Buthelezi, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha

South African Zulu leader and politician, president of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which he founded as a paramilitary organization for attaining a nonracial democratic society in 1974 and converted into a political party in 1994. He was appointed home affairs minister in the country's first post-apartheid government, led by African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela, in 1994. In June 1999 Buthelezi was offered the post of deputy president of South Africa by the new president Thabo Mbeki but Buthelezi refused the post.

Buthelezi's threatened boycott of South Africa's first multiracial elections in 1994 led to a dramatic escalation in politically motivated violence, but he eventually agreed to register his party and joined the new government.