A Warning From South Africa

“One might notice that unlike in the 1990s, apart from a few occasional flare-ups, the struggle is no longer primarily between Xhosa and Zulu, or any African ethnicity for that matter. A crusade against whiteness had united black South Africans who would otherwise have been fighting among themselves.”

In a 2017 article published in The Daily Caller, columnist Ilana Mercer brought to light an under-appreciated aspect of South Africa’s anti-Apartheid movement: that activists espoused competing visions as to what the country should look like post white-minority rule. Not everyone was on board with the multiracial parliamentary democracy Nelson Mandela had in mind.

The main opposition Mercer cited came from black South Africans who were unhappy with the fact that Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) party was dominated by an ethnic group other than their own. The ANC was majority Xhosa, while its chief rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), had a largely Zulu base. Supporters of the two movements clashed violently in the streets leading up to the first multi-racial election in 1994.

The IFP’s founder, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, was Prime Minister of the Zulu Homeland. Homelands were self-governing ethnic enclaves set up by the Apartheid government for indigenous blacks, or “Bantu.” A Homeland’s size and location were based on rough estimates of where most members of a Bantu ethnic group lived prior to European colonization. Homelands were justified as a means to facilitate the eventual independence of various ethnically homogenous black countries while allowing white Afrikaners to have their own state as well. To that end, Pretoria lobbied for international recognition of the Homelands. The 1970 Black Homeland Citizenship Act was passed to expedite blacks’ acquisition of Homeland citizenship.