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South Africa: Rhetoric and Reality
| Article
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12777 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
925 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
This issue of THE WORLD & I contains an article by Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu chief of Kwazulu and the head of Inkhata, the largest dues-paying organization in the Union of South Africa. He has been variously described as a puppet of the white government, by Randall Robinson of TransAfrica, and as a dangerous radical, by the conservative leader Howard Philips. If a man can be honored by his cast of enemies, Chief Buthelezi would meet that test.
But Chief Buthelezi needs no defense. While living under a regime that deprived him of his elementary rights of citizenship, he nonetheless formed an organization that could not be denied a political role. He courageously refused to accept a phony independence for a Kwazulu homeland and offered a plan for all of Natal that developed out of the Oppenheimer report that itself was influenced by earlier private meetings in which I participated. The striking fact about Chief Buthelezi's plan for Natal was that it was accepted by white and Indian leaders in the province and could have served as a model for the rest of South Africa had it not been rejected by President Botha.
Although Chief Buthelezi favors a fully integrated political state in the Union of South Africa, he is aware that this goal cannot be achieved directly without destructive warfare. He has long been prepared to accept interim arrangements that would preserve essential rights for all ethnic groups provided only that power was genuinely shared. His has never been a rule-or-ruin philosophy.
Chief Buthelezi and his followers, unlike some other groups that are contesting for power in South Africa, genuinely wish to maintain political
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