South Africa Contends With its Zulu Nation

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Most people, when they think about race relations and ethnic conflict in South Africa, assume it relates to Black and white South Africans. While that is usually the case, this sometimes ignores issues between the various Black ethnic groups in the country.

Indigenous Africans make up more than 80 per cent of the population of 63 million, and they include a variety of peoples, who speak at least nine major languages. The Zulu and Xhosa, the two largest ethnic nations, have been the most prominent politically since the end of white-minority apartheid rule.

Zululand, a region in the northeastern section of present-day KwaZulu-Natal (formerly Natal) province, is the home of the Zulu people and site of their 19th-century kingdom, when their leader, Shaka, established dominance over what is now KwaZulu-Natal. By 1822, Shaka had conquered an empire covering an area of around 210,000 square kilometres.

The Zulu fought the Afrikaner Boers in the 1830-1840, including at the famous 1838 Battle of Blood River. Meanwhile, the British moved into nearby Natal and annexed it in 1843.

In the age of British imperialism in Asia and Africa, various peoples were designated as “martial races,” based on the idea that they were “typically brave and well-built for fighting.” Among them were the Sikhs in India, the Gurkhas in Nepal, and, in Africa, the Zulus.

The Zulus “earned” this description in the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, which included the Zulu victory in the Battle of Isandlwana. The British Army suffered its worst defeat against an indigenous foe equipped with vastly inferior military technology. Isandlwana resulted in the British leading a heavily reinforced second invasion, and eventual victory. They made Zululand a crown colony in 1887 and annexed it to Natal in 1897.

All of this happened more than a century ago, so what has it to do with modern South African politics? A lot. The Zulu are the largest ethnic group in South Africa, with approximately ten million people residing primarily in the KwaZulu-Natal province. They have preserved their language and culture, maintaining a traditional monarchy within South Africa’s democratic framework, and they retain a strong sense of nationhood.

In the early 1970s, a Bantustan called KwaZulu was formed as a homeland for the Zulu people. Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi was elected as Chief Executive of KwaZulu. He was also the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which he founded in 1975 and led until 2019. Buthelezi, who died in 2023, became representative of the Zulu people, along with King Goodwill Zwelithini, who was his nephew.

In the early 1990s, apartheid (along with its Bantustans), was dismantled, and South Africa’s first fully democratic elections took place in April 1994. The IFP contested these elections and won 10.54 per cent of the national vote and a majority in the KwaZulu-Natal province. As an ethnic regional party, Inkatha supported devolution of power to provincial governments and autonomy for traditional African communities and their leaders. This led to a virtual civil war for years between Zulu Inkatha supporters and members of Nelson Mandela’s ruling African National Congress.

Zulus remain a powerful force nationally. Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, a Zulu, served as the president of South Africa from 2009 to 2018, until forced out of office due to controversies around political and financial corruption.

Last month, the current Zulu king demanded that all foreigners must leave the country, during a speech that was supposed to have been aimed at calming anti-migrant feelings in KwaZulu-Natal. Misuzulu kaZwelithini was addressing his supporters at the place where 20,000 Zulus warriors defeated a British contingent of 1,800 soldiers 147 years ago beneath the rocky outcrop of Isandlwana Hill. His words carry significant weight among Zulus, who view him as a custodian of tradition and a powerful moral authority. 

The ire of many of King Misuzulu’s subjects is now directed not at British invaders but at migrants from neighbouring countries like Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe who have come to South Africa to work. According to official statistics, the country is home to about 2.4 million migrants, about four percent of the population.

Xenophobia and anger directed at migrants remains a key political issue, with some believing foreigners are stealing jobs and benefiting from public services meant for South Africans. The rate of unemployment in the country remains one of the highest in the world at around 33 per cent.

This has led in recent years to the rise of vigilante anti-migrant groups, like Operation Dudula and March on March, which have gained notoriety for their demands that foreign nationals be removed from the country. An angry group of protesters descended on a primary school in the KwaZulu-Natal port city of Durban, claiming that 90 per cent of the pupils there were the children of migrants.

The king also wants to drop Natal from KwaZulu-Natal’s name. Over the last three decades, many cities, towns and roads in South Africa have been renamed, replacing them with indigenous ones or calling them after heroes of the struggle against apartheid.

But for some commentators, the call to name the province simply KwaZulu is an unpalatable reminder of Zulu nationalism and its potential dangers. There are fears that renaming it could create a kind of exceptionalism that could lead to yet more trouble in this ethnically diverse country.

