Inkatha attacks bring Natal province to the brink of civil war AT LEAST 200 people have died since the beginning of September in clashes between supporters and opponents of Inkatha, the reactionary Zulu movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. Such confrontations are nothing new. Buthelezi has never accepted the growth of the more militant forces opposing apartheid, the main ones being the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
In contrast to past conflicts the fighting has been developing on an unprecedented scale. Natal, and especially the Pietermaritzburg region, are today on the brink of a civil war which is threatening the very survival of the progressive sores and one of the causes of the clashes between residents and Inkatha thugs.
Buthelezi has always cultivated an image as a firm opponent of apartheid and of the government's plans for his bantustan. He was expelled in 1950 from the Fort Hare
University, when he joined the ANC's youth organization, a training ground for cadres. However, he rapidly abandoned the radical road, succeeding his father in 1953 as head of the 20,000-member Buthelezi clan. The South African authorities took five years to ratify his accession to the chieftainship.
During the 1970s, Gatsha Buthelezi climbed up the rungs of the hierarchy until, in 1976, he became the chief minister of his bantustan. It was also in this period that he reactivated Inkatha ka Zulu, an organization with cultural aims that had not survived the 1930s. Buthelezi renamed it Inkatha ye Nkululeko ye Sizwe (National
Cultural Liberation Movement) and transformed it into a political organization, It was to be his party, his mouthpiece, his means of controlling the KwaZulu population and his trump card for establishing his credibility.
Anti-apartheid activists targeted by Inkatha
Inkatha is intended to be the sole party in
KwaZulu. Buthelezi "has often spoken of me mappropnateness of an organized op- the inappropriateness of an organized opposition in KwaZulu's political system. He considers that the traditional policy was one of consensus, and that in particular the Zulus should remain faithful to their past. The [KwaZulu] Assembly agreed with this proposal in 1974. It adopted a motion demanding that the minister of Bantu administration and development grant KwaZulu the right to oversee or ban parties before independence." 2
Inkatha and the KwaZulu police - there is often not much difference - have unremittingly persecuted anti-apartheid activists opposed to Buthelezi or those who simply refused to accept his authority. Protesting students, local populations who resisted the incorporation of their areas in KwaZulu or who refused to join Inkatha en masse have all been targets.
On May 5, 1984, Inkatha thugs attacked a rally held by the UDF to celebrate May Day. On March 29, 1986, the second conference on the National Educational Crisis Committee was held in Durban to debate the question of the high-school boycott, which at the time had very active support. Inkatha supporters attacked it, after burning 1. The Zulus also represent the dominant ethnic group (20%) in Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging and in the Transvaal, where half of South Africa's industrial production is concentrated. See Philip Smit, "Process of black urbanisation" in H Giliomee and Lawrence Schlemmer, Up against the fence, David Philip, 1985. 2. Jeffrey Butler, Robert I Rotberg and John Adams, The Black homelands of South Africa, University of California Press, 1977. [All quotations re-translated from French.] opposition in the region. NATHAN PALMER NATHAN DAI MED T HE REASONS for this murder-
Nous fury cannot, however, be understood without analyzing Buthelezi himself, his movement and the policy that he has been following toward progressive forces, as well as toward the white parties. The special features of Natal, the province in which these events have been unfolding, also have to be looked at.
Unlike other potentates that Pretoria set up in granting travesties of independence, the "chief minister" of KwaZulu is not a mere puppet. He is a potential trump card for those in South Africa and the Western countries who are worried about the dangers that will arise for capitalist interests when apartheid enters its death agony.
Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi has probably done everything possible to prepare himself for this role, with the help of most of the Western media. Does he not boast of his former membership of the African National Congress (ANC), which maintained semi-public contacts with him until 1980; of his total rejection of apartheid; of his refusal to let his bantustan, KwaZulu, accept the sort of independence that Pretoria planned for the Black homelands? The other side of the coin is the determination with which Buthelezi opposes any policy of 6 sanctions against South Africa and champions the free-enterprise economy. International Viewpoint • January 25, 1988
When the South African government created the "Zulu national state" in 1959, the territory was made up of 150 scattered tracts of land. This number was reduced to 40 in 1980 and subsequently to 26. The whole area comprises 38 per cent of Natal and 50 per cent of the province's population. KwaZulu — a strange kind of "national state"
Of the 6 million people classed as belonging to the Zulu ethnic group, 3,866,000 lived on the regions assigned to KwaZulu in 1984. With hardly more than half its supposed population actually living there, this fractured territory makes a strange kind of "national state"! Pretoria, moreover, had the intention of detaching one of its regions, Ingwavuma, and handing it over to Swaziland, an independent country neighboring South Africa, which was not at all to Buthelezi's taste.
