Remaking Zulu Identity in Era of Globalization
BY BENEDICT CARTON
In the twilight of apartheid, militant Zulu nationalism threatened a momentous democratic transition in South Africa. Weeks before the milestone April 1994 election, Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, backed by M.G. Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), urged the “warrior Zulu nation” to go it alone and follow the inspiration of Shaka Zulu, a formidable empire builder. This call for self-determination came amid spiraling unrest fueled by rogue security forces, which attacked black townships to further divide a country segregated by law. In Natal province a civil war raged, pitting supporters of the IFP against their Zulu-speaking rivals in the African National Congress (ANC). Some well-armed IFP combatants trained in Buthelezi’s KwaZulu homeland, a Bantustan in Natal funded by the National Party government.
Despite the worsening conflict, ANC negotiators committed to a nonracial, unitary South Africa, and their reformist counterparts in the National Party pressed hard for the late April 1994 vote. Their resolve compelled the IFP to choose between participation and marginalization. At the eleventh hour, Buthelezi agreed to have a paper strip bearing his face and party logo glued to the ballot. Nelson Mandela, the ANC’s top candidate, won the elections, becoming the first black president of a republic once condemned by the United Nations as the last outpost of white supremacy. The IFP and National Party joined the ANC-led government of national unity. Uneasy partners from the start, IFP representatives demanded and received ministries safeguarding the rights of “traditional authorities” in accordance with a fledgling democratic constitution. Overnight, outbreaks of violence between political factions subsided. When we think of current world affairs—shadowed by terrorism, global inequalities, and intractable war—what happened in South Africa a decade ago continues to stand as a model of hope and comity.
One striking development in post-apartheid South Africa has been the rapid diminution of “warrior Zulu” culture, which the IFP harnessed with such skill. In the mid-1990s, debates on nation building, rather than ethnic chauvinism, dominated public discourse. The Zulu king shifted his allegiance from Buthelezi to the consensus leader, Mandela. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sought to heal the wounds of apartheid, fostering soul-searching about what it meant to be South African. Inspired by the TRC, one Zulu-speaking member of Buthelezi’s clan, a scholar and postcolonial critic, recently called for a reparations inquiry into the destructive legacies of Shaka, who Buthelezi, the IFP stalwart, extolled as a founding father of South Africa. Such veneration glossed over Shaka’s historical record; he banished, killed, and subjugated neighboring chiefs, forcibly incorporating their followers. One of Shaka’s subjects exiled to an inhospitable corner of the Zulu kingdom was chief Pungashe, a fabled patriarch of the Buthelezi clan.
By the new millennium, it was increasingly clear that the glories of Shaka’s accomplishment no longer motivated ordinary Zulu people to support Buthelezi’s brand of politics. The last countrywide ballot in mid-April 2004, which included local elections in the renamed province of KwaZulu-Natal, a former stronghold of the IFP, produced irrefutable proof of the retreat of Zulu nationalism. The ANC won a landslide victory, an outcome that would have dominated world headlines ten years previously. But in late April 2004, there was only passing mention of the KwaZulu-Natal vote in international newspapers.
Eulogies for the IFP were ubiquitous in the South African press. One commentary written shortly before the 2004 elections described a moribund future for Buthelezi’s vision: “What is hard to imagine are selfconscious Zulu elites putting together a coherent traditional ‘identity package’ that would appeal to a mass audience in KwaZulu-Natal. Moreover, it would be rash to predict that serious Zulu cultural revivalism would emerge to counter the effects of globalization and reject the modern notion of state citizenship.”
Of course, the satellite-linked global media anticipated the end of Zulu nationalism much earlier when, soon after Mandela was first sworn in, it stopped covering the IFP. Today, if South Africa is mentioned on CNN or in a New York Times article, the focus is more likely to be the grim toll of HIV and AIDS. The pandemic is devastating the country, including Buthelezi’s own family. At a televised event, he called attention to the malicious stigma against those who contract HIV, beseeching South Africans to show greater compassion. He was speaking at the funeral of his own adult child, a victim of a pandemic that produces thousands of burials every weekend. Along with this cruel shock, Buthelezi has had another blow. Months after his child’s death, he acknowledged the “collapse of our [Zulu] nation into the broader unity of South Africa.” He sounded this plaintive note in January 2005, concluding “[f]rom today’s denial of our Zulu nationhood, tomorrow will follow the denial of our Zuluness. In a few years…they will try to foist upon us a uniform sense of Africanism.”
