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 an 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."  I 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 labelled as a 'hit squad' because some of them were involved in acts of violence. What were these in comparison to umKhonto weSizwe, the guerrilla 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 Congress's 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 succinctly 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 'propagandists'' 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; ridiculing 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 her 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 perpetrator, 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 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.

Yours sincerely,

Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, MP