KwaZulu was a bantustan in South Africa, intended by the apartheid government as a semi-independent homeland for the Zulu people. The capital was moved from Nongoma to Ulundi in 1980.It was led until its abolition in 1994 by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulu tribe and head of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). It was merged with the surrounding South African province of Natal to form the new province of KwaZulu-Natal.The name kwaZulu translates roughly as Place of Zulus, or more formally Zululand.In March 1996, two years after South Africa's transition to majority rule, the trial of The State v. Peter Msane & Others was held due to the accusation against thirteen retired white generals, including Magnus Malan (who served as defence minister at the height of emergency rule in the mid-1980s) and seven Zulus, partisans of Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party of complicity in a massacre of thirteen people, ten years earlier, in a rural village in the KwaZulu homeland known as KwaMakhutha. The trial was an attempt by Nelson Mandela's new government to bring to justice those at the top of apartheid's security forces, who were alleged to have purposefully fanned violence among blacks by arming and training one faction – Inkatha – as a proxy force, in the tradition of divide and rule.
