There is a forgotten story behind the Ingonyama Trust’s establishment. A few days before the first democratic elections in April 1994, the last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, signed his final piece of legislation, setting it up. This was no footnote in history, but a seminal political moment, signalling the return of the IFP to the national elections it had abandoned a few months earlier.
Recently, the trust has been described as a “land bribe” to buy the IFP’s commitment, in a fraught and dangerous political climate, to participate in those elections. Otherwise there would be no electoral legitimacy. For his side, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, then leader of the party, has denied such claims, pointing out that the draft law to set up the trust was given to ANC leaders who showed little interest in its contents. Thus, from Buthelezi’s perspective, the trust was no “secret deal” with De Klerk – the ANC was kept in the loop and effectively endorsed its creation.
Much of what transpired behind the scenes during that period, marking the transition from apartheid to democracy, remains shrouded in mystery, though recent books have begun to shed light on the subject. Ben Temkin’s Buthelezi biography has shown the centrality of the trust’s establishment to the IFP’s return to the 1994 elections.
Politics aside, recent criticism of the trust has focused less on its legitimacy per se and more on its mode of operation: the power it entrusts in traditional authorities and how the deployment of that power affects people living on the land. It is vast, some 30%, or 2,8-million hectares, of KwaZulu-Natal. It is also lucrative, with mining, shopping malls and commercial agriculture taking place on a large scale, enabling the trust’s administrators to collect rentals of R100m in good years.