But other parts of South African territory have been forcibly incorporated into KwaZulu against the will of their inhabitants. Such "black spots" that the South African authorities wanted to wipe off the map are KwaMashu (South Africa's second largest township), Umlazi, Lamontville and Chesterville. These were all to become running
down COSATU's headquarters.
In December 1986, 200 of Inkatha's amabuthos slipped into the township of Mphophomeni after an "electricity failure." Workers and leaders in the Metal and Allied Workers' Union involved in the long strike at BTR Sarmcol were in the township. Four people were kidnapped and murdered, including two unionists and the daughter of a third. They were burned alive. Anti-labour union declares war on COSATU
In February-March 1987, more than half a dozen COSATU unionists were killed in Natal. On November 1, COSATU general secretary Jay Naidoo, who had been invited to an conference on investment organized by the business weekly Financial Mail, told an audience of businessmen: "A number of our members working in your factories in Natal have been killed or wounded in attacks by itinerant gangs dedicated to destroying any activity outside Inkatha." (Weekly Mail, November 6, 1987
On May Day in 1986, Inkatha, unable to reconcile itself to watching COSATU trespass on what it considered its private preserve, went into open war against it, launching the Union of Workers' of South Africa (UWUSA). This organization has not spread beyond Inkatha's sanctuaries, where it has conducted forcible but not notably successful recruitment. The least that can be said is it demonstrated an anti-labor rather than a trade-union character. The general secretary of UWUSA was (until his recent resignation) Simon Conco, a businessman who combined his union post with that of KwaZulu minister of labor.
Inkatha is based on a network of labor branches that engage in intimidation, relying on lumpen elements and unemployed youth. But it is also a political rallying ground for the Zulu elites that draw their
BLACH incomes from sugar cane or other crops and from trade, as well as for the traditional apparatus of the clan chiefs and the bantustan bureaucratic apparatus. Inkatha is where you find in concentrated form what Shula Marks called "the politics of ambiguity." 3
Inkatha has all the appearances of the single parties found in neo-colonial Black Africa — regimentation of the population through a bureaucracy and patronage, mobilization of ethnic prejudices, reactionary "nationalism," housing and jobs for members of the movement and so on.
Buthelezi is caught between his national pretensions at a South African-wide level and his exaltation of Zulu "nationalism;" between his adherence to free-enterprise modernism and his attachment to ancestral traditions; between his criticism of the regime and his own dependence on its institutions. On this last point, Buthelezi likes to remind people about his statements opposing apartheid and calling for the release of Nelson Mandela. That did not stop him in 1979 from hailing Botha's scheme for an accord among the southern African states as evidence that the premier was abandoning the doctrine of apartheid. Likewise, while Buthelezi advocated universal suffrage in a single state in the 1970s, in 1985 he declared that he was ready to give that up.
Buthelezi opts for a regional solution
At the beginning of the 1980s, the Zulu chief found himself confronting a two-fold challenge. On the one hand, anti-apartheid mobilizations were growing steadily. The ANC was reappearing more and more in the country. And on the other hand Botha, who succeeded JB Vorster in 1979, had started preparing reforms. There was the Wiehahn commission on the unions, the Riekert commission on influx control (control of Black population movements), the
IN DETAINED Detentio In
SOUTH AFRICA
Zulu "nationalism"
BUTHELEZI will not fail to threaten "Coloured" and above all "Indian" in terests. The latter group is particularly concentrated in Natal and represents a real economic and trading power. While this strength is not comparable to that of white interests, it is formidable enough to offer many Indians a privileged situation in comparison to the population classed as "African." There is a well-to-do Indian petty-bourgeoisie in Natal and a small capitalist class. They were the target of the 1985 Durban riots organized by Inkatha.
