I spent election day driving around KwaZulu-Natal visiting polling stations both in Durban and Zululand. I started early and headed north to Ulundi and then onwards to Nongoma before making my way back to Durban stopping at various polling stations along the way.
Election day was rather slow and sleepy despite the media hype about hotspots in Nongoma and Ulundi. Both areas were quiet and people queued up with quiet dignity and a lack of conflict was evident. I saw a man proudly displaying an ANC T-shirt standing between two men wearing their IFP shirts at Ondini (in Ulundi, the site of Cetswayo’s old capital, which has a wonderful little museum and simple accommodation).
I really love the area north of the Tugela and am really annoyed at people who label the area as “tribal”. That outdated and inaccurate discourse is still used to describe the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). While support for the party has clearly declined as shown by this election, I wish to speak out about how this party has been and continues to be labelled as a Zulu traditional party.
That entire discourse of “tribalism” as a means of describing politics of rural KwaZulu-Natal fails to grasp the very real issues that people are faced with in rural spaces. Similar language was used in the 1980s and early 1990s of the so-called “black-on-black” violence.
Such a discourse dismisses and misunderstands that people were and still are engaged in real politics and struggles that have nothing to do with their race or ethnicity. It places the conflict outside of rational understanding and allows for consistently bad analysis and the maintenance of stereotypes.
The horrific conflict of the 1980s and 1990s in KwaZulu-Natal (then Natal) continues to be disregarded as real struggles of the dying days of apartheid. The idea that the fighting was “tribal” or ethnically based still haunts politics in the province. It also feeds into the mantra of the “miracle” of 1994 of the bloodless transition. It makes all those deaths meaningless as if their deaths were not part of the “struggle”, but part of some ancient animosity.
In contemporary South Africa, Zulu people and their concerns need to be stripped from this limited discourse and in doing so one finds really simple concerns such as a lack of water, unemployment and lack of rural development. Keep ethnicity in the picture and their concerns are dismissed as ethnic chauvinism. Labelling the IFP as a Zulu party does much the same. Conflating a support base with their policies and practices does everybody a disservice.
The media are as much at fault with their focus on personalities instead of policies, but perhaps they are just reflecting the political debates that focus on leaders. In that, the media disappointed me during the elections.
So as the day waned I returned to Durban proud of the people of Zululand for defying the crude stereotypes attributed to the region and to the people trying to make lives better in the region, whatever their political affiliation.
I have not the slightest idea why the DA support in the Western Cape should be seen as “regional” and the IFP support in Kwa-Zulu Natal as “tribal”.
It is insulting.
“label the area as “tribal”.
Yes – KZN is their realm with their King from the oldest royal lineage known.
The Zulu as a “nation” is sacrosanct – politics is fluid.
KZN is the ancestral home of the Zulu’s.
I have found them to be the proudest of all our tribes, even more so than the Afrikaner, (whose pride is legendary.)
Both tribes frown on intermarriage.
You remain an outsider. I speak from experience.
Lyndall –
I am glad to read your thoughts again.
I am jealous! Damn – you can smile broadly in the Western Cape.
As a born and bred ex-Capie, I am in another country after crossing the Vaal River; where smiling is frowned on.
The Western Province is a microcosm of South Africa. It has no original tribe other than Hottentots, San and Strandlopers.
It is the ‘home’ of Dutch Huguenot, who have been diluted with inter-marriage and spread over the world. My great, great gran was a Huguenot descendant and her lineage is now purebred mongrel. Mixed Anglo Saxon.
Clearly the “tribal” epithet is overstated since nearly all black residents of KZN are Zulu.
However, the chickens have now come home to roost from past exploitation of ethnic pride to get votes. Despite the many good features of today’s IFP, their name will always call to mind images of the “Seven Day War” in Pietermaritzburg, hostel-dweller attacks on Jo’burg townships, random train murders, and – in the end – the horrible tragedy of Shell House. The ANC guards were wrong that day – but I well remember how afraid everyone in Johannesburg felt, as the thousands of IFP supporters armed with “traditional weapons” marched on the ANC headquarters. Where are they all now, those mighty impis of men who clubbed children to death, slashed women with pangas, and burned shacks in the name of the IFP? Voting – perhaps – for Zuma, whose “100% Zulu” branding has stolen their former party’s cultural story?
Perhaps it’s true that the IFP was unfairly treated at the TRC hearings. Buthelezi thought so. He would. But still, the memories cling to the IFP’s image like the sweetness of a rotting corpse, and without exclusive rights to Zulu-ness, one wonders what they’ve got left.
Old female paleface
I said that the IFP would save us – and they did!
Ex-Zimbabwe – for sure images from the past get held onto, but do not forget that during the anti-Apartheid struggles one of the battlefields was the media. The IFP lost that battle and got much bad press ever since. Entire books by political scientists have been written on the political violence and they cite news papers as their main sources.
One infamous book was by an MK operative Jabulani Nxumalo under the pseudonym Mzala wrote Gatsha Buthelazi: Chief with a double agenda. He wrote as if he had access to the inner workings of the IFP and it is still cited as an authoritative source with few scholars looking into who he was and where he was (overseas) to gain the information he claimed to have.
The idea of the IFP as an ‘ethnic’ party is also clever exploited by their opponents to deny them a urban vote from non-Zulus. In 1994 the IFP was the most racially diverse party and still attracts many non-Zulus in leadership positions, and even now has many non-Zulus as representatives.
Old, female, paleface:
I disagree that the Zulus are as insular as you infer. I found that living in different Zulu communities during my research was easy to do as they were extremely welcoming in rural spaces. I lived in Ndumo area in 2002 for most of the year and in Thendele in the Drakensberg for the better part of 2 1/2 years.
I found that race didn’t matter as did issues of etiquette and respect. This is where the DA loses out in KZN as the IFP refused a coalition with them in 1999.
Intermarriage is clearly possible and is not discouraged. All along the Drakensberg people claim multiple ethnicities in differing contexts (Sotho, Zulu, Amazizi) and in the North (Thembe, Tsonga).
Zulu identity was and remains as much a political claim as an ‘ethnic’ one and is of recent origin especially in Southern KZN.