‘The Time Has Come to Talk’ : Zulu Leader’s S. Africa Solution: Compromise

Amid South Africa’s unrelenting violence and growing polarization, Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s vision of a political system that assures both blacks and whites equal roles in government would seem to offer the nation its most realistic hope for racial harmony.

Buthelezi is willing to compromise on the demand of South Africa’s 25 million black majority--a quarter of them Zulus--for a one-man, one-vote system by giving the minority five million whites a veto. He advocates a strong bill of rights to protect the individual. He wants South Africa’s free enterprise system to continue, although many of his fellow blacks want a socialist state.

And he favors a federal political system that would allow the country’s different regions to work out their own local accommodations and that would further protect the white, Colored (mixed-race) and Indian minorities.

Buthelezi calls for a national convention, attended by representatives of all races and all political groups, to write a new constitution embodying this live-and-let-live philosophy. He strongly opposes the armed struggle of the outlawed African National Congress, both because of a professed commitment to nonviolence and negotiation and because he believes it will fail and cost many black lives.

Compromise the Key

“We must recognize that a solution to our problems, a political system for the future, must be based on compromise,” Buthelezi said in an interview. “We tell that to whites all the time. They cannot maintain their monopoly on political power and expect to live in peace, but blacks should be prepared to compromise, too.

“One man, one vote is not worth destroying ourselves and our country for when we can work out a compromise,” he added. “I am not abandoning that ideal and all that it means, but I don’t want to see our liberation postponed and the country torn apart to attain it. No, the time has come to talk, to negotiate, to compromise, to reconcile.”

As moderate as this position is, however, it has met with widespread suspicion and even open hostility. Few political leaders here are as controversial as Buthelezi.

While he ranks high in opinion surveys among whites, often outpolling President Pieter W. Botha as “a good leader,” he is viewed by conservatives as even more dangerous than black radicals because his moderation could make majority rule acceptable to whites.

Has Support Among Whites

But many liberal whites, particularly businessmen and politicians, now see Buthelezi as perhaps the only man, black or white, able to bring a peaceful end to apartheid, and they mention him frequently as the country’s first black Cabinet minister or provincial governor or even as prime minister in the federal system that he envisions.

Among blacks, Buthelezi’s power base is unrivaled. He is leader of the nearly seven million Zulus, South Africa’s largest ethnic group. He is chief minister of the Zulu tribal homeland, Kwazulu, and the president of the 1.3 million-member Inkatha movement, the largest black political organization in the country. As a result, he is likely to play a pivotal role in the country’s future.

Buthelezi is criticized by many black militants, however, as an opportunist and even a government puppet for his willingness to work within the present political system. His stated willingness to accept less than the one-man, one-vote system and his refusal to support the armed struggle against apartheid bring even sharper criticism.

Feud Grows Bitter

An increasingly bitter feud between Buthelezi and the African National Congress’ exiled leaders has led to dozens of deaths over the past year in fighting between Inkatha members and congress supporters in the black townships around Durban and in Soweto outside Johannesburg, heightening fears of a black civil war. Buthelezi says the congress has now ordered his assassination.

Despite these controversies, Buthelezi presses on, strengthening Inkatha and his Kwazulu government, entreating Botha to accept a national convention, wooing whites into a multiracial alliance, offering the African National Congress a truce, soliciting support abroad. He is determined to enlarge the middle ground for the politics of moderation and negotiation in South Africa.

Lawrence Schlemmer, director of the University of Natal’s Center for Applied Social Sciences in Durban, says that “few politicians have the capacity of Chief Buthelezi to operate across a spectrum from traditional (black) politics, in the huge industrial townships of Durban, the Witwatersrand (around Johannesburg) and elsewhere, at forums with white industrialists, to international affairs.”

Strong Personal Magnetism

Buthelezi, every inch the son of a proud line of Zulu warriors, is one of South Africa’s most accomplished politicians, with a personal magnetism that few can match and many envy.

He seems equally able to command the attention of mass rallies of more than 50,000, to deal with the day-to-day problems of farmers and shopkeepers in the Buthelezi clan, to discuss the historical and international context of South Africa’s problems with world leaders such as President Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, whom he has met in the past year, and to persuade many whites here that he is their best hope for a peaceful resolution of those problems.