In 1978, Buthelezi formed the
South African Black Alliance (SABA), bringing together Inkatha, the Labour Party of South Africa (Coloureds) and the Indian Reform
Party. The conservative Coloured and Indian leaders of these parties succumbed to the lure of the Tricameral parliament introduced in
1983-84, and therefore participated in Botha's fake constitutional reform.
In August 1984, Gatsha Buthelezi revealed his spite and his "African nationalism." In his view, these leaders are abandoning the Africans and only fostering their own interests at the expense of the Africans."
He added that "They are withdrawing from the liberation struggle, and this will have repercussions when the Africans come to power." (Race
Relations Survey 1984, p.529,
SAIRR, 1985.) Thus, Buthelezi is building a reactionary, racist nationalism designed to reinforce his own regional base. * Good Hope conference on industrial development and so on.
Buthelezi's response was the choice of a regional option, which was to become the "KwaNatal" option. This explains his repeated rejection of "independence" for KwaZulu. While remaining close to the Zulu chiefs, Gatsha Buthelezi appeared open to constitutional readjustments in the framework of a dialogue with the political and business representatives of white Natal, a sort of integrated regional solution.
The Botha government's perspective is a revamped version of that of Verwoerd, the revampea version or that of verwoera, the predecessor of both Vorster and Botha, who in the 1950s was the master architect of apartheid. The Good Hope conference held in the Cape in 1981 maintained the orientation of "ten independent Black states." (This policy has now been half implemented, since Transkei, Ciskei, Venda and Bophuthatswana are independent, and Pre3. Shula Marks, The ambiguities of dependence in South Africa, Ravan, 1986. January 25, 1988 • International Viewpoint
OFTAINED
Detention
BOTHA
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By BERRY In The Star (Johannesburg). Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate.
SOUTH AFRICA
KwaZulu, product of apartheid U NUKE other regions such as the Reef, where the population does not live in the bantustan to which it is assigned and may never even have seen it, almost all the Black population of Natal lives on the various fragments of the bantustan. KwaZulu is the most populous of the bantustans, and, along with Ciskel, has the largest urban population.
This reflects the growing urbanization of the population classified as "African" (which today totals 26 million). The government's planning experts estimate that from now until the end of the century, 10 to 15 million "Africans" will be urbanized. ' KwaZulu's main urban centers border the white areas and the industrial complexes - Durban-Pinetown-Hammarsdale, and, in the north, Empangani and Richards Bay.
When Verwoerd was minister of native affairs, the doctrine was not to authorİze direct investment - white, of course - in the bantustans. Preference was given to developing the industrial concentrations in the white areas close to the "frontiers" of the homelands. It was only after 1969 that the government authorİzed direct investment in the Black areas. But programs for moving plants remained tightly controlled by the authorities in Pretoria, who kept the keys to industrial development of the bantustans in their hands.
Some enterprises began to establish themselves In KwaZulu. Bata Shoes moved one of its plants from the Pinetown Industrial zone to Loskop. The benefits of such an operation were obvious. Wages were two to three times lower than those in the white areas. B&S Furniture moved Its Krugersdrop factory to Ezakheni for the same reasons.
In 1984, the KwaZulu Development Council accepted 34 projects for setting up plants in the bantustan, involving a total of 12.9 million rands. Twelve of these came from Israel, five from the United States, nine from the Far East and two from Europe. The policy of the bantustan authorities has always been to attract foreign investment, while supporting the development of small "African" enterprises.
Unlike most of the other bantustans, KwaZulu has real agricultural potential. Like the others, it has primarily a subsistence and not a profit-making agriculture. This is related both to the arable land available and the productivity of the soils. Since 1913 and the first Land Act, "Africans" have been unable to acquire ownership of land, and the most fertile lands have, of course, been assigned to the "white areas."
The structure of land owmership in South Africa has been shaped politically in accordance with the specific features of the country, bound up with the peculiar aspects of its capitalist development under the conditions of apartheid. The white authorities also manipulated the traditional structures as a supplementary means of control over access to the land. In KwaZulu and the other bantustans, the land is held in accordance with the ancestral system.
