To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800–1996

In the mid-1980s, I spent a number of years documenting political events unfolding in both the Natal province and the ‘homeland’ of KwaZulu (as the patchwork region of apartheidconstituted territories was then called). The events in question were related to the formation and ongoing activities of a popular movement mobilised around ideas of Zulu cultural tradition, an identity politics represented by its leadership in the terms of ‘nation’; that is, arguing for the primacy of an ethnic national form of subjecthood and belonging. Nation and self-determination were, after all, discourses with legitimacy: struggles over who could sit at the gates guarding, or presiding over, a given ‘peoplehood’ were influencing political confrontations in many other parts of the world. Inmy research, Iwas concerned about a leader’s own ‘appetite for power’, his co-leaders and close followers, and their collective brokering of a politics centred on ethnic ‘Zuluness’ over and apart from a broader ‘South African’ vision of national unification. Yet, I had confidence that people mobilised by Inkathawere not pawns of leadership, nor of a third force (although I did take seriously the power of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s authority as well as that of armed state intervention). I acknowledged the reality of large numbers of local people seeing themselves, and their own concerns and future, mirrored in the call to local, cultural solidarity, and in the proposals for federalism, aligned to industrial zoning, jobs, the disciplining of youth and the organisationally linked educational curriculum that Buthelezi promoted. That many also did not accept Inkatha’s conception of belonging was also increasingly clear. The stakes proved extremely high. In the violence of the later 1980s and early 1990s, about 18,000 people lost their lives and many more lost family members, their security, homes and property. ‘Ordinary people’ were overwhelmingly affected by this civil war, even as the leadership resolved their differences or shifted in their alliances. The Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, long a stalwart and unifying symbol of Inkatha, switched his allegiance with ANC