Supported by
Mangosuthu Buthelezi Dies at 95; Zulu Nationalist and a Mandela Rival
He was a powerful force as apartheid ended and bargaining over South Africa’s future began, emerging as a voice for tribal and ethnic rights, and powers for regional governments.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Zulu nationalist who positioned himself as Nelson Mandela’s most powerful Black rival in South Africa’s tortuous transformation from a white segregationist society to a multiracial democracy in the 1990s, died on Saturday. He was 95.
His death was announced in a statement by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa. The statement did not say where he died or give a cause.
Mr. Buthelezi, President Ramaphosa said, had been “an outstanding leader in the political and cultural life of our nation, including the ebbs and flows of our liberation struggle, the transition which secured our freedom in 1994 and our democratic dispensation.”
In the political turmoil of apartheid’s final years, Mangosuthu Buthelezi (pronounced mahn-goh-SOO-TOO boo-teh-LAY-zee) was the third man in South Africa: the linchpin with whom F.W. de Klerk, president of the white minority government, and Mr. Mandela, a global symbol of resistance to injustice released from prison after 27 years, had to reckon to hammer out a new Constitution and the future of the nation.
Proud, ambitious, descended from royalty and intolerant of criticism, Mr. Buthelezi was a hereditary chief of the Zulus, South Africa’s largest ethnic group. Like his battle-hardened ancestors, who had challenged colonial invaders in the 19th century, Mr. Buthelezi sometimes wore leopard skins and wielded assegai spears, but only in ritual war dances for political advantage. He was also the prime minister of KwaZulu, the homeland of six million Zulus, and the founder of the Inkatha Freedom Party, a Zulu political and cultural movement with 1.9 million members.
Beyond claiming to speak for nearly a quarter of the nation’s 28 million Black inhabitants in 1990, Mr. Buthelezi appealed to many white South Africans by advocating a peaceful transition to democracy and free enterprise, and by fiercely opposing Mr. Mandela’s African National Congress and its demands for international sanctions, armed struggle and a socialist revolution to crush Pretoria’s segregationist regime.
Advertisement