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My dear friends and fellow South Africans,

The publication of Dr Anthea Jeffrey's book, People's War is an
epoch-making event. It has reminded me of so many painful things in
the past few decades. I have always stated that I am probably the most
vilified political leader in South Africa over the last three decades.

This book reminds me of a meeting of the Central Committee of the
Inkatha Freedom Party. As we were busy with the affairs of our Party,
a taxi-owner arrived from Empangeni, Mr Dube. He was almost breathless
as he told us that he had consulted his lawyer that morning. That
lawyer happened to be a member of the ruling party by the name of
Professor Ernest Mchunu. He was a MP in the first democratic
parliament when the Government of National Unity assumed office in 1994.

Mr Dube told us of a conversation that he had had with his lawyer that
morning. He said that Professor Mchunu said to him, "We are going to
set up a commission which will expose Buthelezi as the murderer that
he is. By the way, you say he is a Christian and a lay minister. We
are going to expose him as the murderer that he is." also learnt from
other sources subsequently that one of the targets of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission was to demonise me and my Party. If there is
any truth in this, it is the story told by Dr Jeffrey in People's War.

It was amazing that Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the TRC concluded that
I, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, in my representative capacities as former
Chief Minister of KwaZulu, former Minister of the KwaZulu Police and
Leader of Inkatha, was responsible for more human rights violations
than anyone else.

The TRC found:

"The IFP under Buthelezi's leadership was the primary non-state
perpetrator responsible for approximately 33 percent of all the
violations reported to the commission". The IFP, according to the
report, "created a climate of impunity by expressly or implicitly
condoning gross human rights violations and other unlawful acts by
members and supporters of the organisation". It was the most amazing
thing for me to hear. I was quite aware that there were members of
these structures who were convicted for acts of violence. But in not
one single case had I ordered or authorized the killing of anyone.
There was violence. There was counter-violence. There was even
pre-emptive violence in the low intensity civil war that took place
mainly between members of the ANC/UDF and members of Inkatha. It was
not orchestrated by me.

Even when I sought the protection of the state, the 200 young men who
were assigned to protect me were then labeled as a 'hit squad' because
some of them were involved in acts of violence. What were these in
comparison to umKhonto weSizwe, the gurilla army of the ANC?

From the very beginning, when President Mandela announced in the
cabinet in which I served that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was gong to
chair the TRC, I objected, as he was aligned to both the UDF and the
ANC. When he visited me with other clergy in Ulundi, I had raised the
issue of him as a patron of the UDF trying to play a role as a
peacemaker. He told me that he had already resigned as patron of the
UDF. As one can see from Dr Jeffrey's book, the UDF was very deeply
involved in the low intensity civil war.

The Administrative Secretary of the IFP, Mr Zelanele Khumalo, was
charged with General Magnus Malan for some of the heinous acts that
were committed by some of the young people who were given military
training as a VIP Protection Unit for me and Ministers in the KwaZulu
Government. The case lasted 18 months and Mr Khumalo was acquitted.

I publicly stated that if I had committed any crime or had
orchestrated any criminal acts, the State should charge me. I was not
prepared to ask for any amnesty. The leader of the ANC at the time and
Head of State, Mr Thabo Mbeki and 37 leaders of the ANC did ask for
amnesty, which was granted to them. We will never know the details of
the criminal acts for which they asked for amnesty.

This book by Dr Anthea Jeffrey does in fact shed new light on the
grisly low intensity civil war that took place between the ANC and the
IFP. It is an objective telling of the convulsive history which paved
the way for the ANC's rise to power. She has not written a book about
angels and demons, but rather a meticulous account of how, to quote
Martin Williams review in the Citizen, the African National Congresses
rise to power was based on a "people's war" strategy learned from
Vietnamese and Soviet communists. Williams continues: "People's War is
an all-embracing combination of propaganda, organisation and violence.
All individuals, no matter what their affiliation or age, are
potential weapons of war. They can be victims or perpetrators. All are
expendable".

By contrast, Mac Maj Maharaj's review, or should I say, ideological
rant, in last week's Sunday Times was full of the animus and hatred of
a leading operative of Operation Vula. He wrote: "I am reading a book
that has me oscillating between laughter, tears, anger and irritation.
I am left to speculate how many trees were felled to humour its
author". He cannot bear the irreducible fact that Dr Jeffrey has
forensically chronicled every twist and turn of this war's narrative
because she has the temerity to contradict his world-view.

