Imagery, Symbolism and Tradition in a South African Bantustan: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha, and Zulu History

Abstract

During the precolonial period Zulu identity was based on a set of cultural markers defined by the royal family. But European linguists extended the borders of Zulu, as a written language, to include the peoples living to the south of the Tugela river in the colony of Natal. Folklorists, anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists, as well as European employers, adopted this view of the Zulu as a people or Volk. Following the defeat of the Zulu kingdom in 1879 and the decline of the royal family, migrant workers increasingly returned home with this new notion of what it meant to be Zulu. This essentially European interpretation of the word was embraced and spread by Christian converts who, in the twentieth century, sought to mobilize an ethnic political following. Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi has continued with this tradition. In his speeches he represents the Zulu in primordial terms as a bounded group that historically has occupied both Natal and the old precolonial kingdom. The bantustan of KwaZulu, delineated and defined by the policy of apartheid, is presented as the natural heir to the Zulu kingdom, and the Inkatha Freedom Party is portrayed as the guardian of the essence of Zuluness. An attractive historical self-imagery encourages people to define themselves in an exclusive manner as Zulu. Firm values and standards provide an ontological security and a network of assistance for sons abroad. Through a martial imagery, Buthelezi has represented the seven million Zulu as historically the most powerful obstacle to white supremacy. But since the resurgence of nationalist politics in the mid-1980s, and especially since the democratization started in 1990, Inkatha has attempted to attract the Zulu as a people in opposition to the ANC and their allies. This has most visibly resulted in a violent struggle for power; but it has also led to a virulent struggle over what it means to be Zulu. As South Africans scramble for new ways to resolve the crisis in their country, historians scramble for new ways of looking at the society that gave birth to this crisis. During the 1970s the decolonization of Anglophone history was marked by a long debate between liberal and neo-Marxist, or radical, historians.' More recently this debate has waned as the sharper edges of the two 1. On the development of liberal historiography, see C. C. Saunders, The Making of the South African Past (Cape Town, 1988). Neo-Marxist and Afrikaner historiography are more fully treated in K. Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Johannesburg, 1988). The radical approach is well covered by a special issue of the Radical History Review 46/47 (1990). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.156 on Thu, 15 Jun 2017 18:02:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms