It was led until its abolition in 1994 by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi and head of Inkatha, who implemented the limited self-governing powers decided by the South African government as part of apartheid, but rejected the nominal independence which four other homelands accepted, complaining about the fragmented nature of the state, and the inability of the apartheid government to consolidate a viable and contiguous territory for KwaZulu, in the face of stiff resistance from whites.

[4] F. W. de Klerk later commented in an interview that he believed that Buthelezi would have accepted independence had his homeland been given the port of Richards Bay, a proposal that failed due to the white population's resistance to the idea.

[8] The territory had been claimed by King Sobhuza of Swaziland as part of the Swazi monarchs' traditional realm, and the South African government hoped to use the homeland as a buffer zone against guerrilla infiltration from Mozambique.

South Africa responded to the failure of the transfer by temporarily suspending the autonomy of KaNgwane, then restoring it in December 1982 and granting it nominal self-rule in 1984.

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.