Buthelezi’s New Year observations point to one story in South Africa attracting interest far beyond its borders. The term “they” in his final sentence refers to the reigning elites with close ties to the ANC, who champion the “African Renaissance,” an economic-cum-cultural platform integrating ideals of neoliberalism with black nationalism. Government officials trumpeting the “African Renaissance” often evoke the credo of globalization as a panacea for poverty. They also highlight the impressive success of a small but growing class of black South African financiers and executives, “empowered” to acquire white-owned businesses, some of which run tourism ventures packaging exotic African “heritage” for foreign visitors.
Occasionally, ANC heavyweights such as former Deputy Vice President Jacob Zuma, sacked after a court affirmed corruption charges against him, stray too far in deal making. Whatever the case, irony abounds in the objectives of the “African Renaissance.” For decades Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement, which the ANC derided as a stooge of apartheid, proclaimed the benefits of free enterprise. In contrast, until the mid-1990s the ANC favored the politics of redistribution, instituting public works and regulating markets to generate employment with a living wage. In his yearning for a return to Zulu glories, Buthelezi implicitly seems to be advocating a “re-invented fundamentalism…[for] groups threatened and demeaned by globalization.”
According to one economic historian of South African urbanization, no amount of ethnic “fundamentalism” could halt the forces of globalization. Most Zulu people, particularly youths, “have many more opportunities to embrace variants of international (for which we should read ‘American’) consumerism…through the marketing of politically neutralized African-American icons.” Moreover, “pressure on Zulu speaking young people to communicate in English has also intensified, in response to the perceived prestige associated with the planetary lingua franca.” To date, “consumer trends demonstrate a growing disregard among black urban youths for African customs that seem out of step with the global-modern regime.”
Yet while the allure of ethnic traditions may be ebbing among the rising Zulu-speaking generations, the packaging of “Zuluness”—dominated by the fearsome image of Shaka—is now a “growth point” in a booming tourism industry. Hotel and casino magnates in KwaZulu-Natal, with partners in the black economic empowerment (BEE) sector, court investors in Europe, Asia, and North America to secure the capital to operate Shaka-themed parks. Their commercial brochures offer to transport the visitor “into the history of the Zulu people at the Great Kraal of King Shaka and experience the mystery and magic of Africa.” Where would the tourist stay? In “Protea Hotel Shakaland…set amongst mountains, rivers and a peaceful lake, a mere 160km north of Durban, offering a host of fascinating experiences that transport you into a different age: observe captivating Zulu ceremonies like courtship and beer drinking.” To the skeptic among the holidaymakers, Protea Hotel Shakaland ensures that its facility “is more than just a tourist attraction—it is an enriching experience affording you a better understanding of the Zulu nation, its people and their intriguing customs.” In a nearby Zulu heritage, village visitors who sleep in a hut for the night are also treated to the terrifying thrill of being mock-ambushed by actors playing warriors in combat regalia. Young Zulu hospitality workers, speaking excellent English, welcome and soothe the guests.
A few years from now, if Americans fly to the other end of the earth to see an “authentic Zulu village and hotel,” they could very well land in a sprawling airport north of Durban christened King Shaka International. If they arrive by cruise ship—a luxury mode of travel along the Indian Ocean coast—their vessel will likely drift by a colossal statue of Shaka Zulu standing alone in Durban harbor. As they dock on a clear day, a new Waterfront Marine Theme Park, soon to be called Shaka Island, will come into view. The manufactured ethnic identity invested in these sites and spectacles, an identity once wielded as a political weapon before the watershed 1994 election, is now a product to be consumed by paying onlookers.
Benedict Carton (bcarton1@gmu.edu) is associate professor of history (http://history.gmu.edu/). This is a revised excerpt of the introduction to his co-edited book, Being Zulu: Contested Identities past and Present (2009).