Thus, the rules of the market do not govern acquisition of land. It is acquired through inheritance or by grant from the chiefs, on the "prudent" advice of the white authorities. There is no free market in land. "Africans" are not free to sell or to buy land, even in the bantustans, and of course there is no capital market in the form of loans or credit available to the Black population.
"There is no environmental reason for KwaZulu"s agriculture to remain as unproductive as it is, but considerable investment, adaptive ingenuity to bring in new crops and technologies and good public and private resource management will be needed before agriculture can advance."? This agriculture remains largely a female occupation. "For most, return to full-time labour in agriculture is not commensurate with earnings outside....As long as influx laws keep women from moving to their husbands' place of work, much of the minor agriculture will remain in their hands." 3
The needs of agriculture can, however, lead to the development of certain crops in the bantustans. This is true for sugar. Along the Indian Ocean, Natal coast is a prime area for sugar cane, and parts of KwaZulu - the only remaining lands suitable for sugar cane expansion - could become very productive...A quota system is in effect in the (South African] Republic, and KwaZulu has been granted an allotment. This is divided and allocated to farmers by the KwaZulu government on the advice of white extension agents."** 1. Herman Gilliomee, The changing political function of the homelands," in Up against the fences, David Philip, 1985. 2. Butler, Rotberg and Adams, op. cit 3. Ibid. 8 14. Ibid. International Viewpoint January 25, 1988 toria hopes soon to declare the "independence" of Lebowa and KwaNdebele, despite the rejection of this in August 1986 by the KwaNdebele Assembly.) The innovation offered by the Good Hope conference and the 1982 plan that bears its name lay in the recognition of eight (later nine) industrial development "regions," of which only one, the Western Cape, does not include a bantustan.
As an underpinning for these regions, the plan offered the functional ties existing between the white areas and the neighboring bantustans, and proposed the setting up of "Regional Development Advisory Committees." An EEC-type model was not far from the minds of the inventors of this plan!
One of these regions includes Natal (the white areas) and KwaZulu, as well as a strip of territory in northern Transkei. Leaving aside this part of Transkei, the idea reappeared of an entity embracing the white areas of Natal and the territory returned to the Black population of KwaZulu. Does this mean that Botha is a supporter of the KwaNatal opinion? In fact, there are two aspects to the answer. One goes with the question "is such an entity an unavoidable reality?" The second has to do with Botha's intentions. As regards the latter, it has to be pointed out that in the projects that PW Botha has pursued since his accession to the post of premier and then of president of the republic, the dominant feature has been "authoritarian reformism."
Cooption of Black elites into state apparatus
The regional industrial development and local government projects subsequently introduced along with the Regional Services Councils reinforce the links between the white areas and the bantustans for a certain number of tasks at the regional level. But, at the same time, they concentrate still more tasks at the central level, in particular in the hands of the Executive.
Botha has not departed from his policy of coopting the Black elites into the management and administrative apparatus, allowing them to rise as far as the intermediate levels, even at the cost of irritating the Ainkaner far right. In this, his objective is to reinforce his control over the top levels of the state.
The question remains of KwaNatal and the special social and economic features of its two components. The Indaba (debate) over KwaNatal has become the hobby horse of Buthelezi and of the white parliamentary opposition, which has a majority in Natal.
The province has been a laboratory for perfecting and testing a system of representation, administration and economic planning at an intermediate governmental level, in the framework of a future constitutional readjustment (we have even seen an attempt at an Indaba for the Cape).
SOUTH AFRICA
In 1980, Jan Lombard have also managed to turned over to the bosses pull other sections of emof the sugar industry the ployers behind them.
NEW SYSTEM report that they had asked "Unable to achieve suffihim to make on the future ciently quick results by of the province and pro- acceptable way of lobbying the NP posals for adjustments to [National Party] by sigpreserve established in- BOTA nals that Pretoria would terests. It got an unfavor- respond favorably to, priable or mixed reaction vate and regional initiafrom all sides. tives, big capital -
In the same period as including the national the Good Hope confer- representatives of the ence did its work, the Federal Chamber of In"Buthelezi Commission" dustry, the Institute of met. Besides Inkatha's Bankers and Anglo"Coloured" and "Indian" American - went for the partners in the South political gap opened up African Black Alliance by KwaNatal' 6 (SABA), it included This policy has paid white liberal groups, rep- off, since after 1985 the resentatives of the Natal government was to demsugar industry, national onstrate a more favorable chambers of commerce attitude to the experiment and industry, magnates underway in Natal. Bolike Harry Oppenheimer
NOW and various experts.