With this in mind, I recall the famous dictum "He who controls the
past, controls the future," by George Orwell in the dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its main character, Winston Smith, gives ample
evidence of the peculiar art of writing or rather re-writing of
history in the firm embrace of the fictitious totalitarian state par
excellence, its Ministries of Love, Peace, Plenty and Truth, and with
Big Brother affectionately watching over his shoulder. Smith, for his
part, works for the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth,
"rectifying" historical records and newspaper articles to make them
conform to Big Brother's most recent pronouncements, thus rendering
everything that the Party says true. What a job!

The echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four undoubtedly ring true across the
new South Africa's newsrooms, universities and ruling party offices
where the journalists, historians and apparatchiks concerned are
labouring under self-censorship or merely "observing the higher
principle". To many of them, freedom from oppression in this country
came at a cost, often professional and even personal, and weary as
they are today, they think it best not to rock the boat too much. They
owe their allegiance to the new ruling class in whose defence and
promotion they have risen to prominence. By way of reward - or is it
punishment? - they staff the Ministry of Truth and man its Records
Department.

On p506 Doctor Jeffrey succiently observes: "Various local and foreign
journalists were particularly important in spreading ANC propaganda.
Once the people's war began, black journalists living in the townships
may well have found that the easiest way to guarantee their safety was
to turn themselves into 'propogandists' for an (unnamed) liberation
organisation, as Thami Mazwazi was later to suggest. Various other
journalists effectively followed suit, albeit for a variety of
reasons. Time after time they echoed the ANC line: exaggerating the
UDF's popular support; riduculing or denouncing Buthelezi and Inkatha;
overlooking Azapo and the wider BC movement; blaming the Third Force
for the violence; and failing critically to probe the accusation that
De Klerk was engaged in a dual strategy of talking peace while waging
war."

To be fair, rewriting history by those who shaped the events under
scrutiny to suit their intellectual outlook is a fact of life. As a
result, 'rewritten' is the only kind of history there is. The problem
with rewriting history occurs when the political elite of the day
decides to rewrite history as it is occurring, rather than wait
decorously for an appropriate moment of retrospection. Stalin, as
Orwell correctly deduced in Nineteen Eighty-Four and elsewhere in his
fiction, was big on rewriting things as they happened and this habit
led to the virtual collapse of the Soviet reality. Likewise, a denial
of the South African - and even Southern African - reality has been a
prominent feature of the government by the African National Congress
(ANC) post-1994. Doctor Jeffery has rectified this and it took raw
courage as well as your veritable intellectual gifts to do so. Her
work is free from partisan cant and lazy paradigms.

It was in 1984 ? during the height of the Cold War in the
international theatre ? that the "township war" began and the
so-called "black-on-black" violence exploded. Replete with tragic
irony, the armed struggle was to claim the lives of 30,000 black
people during the black-on-black conflict, completely disproportional
to the 600 white people who lost their lives. Many whites were able to
depict the violence as a tribal conflict between Zulu nationalists and
Xhosa ANC supporters and further claimed that it proved that blacks
were unfit to govern. We saw, for instance, how the practice of
necklacing, in which a rubber tyre was filled with petrol and was
forced over a victim's head and then set alight, most potently
demonstrated how the armed struggle was able to harden and dehumanise
the perpetuator, hence, internalising the depravity of the apartheid
oppressor.

Internecine violence between supporters of the ANC and the IFP soon
developed into a low intensity civil war. 400 of Inkatha's leaders and
officer bearers were killed in a systematic plan of mass assassination
in their homes, workplaces and at taxi ranks. The People's War
painstakingly interrogates the political-socio-economic complex causes
which fed this violence.

This grisly orgy of death marked the lowest point in relations between
the two organisations, whilst the real enemy, the apartheid state,
continued to act with impunity. Nelson Mandela sadly wrote to me from
prison: 'In my political career few things have distressed me as much
as to see our people killing one another as is now happening". Some
twenty years later he also was to memorably tell my private secretary
in an interview for television: "Shenge is a formidable survivor who
we could not destroy". It will take generations before the wounds
inflicted in these years on both sides of this dreadful conflict to
heal. They will long serve as a historical reminder that there is no
victory in violent conflict. Dr Jeffrey's seminal work, too, will
stand for all eternity as an eloquent and truthful testimony to that
incontrovertible fact.