 

Jews Must Defend Israel Against Post-October 7 Libels

By Henry Srebrnik, Shalom Magazine, Winter 2026 

I am not only the child of Holocaust survivors, having been born in Poland right after World War II, but I myself, it turns out, am a survivor. Last summer I found a book, by accident, listing child Holocaust survivors in Poland. I was surprised to see I was on the list since I was born July 19, 1945, after Poland had been freed. But it seems being conceived during the war in a Nazi camp made me one.

To confirm this I filed a claim, with a lot of evidence, with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. I did not file under the hardship category (something that is probably true, unfortunately, for most elderly survivors) because, of course, I am not suffering hardships.

In December I got a call from New York confirming my status. They explained that although I am not a hardship claimant, I will nonetheless receive benefits at any Jewish Community Centre in North America, including medical and dental ones, should they include those. I was very surprised! Also, should my annual income ever dip below $66,000, I would be eligible for a monthly pension. Even in retirement, my UPEI pension will be well above that, of course, so that is a moot issue. What I am most pleased about is that this is now “official.”

But I don’t use it as an “excuse” for my “Zionist” views. Maybe Arnold Toynbee was right that we are a “fossil” people, who should have disappeared with the rise of supersessionist Christianity and Islam. But we didn’t. We were dispersed, yet no anti-Zionist calling us “settlers” can give an answer to this question: where, then, if not the land of Israel, are we “indigenous”? The way Cree, Estonians, Kikuyu, Laotians and tens of thousands of other ethnic groups are, even if they migrated from somewhere else. Those assimilated Jews who saw themselves as “indigenous” within the French, German, Hungarian, Polish, and other European nations were in for a rude awakening in World War II. The same happened with those Jews in the Middle East after -- but also, as in Iraq, before -- 1948.

This is what it can lead to, as described by Noah Smith.” In his article “No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land,” published in the Free Press of New York Nov. 27, he points to this problem, which affects all Jews – including, according to our “anti-Zionist” enemies -- even those in Israel:

“My ancestors were Lithuanian Jews. I could leave the country of my birth and go ‘back’ to Lithuania -- a land I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak. Yet my ancestors were not ‘indigenous’ to Lithuania either; they moved there from somewhere else. What if the ethnic Lithuanians chose not to accept me? Where would I go then? Israel? But the folks who do land acknowledgments would consider me a ‘colonizer’ there as well. Would I then wander the Earth, desperately seeking some ethnostate that would allow me and my descendants to live there as a permanently precarious resident alien?” He truly paints the age-old picture of the “wandering Jew!”

Jews, however, have returned – ideologically, even if not completely “genetically” – to a place with which they never lost touch culturally, religiously, and so forth. The land of Israel. It’s a libel to compare this with white Rhodesians, South Africans, the French in Algeria, and indeed Anglo-Canadians, none of whom had any contact or history with those places before conquering them. For that matter, even Afro-Liberians and the Krios of Sierra Leone were “settlers,” since they were freed former Western Hemisphere enslaved people, who didn’t originate in that particular part of West Africa but moved there through American and British auspices.

The Arab claim to Palestine, indeed to the whole Middle East, was itself the result of conquest and settlement, displacing other peoples and religions. No one complains about this, for some reason. Israel, which looms like a giant monster in antisemitic imagery, is but a dot on the map, of about 10 million people, in a sea of billions of Muslim peoples stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Those, too, were, after all, conquests. The claim to Palestine, shorn of all the “academic left post-colonial” stuff is, to bring it down to Occam’s level, simply this: It is Muslim land, and that’s the long and short of it. This is the non-negotiable truth for Hamas and others of that persuasion. We just don’t buy it.

I consider that what has happened in Gaza is tragic, though to my mind no genocide. If anything, it may perhaps have been an overreaction to a shocking event that triggered the worst fears in Israeli and Jewish minds, given our history. Still, I will never apologize for Israel’s right to exist. I do however worry for the state’s future, given the forces arrayed against it.

Meanwhile, things in the diaspora show little sign of improving. “Have we Crossed the Antisemitism Rubicon?” wonders Jacob Dallal, managing director of the Comper Centre for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa, in a Nov. 24, 2025, Times of Israel article.

“The intellectual worldview that has taken root in academia, casting Israel as colonialist and genocidal, and Jews as members or even leaders of the white oppressor class, has spread far beyond universities into other cultural institutions,” he suggests. We may be entering a new era marking the end of the post-World War II hiatus in Western antisemitism.

“Jews will come to face more widespread and systemic discrimination, with silent and not-so-silent boycotts of Jewish and Israeli artists, writers, and academics spreading, largely out of public view.” As anti-Jewish sentiment increases and potentially becomes official policy, the Golden Age for Jews in North America, he contends, may well be over. It certainly seems the case in Canada, where antisemitism has become almost normalized.