TAKES
The commission's re-
Coloureds port was published in
1982. It declared for an association of KwaZulu and Natal, for a mixed
KEEPS
BLECKS economy and economic redistribution measures
DOWN between the two partners in the association, as well as moving toward free access to KwaZulu land.4 aCti
Notional
The ruling National
WHITE POWER tha, on the other hand, does not necessarily support the KwaNatal option one hundred per cent. His party remains divided on it, and the wing most favorable to the regional option, to a large extent, only jumped onto the KwaNatal band wagon when it was already rolling. Botha's game, therefore, is to move toward this scheme, while ward this scheme while keeping prerogatives in the hands of the central executive in the interests of the National Party.
In July 1987, the Regional Service Councils were set up. On August 11, the Joint Executive Authority of KwaZulu-Natal was formed and it began functioning officially in November 1987. It includes ten representatives (three whites, two Indians and five for KwaZulu). The government has let it be known, moreover, that it envisages a similar structure for the Transvaal.
A solution of this type in any case requires political stability in order for the various participants to enjoy a sufficient base and authority. This is precisely what has posed problems for Inkatha and for Buthelezi.
How can he play this role if he is being challenged in the zones that he is supposed to administer, if he does not prevent the growth of the radical anti-apartheid forces? In order to achieve this, Buthelezi is ready to unleash a blood-bath in the attempt to crush his opponents. He is demonstrating this today in Natal. * 4. The Buthelezi Commission, "The requirements for stability and development in KwaZulu and Natal," H & H Publications, Durban, 1982. 5. Daryl Glaser, , "Behind the Indaba: the making of the KwaNatal option, " Transformation 2, 1986. 9 6. Daryl Glaser, op. cit. January 25, 1988• International Viewpoint
Party (NP) showed hostility, while the New Republic Party (NRP), which at the time was still the dominant white party in Natal, began to take its distance from Inkatha and move closer to the government's options. On the other hand, the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) — which was nibbling away at the positions of the NRP — and Inkatha moved toward each other. This was reflected in 1984 by the Ulundi agreement between the KwaZulu government and the Natal province executive. This set up working groups to formulate concrete administrative and constitutional proposals for the whole of Natal-KwaZulu.
In 1985, the Private Sector Liaison Committee was set up. It brought together the Durban Metropolitan Authority Chamber of Commerce, the Natal Chamber of Industry and the Sugar Producers' Association of South Africa. These organizations were strong supporters of the KwaNatal option, and were to develop a policy of pressurizing the government on its behalf.
Chris Saunders, one of the big sugar barons and a member of the sugar producers association, sees the regional model as the only alternative to a single state which "would create the most powerful Black state in the world and lead to Marxism, a dictatorial one-party state, almost continuous revolutions and so on." S
Why do the local employers support the
KwaNatal option? Above all, they are looking for political stability — the fundamental precondition for the security of their investments. And Pretoria is proving incapable of assuring that either through reform or armed force. The local employers want a labor market in the region freed from the fetters that impede free circulation. More generally, they want to rationalize the infrastructures by extending the reach of the region's industrial centers to KwaZulu.
Sugar magnates support
KwaNatal option
For these reasons, the sugar magnates have every interest in opposing the stabilization of KwaZulu as an entity distinct from the rest of Natal, since such a consolidation would involve the state buying up lands with a view to incorporating them into the bantustan, subject to redivisions and recombinations.
The profitability threshold of the sugar refineries turns around 70 to 75 per cent of capacity utilization, and is very dependent on intensive supply, and therefore on cultivating large tracts of land. That makes all arable land precious.
However, while the sugar industry employers have been in the front rank of the supporters of the KwaNatal option, they weBell 1984
TURKEY
Özal profits from election results and the opposition's weaknesses
WITH THE legislative elections on November 29 in Turkey, the process of transition following the 1980 military coup came to its end. All the bourgeois parties and politicians who were banned by the generals were able to participate in these elections.