I'm not exactly clear on your question.
In AIX 4.3, the mutex "attributes" are not used.
Therefore, you can probably just use the default
initialization... pthread_mutex_init(&mymutex, NULL)
You must call this prior to using that mutex. You should
NOT attempt to re-init the same mutex more than once
unless interleaved by a call to pthread_mutex_destroy.
So if I understand your question correctly, my answer
would be "synchronous".