Buthelezi: A Biography

Rating:
Summary: Voice of Reason and Conscience
Review: In this book, Ben Temkin outlines the life and times of one of the finest statesmen and visionary leaders ever produced in Africa, Prince Mangosutho Buthelezi.
He highlights Buthelezi's youth and his 50 years of political involvement, which has always been intimately tied up with the development of the Zulu nation, including his defiance of the Apartheid government from 1956, when as a young chief he confronted Apartheid architect, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, and his ceaseless struggles for the rights of the Zulu people, and Black South Africans as a whole.
He details the role of the Apartheid government, and later of the Marxist ANC to destroy Buthelezi
Much has been written about Buthelezi, but little has been fair. Much of it clouded with politically correct bigotry and invective, by those who prefer to blindly accept the worldview of Nelson Mandela's Revolutionary African National Congress, who where involved in a propaganda war against Buthelezi and his Inkatha Movement, since 1979. This was because Buthelezi refused to endorse the ANC's strategy of 'armed struggle' against White minority rule in South Africa, and to become a surrogate to the ANC's Revolutionary Leninist hegemony - Buthelezi had always vigorously opposed Apartheid and preferred peaceful methods of opposing it. He also wanted Apartheid to be replaced by a pluralist federal democracy, rather than the centralized Revolutionary one party state, favoured by the ANC.
The ANC hate campaign escalated into violence from the mid-1980's by the ANC and it's surrogates, who where responsible for the murder of over 10 000 Inkatha supporters.
. The author also highlights the hypocrisy of the leftwing establishment in South Africa in endorsing the ANC's unjust campaign against not only Buthelezi, but also the hundreds of thousands of Zulu's in Inkatha.
We learn for example how Marxist clerics, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Reverend Allan Boesak, pressured d Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr Martin Luther, to cancel a meeting with Buthelezi.

Buthelezi has always been consistent in opposing all inhumane political systems in South Africa , from apartheid to the ANC's terror war against Black political opponents.

He has been lauded universally in the 1970's while betrayed by many in the late 1980's and 1990's who wished to help the ANC build a totalitarian state.
The book also talks about his career as Minister of Home Affairs in the post-Apartheid, ANC led government, where he has remained a voice of reason and conscience.