What are the facts Mangosuthu Buthelezi now? Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) founder and president emeritus Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who served as traditional prime minister to a succession of Zulu kings, has died. Buthelezi, 95, died early on Saturday morning, after a lengthy spell in hospita Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) founder and traditional Zulu prime minister, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, died in the early hours of Saturday morning. His death was announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa. This comes just two weeks after Buthelezi turned 95 years old. “Prince Buthelezi, who served as the democratic South Africa’s first minister of home affairs, passed away in the early hours of today, Saturday, 9 September 2023, just two weeks after the celebration of his 95th birthday,” Ramaphosa wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter Beyond claiming to speak for nearly a quarter of the nation’s 28 million Black inhabitants in 1990, Mr. Buthelezi appealed to many white South Africans by advocating a peaceful transition to democracy and free enterprise, and by fiercely opposing Mr. Mandela’s African National Congress and its demands for international sanctions, armed struggle and a socialist revolution to crush Pretoria’s segregationist regime. But Mr. Buthelezi was an enigma. To his many admirers, he was a statesman, posing in the Oval Office with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; having tea with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain; visiting Pope Paul VI at the Vatican; and cultivating a persona as the man who might lead South Africa when white rule eventually gave way. Historians and human rights activists, however, said that for decades, as Mr. Mandela languished as a prisoner of conscience, Mr. Buthelezi amplified his power with devious stratagems. Instead of challenging Pretoria, which might have landed him in prison, he opposed apartheid from within governing structures, critics said, rejecting nominal independence for KwaZulu and running his homeland like a dictatorship. Controlling the police, the legislature, the courts and other levers of power, he repressed anti-apartheid groups with policies remarkably like those of Pretoria, critics said, ordering arrests, disrupting protests, dispensing patronage and denying jobs to dissenters. Many Black intellectuals and activists fled KwaZulu, the collection of 40 tribal homelands scattered across the former Natal Province on South Africa’s southeast salient. (After apartheid, KwaZulu became KwaZulu-Natal Province. “Depending on whom you talk to in South Africa, he is a tool of apartheid, a courageous opponent of white domination, a tribal warlord or a visionary proponent of democratic capitalism,” Michael Clough said in a review of Mr. Buthelezi’s book, “South Africa: My Vision of the Future” (1990), adding, “While he speaks eloquently of the need for nonviolence, his followers have been accused of murdering hundreds of their opponents in Natal Province.” In 1990, when South Africa signaled its willingness to disband apartheid by freeing Mr. Mandela and lifting a 30-year ban on the A.N.C., Mr. de Klerk and Mr. Mandela became the principal negotiators for a new Constitution. But Mr. Buthelezi quickly inserted himself into the bargaining as a voice for capitalism, education, tribal and ethnic rights, and powers for regional governments.