Invictus - Carlin [51]
Mandela was well on the way to fulfilling his old vow to bring freedom to South Africa, but there were storms ahead, phenomena of political nature that he had not anticipated and that initially escaped his control. For, with the negotiations at the World Trade Centre proceeding at their stately pace, the right-wing war to scupper them was already under way. It was a war that took different forms, and one of them—the bloodiest—had a black face. For there was not only a white right wing in South Africa but also—far more difficult for an outsider to understand—a black right. And their interests converged.
The Zulu right-wing movement Inkatha and in particular its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi (“crazy like a fox,” as a foreign ambassador described him), were as fearful as the white right that if the ANC came to power it would exact dreadful retribution on them. For Buthelezi had gone along with apartheid, while pretending, when the occasion demanded it, that he did not. His rhetoric often aped the ANC’s, lashing the government’s racism and so forth, but the fact was that he had taken the apartheid shilling. Hendrick Verwoerd’s “grand apartheid” plan had been to divide South Africa into a series of tribal homelands, which he conceived of as internationally recognized sovereign states. The Dr. Strangelove of apartheid (“I never suffer from the nagging doubt,” Verwoerd once declared, “that perhaps I might be wrong”) imagined that each of South Africa’s nine tribal groups would have its own mini-state, while the white tribe would bag the mineral and farm-rich lion’s share, the big cities included. Buthelezi went along with the plan, accepting a little fiefdom financed entirely by Pretoria and named KwaZulu. Here he lived a grand life as “chief minister,” complete with a cabinet and ministers and a police force headed by an Afrikaner brigadier (in this terrain Pretoria called the shots) who was a former chief of white South Africa’s security police.
Buthelezi’s statelet might have been comical had it not been a tool of Botha’s counter insurgency. Guided by Pretoria’s in-house brigadier, Buthelezi dispatched his impi (Zulu for “battalion”) forces against the town-dwelling, English-speaking, ANC-supporting half of the Zulu population, resulting in battles between the two sides that caused thousands of deaths. The ANC and its supporters came to detest Buthelezi as much as Botha, if not more. Buthelezi feared that if Mandela ever took power he would lose the political and economic privileges derived from his complicity with the apartheid state. He also feared bloody revenge, as the white right did, which was why neither saw any benefit in a negotiation process whose end was majority rule.
Within six months of Mandela’s release, Inkatha’s spear-wielding warriors had extended their war beyond Zulu country to the townships around Johannesburg, mounting assaults on the community at large, knowing that the vast majority were going to be supporters of the ANC. Hundreds died—shot, speared, knifed, or burned—every month. In their attacks, which continued for the first three years after Mandela’s release, Buthelezi’s thugs counted on the overt assistance of the uniformed police, whose armored cars escorted the Inkatha impis in and out of battle. Covertly, elements of the security police and military intelligence were providing the Inkatha terrorists with guns. The objective was quite clear: to provoke the ANC into a series of mini-civil wars in the townships and render the planned new order ungovernable.
For all Mandela’s calculation and charm, he had moments of towering indignation, in most cases precipitated by the slaughter in the townships and by De Klerk, whom he now regretted having called “a man of integrity” and accused of