INKATHA

in full Inkatha Freedom Party, black political movement in South Africa that derives its main support from the Zulu people. Inkatha was founded about 1975 in the black homeland of KwaZulu by Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief of the Zulu people and the chief minister of the homeland. Its purpose was to work against apartheid (the official South African policy of racial segregation) and to encourage the political and cultural aspirations of South African blacks. Under Buthelezi's leadership, Inkatha advocated an evolutionary struggle against apartheid and declared its willingness to accept special power-sharing arrangements that would fall short of majority rule in a postapartheid South Africa. Inkatha's membership was said to exceed 2,000,000 by the 1990s, making it South Africa's largest political organization. Inkatha did not expand beyond its Zulu tribal base, however, and the organization was criticized as being collaborationist and ethnically divisive by members of the African National Congress (ANC) and other more radical black antiapartheid organizations. In the late 1980s and the '90s followers of the two movements were regularly involved in bloody clashes that had strong tribal (i.e., Zulu versus non-Zulu) overtones. In 1991 the South African government admitted that it had secretly subsidized Inkatha in the latter's deepening rivalry with the ANC.