Hon Speaker, 16 years have passed since South Africans were shot or burnt to death in political conflict, and even though we will never forget this painful part of our history, memory of the trauma has faded. Some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. The conventional wisdom is that they died at the hands of the state third force, but Anthea Jeffery's book, People's War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa, paints an accurate picture in which she explains that these people died as a result of the people's war the ANC unleashed.
In 1993, the IFP president, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, drew attention to the 275 IFP leaders who had been killed since 1985. He asked why this was of no consequence. Buthelezi asked how the 1994 election could be free and fair in such a climate and withdrew from the election process in protest.
He was demonised for his views and actions at the time. Jeffery's book lays out how the people's war allowed the ANC to dominate the negotiating process, to marginalise people like Prince Buthelezi and to seize a virtual monopoly on power in 1994. Even though Dr Jeffery's book has been on the shelves for many months, we would like to congratulate her on publishing a balanced narrative of the history of South Africa and the struggle for freedom. Since the dawn of democracy, there have been too many instances of the ruling party trying to paint a distorted picture of the struggle, and in some instances there have been attempts to rewrite history entirely. [Applause.]