Letter: Self-governing 'solution' will encourage violence in South Africa

Sir: On the eve of departure from Ulundi, capital of the kingdom of Kwazulu, in Natal, in my capacity as an honorary constitutional adviser to the chief minister, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, I feel impelled to express my apprehension at the near certainty of yet another imminent internecine bloody conflict on the African continent, as unlikely to be resolved by international intervention, via the UN or otherwise, as has proved to be the case in Angola or Somalia.

A clear majority of the Zulu people with a long history of popular resistance to alien domination and abhorrence of apartheid is determined not to submit to over a century of repressive white rule being replaced, not by a democratic form of government, but by a no less repressive, also alien black, authoritarian centrist one.

Since the Republic of South Africa never has possessed any element of coherent nationhood, but was only born and maintained as a theoretically unified political structure, resulting only from external conquests, it is an inescapable fact that now that the foreign conquerors are having to abandon their exercise of exclusive political power, the people of South Africa are seeking to gain, or regain, their own lost national identities.

The Zulus and many other black African peoples are just as distinct, socially and culturally, in historic and ethnic terms as the USSR's recently freed white colonial citizens. Yet they are prepared to go further in trying to maintain a 'union', of South Africa, in the creation and sustenance of which they have never been able to play any role, than their counterparts in recently freed Eastern Europe by agreeing to remain within a genuine federal structure yielding a greater degree of national sovereignty.

The Zulus are being condemned for their reluctance to exchange one set of harsh masters for another, albeit of the same colour, of obstructing the defeat of apartheid: despite the fact that in 1986 it was the Zulu-dominated Inkatha (Freedom) Party that submitted consensus proposals for the whole of Natal for a new non-racist multi-racial government in Pretoria.

Yours etc,

FREDERIC BENNETT

London, WC2