Inkatha’s Attempted Truce with ANC

Inkatha’s Attempted Truce with ANC

On 27 November 1985, the Inkatha National Cultural Liberation Movement (aka “Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe”) proposed a truce with the African National Congress (ANC) in Lusaka, Zambia, as an effort to calm violent clashes between members of the two parties and to cover its role in the perpetuation of such violence. The Secretary General of Inkatha, Oscar Dhlomo, communicated the peace offer to the ANC in exile, as Inkatha “consistently” maintained that it was not responsible for the violence between the ANC and itself. In an attempt to bring itself closer to the ANC, it deceitfully blamed violence on the apartheid government.

Chief Gatsha Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a former member of the ANC Youth League, founded Inkatha on 21 March 1975, using a structure rooted on what was a 1920s cultural organisation for the Zulu speaking population, known as “Inkatha ka Zulu” (“Zulu Council”), which was established by his uncle, Zulu King Solomon kaDinuzulu. Because of Buthelezi’s former position in the ANC, the two organisations were initially very close, and each supported the other in the anti-apartheid struggle. However, by the late 1970s, tensions began emerging between Gatsha Buthelezi and other leaders of the liberation struggle within the country, as he firmly asserted himself within the apartheid Bantustan system.

In London, 1979, the two parties established a co-operative relationship and mutual respect, and “It was also in this context that we maintained regular contact with Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of the KwaZulu bantustan”, according to ANC President Oliver Tambo. “We sought that this former member of the ANC Youth League who had taken up his position in the KwaZulu bantustan after consultations with our leadership, should use the legal opportunities provided by the bantustan programme to participate in the mass mobilisation of our people on the correct basis of the orientation of the masses to focus on the struggle for a united and non-racial South Africa. In the course of our discussions with him, we agreed that this would also necessitate the formation of a mass democratic organisation in the bantustan that he headed. Inkatha originated from this agreement.”

However, Gatsha Mangosuthu Buthelezi used this relationship with the ANC as an opportunity to outshine those who opposed him, such as Dr Ntatho Motlana, who was the chairperson of the Soweto Committee of Ten. Dr Motlana had remarked on one occasion that Gatsha Buthelezi was a “collaborator” and a “traitor”, particularly as a homeland (Bantustan) leader, he was trying to help his apartheid masters to sell the policy of apartheid.

For instance, on one significant occasion, following Buthelezi announcing to his Langa township supporters that he had met Oliver Tambo, Motlana rejected this claim, saying that “Tambo could not meet with traitors”. Buthelezi took this as an offensive attack on his reputation, especially since it occurred after an incident when he was impolitely received by students the University of Zululand and was rudely ejected at the funeral of Robert Sobukwe. Both these incidents deeply wounded his pride.

ANC President Tambo maintained that, “Unfortunately, we failed to mobilise our own people to take on the task of resurrecting Inkatha as the kind of organisation that we wanted, owing to the understandable antipathy of many of our comrades towards what they considered as working within the bantustan system. The task of reconstituting Inkatha therefore fell on Gatsha Buthelezi himself, who then built Inkatha as a personal power base far removed from the kind of organisation we had visualised, as an instrument for the mobilisation of our people in the countryside into an active and conscious force for revolutionary change.”

“In the first instance,” Tambo averred, “Gatsha dressed Inkatha in the clothes of the ANC, exactly because he knew that the masses to whom he was appealing were loyal to the ANC and had for six decades adhered to our movement as their representative and their leader. Later, when he thought he had sufficient of a base, he also used coercive methods against the people to force them to support Inkatha.”

As a Bantustan leader, the power of Buthelezi depended on the apartheid state and economy. With anti-apartheid leaders inside South Africa and abroad demanding sanctions, Buthelezi opposed these demands, thus he came to be regarded more and more as a government puppet, along with other Bantustan leaders. His tribal loyalties and focus on ethnic interests over national unity were also criticised as contributing to the divisive programme of the fascist apartheid regime. This led to a virtual civil war between Zulu loyalist supporters and ANC members in Natal and some parts of the Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Vaal (PWV) areas.

In the early 1980s, Inkatha supporters unleashed violence upon those who were opposed to the KwaZulu Bantustan and towards Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, especially in the townships and institutions wherein Inkatha believed to be yielding influence. It became worse as Inkatha support deteriorated when the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in 1983 and began to expand into what Inkatha regarded as its stronghold of Natal, and particularly those areas considered to be part of the KwaZulu Bantustan. The ANC had come to be regarded as a thorn in the side of Inkatha, which wielded much more political force through the United Democratic Front (UDF) than Inkatha.

