King Zwelithini’s reckless use of personal power

 It would be remiss not to acknowledge the Zulu King’s complicity with apartheid machinations, political violence, homophobia, sexism and xenophobia – and the exploitative Ingonyama Trust.

 

5 August 2000: King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu at his 52nd birthday celebrations at the Rumelin Stadium in Madadeni, Newcastle. (Photograph by Rajesh Jantilal/ AFP)

It has been said that the powerful state King Shaka kaSenzangakhona constructed in the early 19th century was not, as has often been suggested in colonial literature, entirely unique. There is archaeological and archival evidence, fragmentary but certainly suggestive, of an Mbo state in the same region reaching back to the 17th century and quite possibly further into the past.

But there is no doubt that the state Shaka built – in part, some have said, in response to pressures generated by Portuguese slave raiding from the East – rapidly became a powerful regional force. When the first British invasion of the Zulu Kingdom was decisively defeated at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879, it became a world historical force.

But when the Zulu state was finally defeated, aspects of what remained of its system of political authority were incorporated into what became the standard colonial mode of rule, often in a distorted form. Ugandan intellectual Mahmood Mamdani has shown how, across colonial Africa, the idea that Africans naturally inhabit the realm of tradition and are therefore interlopers into modernity was fundamental to colonial ideology. One way in which colonialism used this deliberately cultivated fantasy to legitimate and organise domination was to fabricate the “tribe” as a geographically, linguistically and ethnically fixed form of political affiliation, and to then use it to divide Africans and subordinate them to a separate form of rule described as traditional authority.  

SOURCE ;.newframe

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(With input from news agency language)

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