The th!nc Foundation

We seldom meet people who make an indelible mark in our very lives that we realise after they have departed this world how big a gap they filled.  As we grow up, we meet and designate titles to people we encounter. Some we are born into defined relationships with them, and as a result, nature defines them according to what they will always be, with or without our permission. These are our family and extended family; blood relations will determine and, to a great extent, even attempt to regulate how you should relate. As important as these are to our lives, we have not chosen them; they did not choose us, yet they are who or what they are in our lives.  Those we do not choose, operate, and almost always, on a right and claim wavelength of relationship building and management. Sometimes, they have rights in our lives because of how nature defines them about us. Others have more than rights but claim to occupy specific spaces in our lives. I mean rights possessing and rightful cl...

A casual read of 'mainstream' in-ANC social media conversations amongst 'comrades' reflects a managed discontent at the decision by President Ramaphosa to give Prince Buthelezi a category one state funeral. In a veiled show of this discontent, the leader of the ANC Veterans League, Dr Snuki Zikalala, interrogates the category one decision and decries the criteria with compelling comparisons. Notwithstanding the discontent, support, including a general reverence of Prince Buthelezi, and arguably a precursor of still-to-come national veneration functions in his honour, the question is why was it so easy to have consensus amongst South Africa's elite on this matter.  This consensus is growing into one of the questionable axioms of political thoughts about how power is distributed in society. The dawn of a democratic order after 1994 meant that South African society was on a definite path to create a ruling class out of the new democracy-created governing leadership coh...

The death of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi has triggered not only the battle for the pivot of Zulu cultural and political life, the position of the Kingdom's Premiership but also a battle for a potentially politically stranded KwaZulu-Natal abaNTU vote. The speeches at uMtwana's memorial service, which in many ways assumed the status of parading a potential alternative, through coalition, to the ANC as the governing party, were choreographed to appease the KZN vote.    Since the successes of opposition parties' coalitions against the ANC in local government in 2016 and 2021, leaders of opposition parties have realised the value of having their parties working together to undermine ANC hegemony wherever it threatens to renew itself. The death of Buthelezi, however, has made opposition leaders concerned about the potential advances of the ANC to capture the political soul of a Buthelezi-as-a-person specific voter constituency. In the last five years of Buthelezi's life, the...

The (untimely) death of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi has been received with mixed emotions by South Africans from all walks of life.  There have been varieties of political grandstanding, ranging from outright disparaging remarks about his life to remarks about him having been one of the most outstanding leaders of South Africa. The Presidency has characterised him as "an outstanding leader in the political and cultural life of our nation". The most brutal exposition of who he was outside a formal narrative ignited by the government came from the editor-in-chief of City Press, Mondli Makhanya, who simply said he was "a chief apartheid collaborator and a mass murderer". The brute truth is Buthelezi was complicit in what the apartheid state sought to achieve, and this aspect of him is receiving attention in many renditions.  What might not be receiving attention is a definition of his death beyond 'ukutshalwa ko mtwana (the burial). Buthelezi was one of the leaders...

Yes, death is a mighty and universal truth. When it strikes, an array of virtues rise in mercy, compassion, memory, legacy, and love. Of every tear that we, the sorrowing mortals, shed on graves such as that awaits many of those we consider our leaders, some good might be born as some gentler aspects of our nature rise with the best of human virtues out of the experience.  I n their warrior spirit, most of our leaders have, and in their unique ways as a generation, lived a life that perpetually declared, "as to what I dare, I’m a ... bird now, that has dared all manner of traps...and I’m not afeard to perch upon a scarecrow. If there’s Death hid inside of it, there is, and let him come out, and I’ll face him, and then I’ll believe in him and not afore". Yet, and this our leaders know to deny, “a person knows that he is mortal, but takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life”. Notwithstanding, death ends life; it does not end the relationship of l...