Chief with a Double Agenda: A hidden history now open to South Africans

News24

11 hours ago

'Chief with a Double Agenda is not just a book about Buthelezi,' writes Mandla J Radebe in his introduction to this republished work. 'It is a book about betrayal, ideology, class collaboration and the dangers of political amnesia. It is about the ways in which colonial and apartheid regimes co-opted segments of the oppressed to maintain power and how those collaborations were rationalised in the language of pragmatism. It is about the limits of reconciliation without justice and the costs of democracy built on silence and expediency.'
Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda was first published in London in 1988 but was made unavailable in South Africa because of litigation threats by Mangosuthu Buthelezi (clan name Gatsha). Jacana Media has now republished this historic work to make it widely available, and it is News24's Book of the Month for July.
Operating from within the South African government's apartheid systems, Buthelezi – Chief Minister of the KwaZulu homeland – presented himself as a leading opponent of apartheid but resolutely opposed the struggle for liberation led by the ANC and its allies. He preached a doctrine of non-violence yet headed the Inkatha movement, which was widely accused of using violence against its opponents. In contrast to the call of the worldwide anti-apartheid movement for sanctions against South Africa, Buthelezi toured Western capitals seeking new investments.
Who was this man, and what did he stand for? Whose side was he on? Jabulani Nobleman 'Mzala' Nxumalo examined these vital questions in an analysis using a wide range of materials, including interviews with some of Buthelezi's contemporaries, to investigate a complex political figure.
In this edited extract from the introduction, Radebe gives the background to his controversial figure and the book.
BOOK: Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda by Jabulani Nobleman 'Mzala' Nxumalo (Jacana)
In the complex and contested history of South Africa's national liberation struggle, few figures have provoked as much controversy or generated such polarising views as the late 'traditional prime minister' to the Zulu kingdom and the founder of Inkatha Freedom Party, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi (1928-2023). Revered by his followers as a traditionalist, nationalist, and statesman, and reviled by many within and beyond the liberation movement as a collaborator and reactionary, Buthelezi's political legacy remains entangled in contradictions.
Nowhere are these contradictions more systematically dissected than in Jabulani Nobleman 'Mzala' Nxumalo's 1988 book Gatsha Buthelezi: Chief with a Double Agenda. Far from a conventional biography, Mzala's book qualifies to be regarded as a revolutionary polemic, influenced by Marxist-Leninist analysis and tradition, and intended not merely to inform but to also intervene.
In this book, Mzala subjects Buthelezi to a public trial, ultimately indicting him as a political quisling – an African leader who, masked in the rhetoric of Zulu nationalism, eventually lent legitimacy to the apartheid regime's ethno-nationalist and divide-and-rule strategy. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that such a characterisation wouldn't meet fierce contradictions.
The publication of Chief with a Double Agenda marked a critical moment in the ideological contestation over the meaning of leadership, collaboration, and struggle for liberation in the latter years of apartheid South Africa. Mzala did not merely question Buthelezi's political choices, he denounced the entire edifice of the Bantustan system and its ideological underpinnings. In so doing, he exposed Buthelezi's role not as a tactical opponent of apartheid from within but as a vital cog in the apartheid state's infrastructure.
Indeed, Buthelezi's association held strategic historical significance for the National Party, largely due to the demographic and symbolic weight of the Zulu kingdom, which the regime viewed as instrumental in legitimising and sustaining the broader project of apartheid. Mzala's thesis, delivered with precision and polemical force, rendered the book a political spectre – one that would haunt Buthelezi's public life until the very end.
The significance of Mzala's intervention lies not only in its critique of one man but in what it reveals about the broader political conjuncture, particularly in the tumultuous 1980s. At a time when the apartheid state was facing internal revolts and international condemnation, and when elements within the liberation movement were debating strategies of armed struggle, negotiation, and mass mobilisation, Chief with a Double Agenda offered a sharp reminder that not all black leaders operated in the service of liberation.
Mzala consistently advanced the argument that blackness, in and of itself, was not a marker of revolutionary consciousness and insisted that pigmentation alone, 'even if blacker than coal,' did not equate to progressiveness.
Grounded in a Marxist-Leninist analysis of class collaboration and the national question, he categorically located Bantustan leaders such as Kaiser Matanzima, Lucas Mangope, and Patrick Mphephu within the camp of counter-revolutionaries, whose roles he viewed as antithetical to the objectives of national liberation.
Equally, for Mzala, Buthelezi's insistence on operating within the apartheid-sanctioned structures, his leadership of the KwaZulu Bantustan, his opposition to sanctions, and his antagonism towards the United Democratic Front (UDF), represented not pragmatism but betrayal.
It would be disingenuous to overlook the extent to which Buthelezi's legacy remains deeply contested, particularly in relation to his engagement with apartheid-era policies such as the Bantu Authorities Act (BAA). Enacted in 1951, the BAA constituted a foundational pillar of the apartheid state's ideology of 'separate development', systematically entrenching ethnic divisions by co-opting traditional leadership structures and institutionalising Bantustans as pseudo-autonomous entities under the firm grip of state control.
Buthelezi assumed the chieftaincy of the Buthelezi 'clan' within the framework of this system in the early 1950s, a position that shaped his later political trajectory. As Chief Minister of KwaZulu, he projected himself as a vocal opponent of apartheid, even as he operated squarely within the architecture of the Bantustan system. This duality became a defining feature of his political identity and a source of enduring controversy among scholars, activists, and political commentators.
While Buthelezi consistently defended his participation in the Bantustan system as a form of strategic resistance from within, many critics interpreted his role as calculated collaboration with the apartheid state. His refusal to accept nominal 'independence' for KwaZulu distinguished him from other homeland leaders, with Buthelezi arguing that such 'independence for the homelands was a government strategy aimed at stripping blacks of their South African citizenship' (JL Marshfield).
Yet, notwithstanding this stance, his tenure was characterised by authoritarian governance and credible allegations of political violence, particularly targeting ANC-aligned structures such as the UDF. The findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) further complicated his legacy, establishing evidence of collusion between Inkatha and the apartheid security apparatus.
Some scholars characterised Buthelezi as a conservative nationalist who sought to 'use the system against itself' by operating within the confines of the apartheid framework and exploiting the margins of state tolerance in an effort, ostensibly, to subvert its legitimacy from within. Yet, his frequent appropriation of historical figures such as Pixley ka Seme to buttress his own leadership claims demonstrate the ideological ambiguity at the heart of his political project.
This manoeuvring often placed him at odds with the broader liberation movement, particularly the ANC, which viewed his sustained engagement with the apartheid state as both politically damaging and ideologically suspect.
Nowhere did these tensions find sharper expression than in Mzala's Chief with a Double Agenda, whose incisive critiques cast Buthelezi as a political actor deeply complicit in legitimising apartheid. As such, any serious engagement with Buthelezi's legacy must grapple with the dialectic of resistance and collaboration.