How old is Mangosuthu Buthelezi?

Sept 9 (Reuters) – Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a veteran South African politician, Zulu prince and controversial figure during the apartheid liberation struggle, has died, the presidency said on Saturday. He was 95.Buthelezi descended from a line of important Zulu chiefs. He attended South African Native College (now the University of Fort Hare) and was a member of the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC). His political activities brought about his expulsion from school, and he completed his degree in history and Bantu administration at the University of Natal. In 1951 he began working in South Africa’s Department of Native Affairs. Buthelezi assumed his role as the hereditary chief of the Buthelezi clan of Zulus in 1953, although his chieftainship was not recognized by the South African government until 1957. He became chief executive officer of the newly formed Zulu Territorial Authority in 1970 and chief executive councillor of the KwaZulu Legislative Assembly in 1972. In 1976 he became the chief minister of the KwaZulu Bantustan, a collection of 11 scattered Zulu exclaves located within the Natal province.

Buthelezi pursued personal political goals with an unusual combination of strategies. Though he initially opposed the creation of black homelands, or Bantustans, he opted to work within the Bantustan administrative structure to bring an end to the government’s policy of apartheid. Despite his early connections with the ANC and a common goal of black liberation in South Africa, Buthelezi was increasingly at odds with the ANC under Oliver Tambo’s leadership, and he rejected the ANC’s guerrilla strategies and calls for economic sanctions against South Africa as means to end apartheid. In 1975 Buthelezi revived a moribund Zulu cultural association and renamed it Inkatha ye Nkululeke ye Sizwe (National Cultural Liberation Movement). He used Inkatha as a personal power base that systematically mobilized Zulu nationalist aspirations, although his narrow regional and ethnic support base would make his ambition of being national leader difficult. Buthelezi set out to challenge the ANC, all while provocatively adopting the uniform and other of the symbols of the ANC.
With the advent of democracy, Buthelezi served as home affairs minister in Mandela’s government after 1994. As acting president in 1998, he launched an invasion of Lesotho, the tiny mountain kingdom surrounded by South Africa, to crush a rebellion. It was bloodier than South Africa bargained for and it remains a controversial episode in the country’s regional hegemony. As the not so grey eminence behind the Zulu kingdom’s reinvention for the democratic era, at apartheid’s end Buthelezi also secured the formation of the Ingonyama Trust, which now owns vast traditional lands in KwaZulu-Natal province, officially on behalf of the king. In latter years the trust has been mired in corruption scandals and power battles. Buthelezi portrayed himself as an elder statesman but as he ailed in recent months, there were also reports of rifts between him and the new king. The party he founded and officially stepped back from in 2019 has meanwhile sought to cultivate a multi-ethnic appeal. As the fourth-biggest party in South Africa’s national assembly, the IFP will be play an important role in potentially knife-edge elections next year, with the ANC’s long-held majority under threat. “We are devastated by this unspeakable loss to the IFP, the Zulu Nation, our country, and the greater cause of justice and peace,” the party said on Saturday.