Dapper, polished, charming, Buthelezi has the grace and manners--and the Saville Row wardrobe--of a true aristocrat. Yet, he still readily dons a Zulu chief’s leopard skins and necklace of lion’s claws on ceremonial occasions and, with a cowhide shield, leads his warriors in tribal dances.

Has Flashes of Anger

Flashes of anger interrupt his smooth conversation when he is challenged, his word doubted, his political integrity questioned, but the courtesy and charm return once his point is accepted.

“For someone in whose veins courses the blood of warriors who fought the English and the Afrikaners, whose people staged the last armed struggle against white rule in this country, it is not easy to preach nonviolence and negotiation,” Buthelezi said. “But I recognize that Mr. Botha’s defense forces cannot now be challenged . . . and that most of the casualties of an armed struggle today would be black. . . .

“Besides . . . I am now at last convinced that there is a groundswell of white demand for the normalization of South Africa as a modern, Western-style industrial democracy. I do not fear my white compatriots. They are Africans, too, and have a God-given right to remain here.”

Buthelezi, who will be 58 on Aug. 27, is chief of the largest clan, the Buthelezis, of the more than 50 tribes within the Zulu nation. As such, he assumed the traditional positions of prime minister to the Zulu king and commander of his regiments. But the government, judging him a radical, refused to recognize his chieftaincy for five years in the 1950s.

Uncle Founded ANC

Growing up in the royal household of his uncle, the Zulu king, after his father’s death, Buthelezi not only heard tales of his great ancestors, King Shaka and King Cetshwayo, but witnessed a rebirth of black nationalism and culture. An uncle, Dr. Pixley ka-Isaka Seme, founded the African National Congress. Another uncle, Bishop Alphaeus H. Zulu, was one of the first black Anglican bishops in South Africa. His mother, Princess Constance Magogo Zulu, who died a year ago, was a leading historian of the Zulus and a well known musician and composer.

Buthelezi studied history and administration at Fort Hare University in what is now the “independent” tribal homeland of Ciskei. The school has produced many of southern Africa’s black leaders, but it expelled Buthelezi for his political activities. He later finished his studies at the University of Natal in Durban. History remains, along with classical music, among his strongest interests.

He wanted to be a lawyer and became a clerk in the Durban law offices of Rowley Arenstein, a Communist then fighting the first laws enforcing apartheid and helping to establish black labor unions.

Arenstein was subsequently “banned” by the government and forbidden from taking part in political or union activities and eventually practicing law. He broke with the South African Communist Party but remained a Marxist, and he is still a political confidant of the Zulu chief.

Attended Church Schools

Buthelezi says that his Anglican faith has been another major factor in shaping his views. He grew up in a religious household, attended schools founded by missionaries and is now a deacon in his church. He keeps a Bible in his car to read on his long trips through Kwazulu and leads prayer breakfasts in Durban.

At the insistence of his family and also at the urging of Chief Albert Luthuli, then president of the African National Congress and the 1960 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Buthelezi was brought back from his legal apprenticeship in Durban to assume the leadership of his clan and resolved to use the position to fight apartheid.

His chieftaincy brought Buthelezi into the Kwazulu government in the 1970s, but when Pretoria began pushing the tribal homelands to accept independence, he organized his Inkatha movement to remain part of South Africa and won every seat in the legislative elections there.

Involvement Criticized

His involvement with the existing system has been widely criticized by black militants, but Buthelezi justifies his leadership of Kwazulu on grounds that it thwarted Pretoria’s plans to force all the tribal homelands into nominal independence and thus give South Africa a white majority.

Inkatha also helped defeat the government’s attempt to cede a large tract of territory to neighboring Swaziland, a move that would have expatriated hundreds of thousands of blacks.

Buthelezi also contends that he has been able to use Kwazulu’s autonomy to undercut apartheid in some ways.

Any black can obtain Kwazulu citizenship--thousands of non-Zulus have--and thus be sure of retaining South African nationality. Many apartheid laws and regulations, such as those enforcing racial segregation, have been repealed or are not enforced in Kwazulu.

