I doubt whether most Zulu people would go along with that assertion, and that is because the idea of national solidarity over tribal interest was formulated by Zulu leaders in the first place, especially Pixley ka Seme.
The author elevates Buthelezi above the likes of Seme, John Langalibalele Dube and Albert Luthuli because he was from within the Zulu royal house. We need not belabour the foolhardiness of that argument, save to say we would not be living in a democratic South Africa were it not for the vision of Dube, Seme and Luthuli.
Reading the article, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was one stable Zulu royal house inherited from the past. A cursory look at Zulu history shows how the fratricidal nature of monarchical succession weakened the kingdom and opened it for attack by the Boers and British alike. The source of the fratricide was Shaka’s decision not to have an heir, for fear that such an heir would seek to usurp power and he might have to kill him. Shaka’s brother Dingane adopted the same principle but killed his brothers, sparing only Mpande and Gqugqu. He would live to regret sparing Mpande. Just as Dingane had killed Shaka, Mpande would collude with the Boers to chase Dingane out of the kingdom.
Mpande was the first Zulu king to die of natural causes. But as Shaka had feared, Mpande’s son Cetshwayo sought to usurp power, in part because the father favoured another son, Mbuyazi. The rivalry between Cetshwayo and Mbuyazi led to one of the three civil wars that engulfed the kingdom between 1840 and 1880. Cetshwayo defeated Zibhebhu but was himself chased out of his kingdom after a rebellion by his half-brother Hamu and influential chiefs such as Zibhebhu.
It is ironic for Buthelezi to claim to restore Cetshwayo’s glory when his great-grandfather Mnyamana, once Cetshwayo’s chief councillor, ultimately betrayed the king and threw in his lot with the British. What is surprising is how Buthelezi would fall for the same divide-and-rule strategy that whites had used to undermine the Zulu kingdom. Those who do not learn from history are indeed bound to repeat it, and that is exactly what he did in buying into the divide and rule of the homeland system.
We need only remember while also forgetting. After all, that is the basis of our rapprochement with the apartheid government
Part of the fraud that Biko identified in the Bantustan system is the persistent but false narrative that the Zulu people existed outside the liberation struggle, and that the ANC was a Xhosa organisation. But as I have pointed out it was Dube and Seme who formulated the idea of African nationalism. On top of that, most ANC presidents were Zulu: Dube, Josiah Gumede, Seme, Luthuli and Jacob Zuma. And that is as it should be, as the Zulus constitute the largest segment of the African population.
Now for a qualification, again based on a formulation that Anderson borrowed from the French philosopher Ernest Renan in his lecture “What is a nation?” delivered in 1882 at the Sorbonne. This is the paradoxical concept of remembering and forgetting. The nation is simultaneously implored to remember and commemorate the atrocities of the past (apartheid) while forgetting them for most of the time if we are survive as a nation (think Truth and Reconciliation Commission). I invited Anderson to speak at Wits University some years ago and he made the same argument using the example of June 16 — that we had to remember what happened that day, but we would also have to forget it if we were to save ourselves from vengeance and build a new nation.
I had narrow escapes with Inkatha when I was a student activist in a Wits University dormitory not too far from the hostels in Diepkloof, Soweto. And yet in 2001 I invited Buthelezi to deliver the first Robert Sobukwe Lecture at the University of Fort Hare — on account of his friendship with Sobukwe. In Renan’s formulation, I was “obliged to have forgotten” his role as a Bantustan leader, but also just as obliged to remember that role if history was not to repeat itself. The upshot of it all is that we do not have to falsify history in evaluating Buthelezi’s role in our national life. We need only remember while also forgetting. After all, that is the basis of our rapprochement with the apartheid government.
• Xolela Mangcu is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Life Writing, Wolfson College, Oxford University
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