Abstract EN:

This pluridisciplinary study of the zulu nationalist movement in south africa deals with the notions of ethnicity and politics and offers the first monography in french of the inkatha freedom party. Here, ethnicity is understood as complex processes of identification which happen to be politically operational through the gestion of a stock of shared identity patterns. The case study of inkatha helps to understand the double nature, political and emotional, of ethnicity. It starts with the analysis of the historical creation and development of an ethnic identity among zulu speakers -especially during colonial times- and of the bond of this group with a bounded administrative territory. It goes on with the study of the political use of ethnicity that has been made by the government and the following nationalist movements (inkatha was created in 1924, was recreated as inkatha ye sizwe in 1975 and reshaped into the inkatha freedom party in 1990). The second part of this work deals with the attempts of institutionalisation of the zulu ethnic label and with the popular forms of resistance to it. At the turn of the 90's, paradoxically, together with the abolition of apartheid and the democratic shift in south africa, the ongoing conflict in kwazulu-natal, which was not put out by the new national frame, tends to prouve that zulu identities have remained politically sound.