Inkatha’s leadership used to insist that it shared the same objective as the ANC “Mission-in-Exile”, the ending of the apartheid system. The principal differences, according to Inkatha, were about strategy, and in particular the ANC’s commitment to seizing power by violent means. Gatsha Buthelezi often emphasised that he was not prepared to assist in realising the ANC’s vision of “a future socialist revolution in which the country will be transformed into a Marxist one-Party state” (Johann Langner).

Buthelezi also claimed that the ANC external mission had initially hoped that it could use Inkatha as a “surrogate liberation movement inside South Africa which could employ its massive organisational network to advance the ANC version of the liberation struggle”. When the ANC found that Inkatha had other ideals and strategies, Johann Langner claimed, “it began an international campaign to denigrate Buthelezi for his anti-violence stand and his alleged co-operation with the apartheid regime”.

Fearing erosion of his power, Buthelezi collaborated with the apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF) and received military training for Zulu militia from SADF special forces starting in the 1980s, as part of “Operation Marion”. This operation became an important element of the apartheid government’s response to the rising popular revolution led by the UDF and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) during the 1980s. Although the Inkatha leadership confessed non-violence, there was clear evidence that during the time that negotiations were taking place in the early 1990s, Inkatha and ANC members were at war with each other, and Inkatha’s Self-Protection Units (SPUs) confronted the ANC-created Self-Defence Units (SDUs), which were intended to protect the communities from apartheid violence.

During the phase of establishing a constitution for South Africa and prior to the first free elections in South African history, bloodshed frequently occurred between Inkatha and the ANC, as both attempted to campaign in each other’s Natal and PWV strongholds. Inkatha members became involved in several massacres, including the Trust Feed massacre on 3 December 1988, and the Boipatong massacre on 17 June 1992, among others. In November 1993, Inkatha signed a solidarity pact with the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), with the AWB providing the IFP with military training and agreeing that “Boer and Zulu would fight together for freedom and land should they be confronted by a common enemy”. In 1991 the apartheid government admitted that it had secretly subsidized Inkatha in the latter’s deepening rivalry with the ANC.

In 1994 the name of Inkatha was changed to Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). The party was established in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, after which branches of the party quickly sprang up in the Transvaal, and with less impact in the Orange Free State and the Western Cape. The conflict’s turning point was the 28 March 1994 shooting incident that took place at Shell House, the headquarters of the ANC, in central Johannesburg, wherein ANC security guards returned fire, killing nineteen IFP supporters, who attempted to invade Shell House in protest against the 1994 elections. ANC security guards claimed that the IFP supporters were storming the building, gunfire from the crowd rang out and bullets struck the walls of the Shell House building.

The visit of Inkatha to Lusaka on 27 November 1985, under the leadership of Secretary General, Oscar Dhlomo, was part of the massive pilgrimages to the ANC that occurred in that year, leading to the ANC President Oliver Tambo asking the question, “What replaces the apartheid system? What would be their position in the new system? Well, they cannot look forward to the kind of system that the ANC has in mind under the Freedom Charter …a system that falls short of the stipulations of the Freedom Charter but moves away from a system that thrives on violence and produces counter-violence.”

According to President Oliver Tambo, “we certainly do not think that the regime and its supporters are really thinking of an alternative to the apartheid system. They are thinking of something which may be slightly different. It might even be called something else, not apartheid, but would in practice be apartheid. We must protect our struggle against forces which sound correct but whose objective is entirely to destroy the cause, the objective, of our revolutionary struggle.”

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
Oliver Tambo, “The Eyes of the World are Focussed on this Conference: Political Report of the National Executive Committee to the National Consultative Conference of the African National Congress, Kabwe, Zambia, 17 June 1985”, Sechaba, December 1985.
Oliver Tambo, “On Talks”, Sechaba, February 1986.
Johann Langner, “Inkatha”, Africa Insight, Vol. 17, Issue 1, 1987.
Mzala, “Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda”, Zed Books, 1988.
Lesley J Fordred, “Narrative, Conflict and Change: Journalism in the New South Africa”, Doctor of Philosophy Thesis: University of Cape Town, January 1999.
Luli Callinicos, “Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains”, David Philip, 2004.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”, Penguin, 2016.

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