The 'home' in homeland: gender, national space, and Inkatha's politics of ethnicity

In South Africa, a country in which the manipulation of ethnicity was at the heart of the government's attempts to establish control over the majority African population, ethnic mobilization during the liberation struggle was singularly unsuccessful. The one exception was Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's controversial Inkatha movement. This article suggests that one of the reasons for Inkatha's successes was the astute way in which the organization and, in particular, Buthelezi played on gendered notions of 'home' and 'homeland'. Historically, apartheid constructed notions of home and space differently for women and men and Inkatha was able to draw upon and manipulate these differences to produce a powerfully felt response. Thus, for men, many of them migrant workers in South Africa's cities, the notion of 'home' implied a return to patriarchal values and male domestic control in a historically constituted 'homeland'; for women, Buthelezi emphasized the new 'modern' opportunities opened up by the KwaZulu homeland, and the importance of their 'God-given' gifts of motherhood.