A chief’s princely agenda

If I were Gatsha Buthelezi, I would also be more than peeved at Mzala’s Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda, not least because in the book the author casts aspersions on Buthelezi’s paternity and claim to the title “Prince”. Calling into question someone’s parentage cuts deep in a society where “Zuluness” is associated with the Law of the Father, and without an affirmation of one’s father’s belonging to this ethnic identity, the mother’s position as a Zulu princess becomes null and void.

It is, however, surprising that in a book dedicated to a trenchant and Marxist reading of the creation of Bantustans and the role of Mangosuthu Buthelezi in homeland politics, Mzala should have spent so much time scratching this scar on Buthelezi’s persona. It is as if Mzala himself was attempting to affirm and legitimise his Zuluness and his claim to this ethnic moniker. The “insider info” dished out in the book is deliciously scandalous to read, especially since Buthelezi is no longer here to be a counterpoise and gadfly. Yet, hidden behind the smooth surface of jibes and side swipes lies the uncomfortable truth that despite its best intentions and deployment of perspicacious academic analysis, the book doesn’t quite explain the mystery of Buthelezi’s popularity and ultimate endurance in Bantustan and post-apartheid politics.

The longevity may be explained by his cantankerous nature and his ability to eviscerate his opponents in both English and Zulu, but it could also be that Buthelezi is and was the epitome of what South African politics was always going to be, namely a politics of luminaries rather than policies. It could even be said that Buthelezi is South Africa’s “Teflon Don” since he managed to slip through every noose knotted for him.

We can, for example, compare Mzala’s book to Charles van Onselen’s The Fox & the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath (2007), or to a book that defined my understanding of a biographical subject, namely Sebastian de Grazia’s Machiavelli in Hell (1989). Both of these books attempt to turn calumny and infamy into begrudging awe. The fine line between fame and notoriety is therefore crossed many times if one is to write a convincing “anti-biography biography”. The delicate balance between excoriation and censure can only be defined by the author’s ability to penetrate the mind of even the most repulsive or volatile character. The author, in other words, has to be willing to walk on the dark side and share in the psychology of the psychopath, con artist, parvenu or, as in the case of Buthelezi, a shapeshifting nemesis to the country’s liberation movements.

What makes Buthelezi compelling as a villain is exactly that not only did he live to tell the tale, but he also managed to deftly reinvent himself as soon as his former enemies were safely ensconced in positions of power. Even here, he could be a formidable and terrifying contrarian, or he could be a dapper politician who wears a fascinator to the opening of the country’s parliament. If a person has ever been like quicksilver, it was Buthelezi.

As far as Marxist theory is concerned, Mzala’s book is unmistakably committed; it is inherently anticapitalist, explicitly pro-trade unions and worker movements; and it doesn’t leave space for capitalism or apartheid to redeem itself with reforms. In the 1980s, such clear-cut theorising about the state of global capital and the inevitability of working-class victory in the Grand Struggle (à la Marx, Lenin and Mao) of labour versus capital, livelihoods versus profits and humanism versus mechanisation was in vogue and perhaps a necessary step towards developing an anticolonial position. Without, for example, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) or Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), there would have been no launching pad for thinkers such as Mzala Nxumalo who wanted to apply Karl Marx’s theories to the specific conditions of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the power of mining capital. However, as it becomes apparent, some of the ingredients of the Buthelezi story do not neatly fit into the Marxist critique, and so it is that the ascendancy of chiefs and “traditional leaders” under apartheid becomes one of the central paradoxes of the book and of Buthelezi’s character.

In the introductory chapter, Mzala sets out his own case clearly when he states that “... the tendency has been to equate nonviolence, as a strategy, with the economic policy of monopoly capitalism. Thus, the rejection of armed struggle and an open commitment to the capitalist system have become the characteristics of the black leader whom Western governments are willing to back in preparation for the post-apartheid era”. This, therefore, becomes the first chink in Buthelezi’s armour; he was a black leader who preached nonviolence and became, at least for a while, the darling of the local and international press and a minor celebrity abroad. But on the unstable ground of ethnic identity and identification.

In the same way that the apartheid state thought that it understood how ethnic identities work, Mzala seems to be making the same assumption about his positionality. In his case, the ethnicity argument rests on a distinction that could be labelled as “Good Zulu” versus “Bad Zulu”. Buthelezi automatically becomes the latter because he used his ethnic identity to climb up the ladder of the apartheid hierarchy, and also because his political party, Inkatha, fomented violence in the name of Zulu nationalism.

In the main, Buthelezi’s struggle, if it can be called that, was about reconciling African versus ethnic nationalism. Although Mzala never quite expresses it this way, Buthelezi’s ambition, and not only his agenda, was bifurcated. He was caught between two warring worlds — the glamorous world of Zulu royalty and nobility versus the dreary and rule-bound world of “Bantu” administration bureaucracy. Each world offered its attractions as well as its own quagmires.

The proof that this was a general struggle and not one unique to Buthelezi is the fact that there were so many leaders (including the ones who later became revolutionaries) who succumbed to the allure of consecrated ethnic power. There is no better example of the latter than Chief Albert Luthuli who became a chief, president of the ANC and a Nobel laureate even while being threatened by the crushing presence of the apartheid state and its clandestine apparatus. In some senses, as Mzala also makes the point, Luthuli and Buthelezi were diametrical opposites — one was a social climber who ardently pursued and acquired the coveted position of “chief” while the other became so noxious to the goals of apartheid’s separate development that in 1952 he was deposed from his position as chief. But what did it mean to be “chief” and why was it so central to Buthelezi’s self-image?