In taking over schools despite its meager financial resources, the Kwazulu government has tried to raise the low level of black education and train skilled personnel that the country will need later. And Buthelezi has successfully recruited a significant number of experienced white civil servants to work in the Kwazulu government as an example of what a nonracial administration might be for the country as a whole.

A One-Party State?

Critics charge, however, that Buthelezi runs Kwazulu virtually as one-party state. Membership in Inkatha, they say, is required for everything, from business licenses to government employment to university admission.

Inkatha has established a new black labor union, rivaling those in the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and reportedly is telling Zulu workers to switch to it.

Those who oppose Buthelezi, according to these critics, are often brutally dealt with by Zulu impis, the traditional regiments of warriors. And Inkatha has been blamed by many in the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups close to the African National Congress, for the many clashes between members of the rival organizations during the past year.

Buthelezi, angry and hurt by the allegations, rejects them with point-by-point refutations and then asks what his critics have achieved, particularly those who support the African National Congress’s guerrilla campaign.

“This government is not going to be brought down by a bomb here and a bomb there . . . but only through the education, the mobilization and the unity of our people,” he said. “Black disunity, in fact, is the greatest obstacle to black liberation.

Black, White Conference

Buthelezi’s latest project is a historic conference between blacks and whites in Natal, his home province, to discuss creation of the country’s first completely multiracial government there--a model, he believes, for other regions and perhaps the first step toward the federal constitution he sees as a solution for the current turmoil.

“The fact that they are sitting down and working out a political modus vivendi for the future is itself a breakthrough,” he said.

The Natal-Kwazulu Indaba, as the conference is called, using the Zulu word for meeting, has already produced a bill of rights intended as the foundation for further negotiations on sharing political power. The next step is expected to be a multiracial provincial assembly, which would be the country’s first genuinely integrated legislative body, to accompany the joint Natal-Kwazulu provincial administration already agreed upon.

Parliament, where Botha’s ruling National Party has effective control, would have to approve the Indaba’s agreements before they could take effect.

Cautious on Botha Plan

Buthelezi, although convinced that “apartheid cannot last another decade,” is similarly cautious on Botha’s proposal for a new “national council,” which is at the center of the president’s reform program.

Botha says the council under his chairmanship, with wide black participation and with legal standing, would start as a forum for discussion of all legislation affecting blacks, who unlike Coloreds, persons of mixed race, and Indians are excluded from the white-dominated Parliament. But it would later undertake the task of drafting a new power-sharing constitution for the country.

“This could be almost the national convention that we have wanted for years,” Buthelezi said, expressing his own interest in taking part if the council will actually be writing a new constitution.

Yet last week, while assessing the government’s hard-line rejection of British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe’s recent peace mission to southern Africa, Buthelezi saw little scope for his own moderate role.

“There must come a time when I say enough is enough,” he told a Natal province businessmen’s conference. “There must come a time when the South African government’s actions and attitudes demand that I revise my position before I become an outdated, has-been politician.”

In addition to insisting that Botha’s proposed national council have a clear ultimate goal of drafting a new constitution, Buthelezi has set several other tough conditions for his participation. The present state of emergency, imposed June 12, must be lifted. Nelson Mandela, the former leader of the African National Congress’ military arm who has been in prison since 1962, must be released and offered the same opportunity to participate.

And “serious deficiencies” in the legislation establishing the council must be corrected so that its members, not President Botha, will control its deliberations.

“If these problems are not cured,” Buthelezi said, “this will be a puppet body with its members manipulated by the state president. . . . Again, this will be something that he has imposed on the black people, and again it will cause violence, more violence, and not end it.”

Without Buthelezi, the national council cannot succeed, most political analysts believe, and the government’s plans for step-by-step reforms will be jeopardized even further. Only two or three other black leaders have expressed even limited interest in the council.

“I am prepared to negotiate the future with P. W. Botha when he says he wants to share power,” Buthelezi said. “But these must be true negotiations among equals, not whites imposing a solution on blacks. . . .”