A sunset clause for the IFP

By Percy Mabandu

The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) by dissolving would be as good for our identity discourse as its merger with the ANC is bad for South Africa’s body politic. At first breath the party and its excesses, by dissolving, will make space for more progressive thinking about other ways of being black in the land of the fallen rand. At the heart of the IFP’s raison d’être is a form of Zulu nationalism that feeds into ethnic chauvinism and an antiquated conception of identity.

The then exiled ANC leaders OR Thambo and Thabo Mbeki encouraged the IFP’s formation with intentions to take advantage of loopholes in apartheid’s Bantustan system and its related Group Areas Act. However, they were at once playing into legitimising the IFP’s dangerous puritan concept of ethnicity.

Hence Buthelezi could easily exploit traditional institutions to bolster his own political ambitions when he ultimately broke ranks with the ANC. These narrow interests made possible the bloodshed of the late 1980s and early 1990s in an unnecessary war between ANC activists and recalcitrant IFP “impis”.

Buthelezi’s closed sense of identity also doesn’t make space for a more empowering historical perspective. That before the late King uShaka ’ka Senzangakhona Zulu’s nation building efforts, there was a diverse multiplicity of clans: the Khumalos, the Mthethwas and so on. A diversity which empowered early Zulu monarchs politically and didn’t isolate them as the IFP essentially does. This is because the IFP’s faults tend to be seen as essentially ethnic and not party political.

Disarming the sort of ethnic chauvinism that the IFP relies on to exist means hybridity will be acknowledged beyond being “coloured” in South Africa. So that when Moeletsi Mbeki, in his brother’s biography, describes his mother, Epainette, as a “MoSotho woman in … a world of Xhosa elite” he fashions a pluralistic ethnic identity for himself and his kin; one that is both Xhosa, by his father’s lineage, and Sotho by his mother’s heritage. And at once he problematised the privilege of patrilineage and women empowerment in our evolving ethnic cultures.

This mixed-ness brings up a debate which was once narrowly coined as a “de-tribalisation” brought by migration to modern African cities. I say it is narrow because it failed to see that even the Xhosa language is a hybrid of Khoisan and Nguni dialects, it also failed to discern the same Khoisan clicks and some Tswana in King Moshoeshoe’s Sotho. So I offer that identity is process and the IFP and apartheid’s conception of Zuluness is static. Hence they failed to formulate Kwa-Zulu (Zululand) into eZulwini (heaven).

The potential merger with the ANC also posits the IFP to further menace our body politic. At a time when the democratic imperative should be to build a healthy and legitimate opposition, the lauded merger would only bolster an already strong ruling party. This threatens to take us further towards a de facto one party state. It should not take a genius to figure out that the official opposition, Democratic Alliance, does not quite resonate with the subaltern. The new Congress of the People is also faltering along with the rest of other alternatives. So the IFP’s 4.55% of the vote, won at the last national elections could be used better. The ANC, having secured a 65.9% at the same polls, would surely appreciate a more robust opposition to help make it more accountable. So at best, the IFP must die. It should be relegated to history textbooks or something of the sort rather than harm us as the merger might.

Frankly, the present might be the time for Prince Buthelezi to really be revolutionary and help strengthen our democratic experiment. There might not be a better alternative for him to secure a dignified legacy.

Percy Mabandu is a journalist with the Mail&Guardian. He boasts being shaped in the post-tribal and neo-ethnic milieu of Gauteng’s urban black experience.