Although Mzala’s narrative revolves around the passing of the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 and the manner in which it changed the meaning of chieftaincy, it is fair to say that this role in Nguni society was never as transparent as he may have wanted to present it in the book. In other words, rather than there being a contrast between “chiefs in precolonial times” versus “chiefs under apartheid”, the whole question of the role of aristocracy in a modern society is the one that needs to be answered.

Buthelezi was adept at manipulating the ambivalences and silences around the power of aristocratic belonging and claims. Thus, when Mzala questions how, as the son of a Zulu princess — Princess Magogo, the daughter of King Dinuzulu — Buthelezi could claim to be a prince, he is not mentioning that it was the mother, not the son, who “birthed” a chief. The story is a vexing one with many details, but the shortest version is that when Princess Magogo married into the Buthelezi clan, she knew what she was there to do. Her job was to ensure that her son and, therefore, her descendants became the rulers of the Buthelezi clan. Thus, regardless of the fuel added by the apartheid state, Buthelezi was promoted by his mother, who outsmarted the entire Buthelezi clan.

Such female-engineered coups d’état are not unusual in African history. Take the Ethiopian example. Haile Selassie (aka Ras Tafari Makonnen) became an emperor because his mother spread the rumour that the rightful heir was an apostate who had converted to Islam, and in a society based on the Solomonic myth of descent and Coptic orthodoxy, this was a no-no, and the prospective candidate was “deposed” before he could even become emperor. Inevitably, these powerful and conniving women are described as possessing occult power, and Mzala comes close to saying the same, since he argues that Buthelezi’s father, Mathole Buthelezi, was no longer at an age where he could “father a child”, which is a biologically bizarre claim to make. Thus, rather than being an upstart and usurper, Buthelezi is of a piece with many other African rulers whose mothers eliminated the competition, undermined the rule of primogeniture and ensured that their sons became heirs.

Related to the controversy regarding Buthelezi’s supposed immaculate conception is the history of the Buthelezi clan. As with the previous reliance on oral tradition, Mzala repeats a well-worn story that the Buthelezis are originally from a Sotho ancestor and herbalist whose original name was unpronounceable and so people named him after his profession — “-butha” (collect) and “izintelezi” (protective medicines). Although this is a charming piece of wordplay, it doesn’t quite match the one that we told each other when we were children.

According to our childish version of the Buthelezi surname, the story goes that there was a woman called Zi who brewed such delicious beer that when her happy imbibers wanted more, they would shout, “Buthele, Zi!” (“Pour it, Zi!”). So, which is the real story? Do the Buthelezis originate from a Sotho herbalist with an unpronounceable name, or do they hail from a beer brewer called Zi? The beauty of Nguni languages is that you can create a million words from just one root, like “-butha” or “-thela” (pour), and because the languages are also tonal, the amount of wordplay is more or less infinite.

Beyond these questions of what it means to be “Buthelezi” or “Zulu” is the formation of the political party or cultural movement that Buthelezi presided over from its inception in 1975 to his stepping down in 2019. This long reign is again not unusual on the African continent, where presidents-for-life abound. In the case of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the power of the creation of the political party rests on the fact that it was a revival of a cultural movement that was created in 1922 as Inkatha ka Zulu and given explicit support by the then Zulu king, Solomon kaDinuzulu. The use of the word “Inkatha” to symbolise the unity of the Zulu nation is not a move that is unique to Buthelezi’s political party.

Yet, in Mzala’s book, Inkatha inevitably gets associated with the history of violence, and although this is not undeserved, there is an opportunity missed to have explored the meaning of cultural ambiguity and how Buthelezi manipulated the enduring power of Zulu kingship to present his political party as representing “all Zulus”. More importantly, as the inquiry that became known as the Goldstone Commission revealed, much of the violence that was termed “political” had at its root other kinds of activities like the illicit trade in firearms, illegal gold smuggling and smelting, conflict within the taxi industry and the direct assistance of “Zulu” militia by members of the South African Defence Force.

At the time when Mzala was writing, it was probably too far-fetched to have imagined that the identity defined as “Zulu” included so many diverse dilutions and amendments. In addition, the violence of the 1980s and 1990s was a contest over the many futures and roads that South Africa could have taken. As Mzala explores in his book, Inkatha and Buthelezi chose federalism and stuck to this ideological position. Mzala’s own vision was of a socialist constitutional order. The irony, from the position of the present, is that we are a melange of these diverse futures; there is a touch of federalism, a touch of welfare statism, a touch of capitalism and a touch of constitutionalism.

We have certainly not become the kind of “People’s Republic” that Mzala may have envisioned. As South Africa celebrates the 30th anniversary of the advent of democracy, the election posters for the IFP (the now renamed Inkatha Freedom Party) prominently feature the now deceased Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. Nothing more testifies to the man’s beatification than the image of an affable and smiling Buthelezi dressed in an ingwe pillbox hat or black beret. The hashtag for the election campaign is #DoItForShenge, an unambiguous allusion to Buthelezi’s clan name as well as his status as an ancestor — a patriarchal one to boot.

Although Mzala’s book was written about Buthelezi, with hindsight, it is also possible to state that the book is about the history of Zulu patriarchy, as much of the book’s argument revolves around the illegitimacy of Buthelezi’s claim to hereditary power. Mzala is consistent in his poking at this villainous usurpation of power, but is not as harshly critical of his own admiration for Zulu patriarchy, since this seems to be a hornet’s nest that should not be stirred.

In addition, I think Mzala never fully explored the question of what an anti-biography biography should conclude about its main protagonist. In other words, Mzala never fully explored the possibilities inherent in the genre. He was so focused on his Marxist critique that he didn’t get time to ask the pertinent question — does Buthelezi deserve this kind of anti-biography biography?

• Mokoena is an associate professor and researcher at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Chief with a Double Agenda by Mzala (Nobleman Nxumalo) is published by Jacana Media