My 2018 visit to the village of Nkandla, in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, is unforgettable. I was part of my cousin brother’s entourage there, the second such visit on his mission to marry a local girl. At the end of our visit, after satisfying bride wealth and dowry customs quite similar to those practised among the Banyankore people of western Uganda, we were allowed to fold Bridget Busisiwe Dlamini into our family. Bridget became my sister-in-law, and in a memorable moment, as we were reposed in her father’s compound, she came to me and pointed to the adjacent hill. “That is President Zuma’s home. The famous Nkandla,” she said, smiling to reveal her dimpled cheeks and elegant white teeth.
Bridget now is the mother of two strong nephews of mine. Not too long ago, Bridget, her two boys and I visited Igongo Cultural Centre just outside the Ugandan city of Mbarara. While we were there, my Zulu sister-in-law said that she believed the legendary Ankore fighter Muguta ya Butaaho had been reborn in Shaka, the famous Zulu warrior-king. And then, with the declaratory manner of a professor of anthropology, she explained that, as a little girl growing up in Nkandla, she had come to believe the mythical story children were told about Zuma’s links to ancient Zulu military-political royalty. According to that story, Shaka’s bloodline came to Zuma, and Bridget remarked proudly that while she had no blood ties with Zuma, she drank the same water that Zuma drank as a herdsboy tending his father’s cattle all those years ago in the rural hills of Nkandla.
“By my marriage in Ankore, I see our sons everyday having Muguta and Zuma and Shaka in them,” she said. “They are fighters like their mother and father. Your brother descended from Muguta … He calls me ‘Daughter of Zuma.’”
That day, a question started to intrigue my mind: What material is Zuma made of? Why does he have this strange hold on people? Why was he a compelling figure to South Africans such as this young mother who possibly had never encountered him from close quarters? Her claims about Zuma’s unique bloodline were dubious, but her admiration if not love for Zuma was genuine. And I think it points to something: the transnational and transcultural spiritual strength that the former South African leader seems to embody across Africa. Zuma, as a character and as a man, is extremely interesting, and as a politician there’s, amassed in him, the kind of intense strength that he will take to his grave. I once entertained the thought that if Shakespeare were alive today, perhaps Zuma would be a protagonist (or antagonist, for that matter) in one of the great bard’s plays.
Zuma, of course, has been back in the limelight lately over his efforts to retaliate against the African National Congress, the party that led South Africa from white racist rule and which, after three decades of uninterrupted power, is struggling to stay at the apex of national politics. Zuma – South Africa’s deputy president from 1999 to 2005 and its president from 2009 to 2018 – had long been involved in a power struggle with his successor, Cyril Ramaphosa. Zuma, even after resigning the presidency amid a cloud of corruption allegations, continued to wield tremendous influence over a wing of the ANC.
Regarding Zuma, it appears that South Africa’s ruling party made many missteps on its way to losing its governing majority in this year’s elections, and Zuma feels he has long been persecuted by people taking orders from Ramaphosa. In 2021 Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in jail for alleged contempt of court after he refused to testify before a judicial panel investigating what South Africans describe as Zuma-era “state capture” but which really refers to the systematic cronyism that benefited people close to power at the expense of most South Africans. More than 300 people were killed in the riots that followed Zuma’s jailing. He served only two months of the sentence but remains in legal jeopardy over corruption charges stemming from a 1999 arms deal.
In December 2023, sixty-two years after Nelson Mandela founded the ANC paramilitary wing known as uMkhonto weSizwe, which means ‘Spear of the Nation’ in isiZulu, Zuma announced that he would not be voting for the ANC in polls set for 2024. Instead, Zuma said, he would support the newly formed uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, which, it turned out, a protégé had registered on his behalf. Zuma, while still a ranking member of the ANC, had quietly orchestrated the launch of a party that was poised to contest political power.
Asked by a South African interviewer whether he was not overestimating himself and his MK party days ahead of voting, Zuma beamed characteristically and pointed out that he was aiming for what he called a “political something-something.” Only Zuma knows what he was referring to, even though, in its murkiness, the mumbo jumbo seemed an apt statement on Zuma’s shadowy place in South African politics.
But if it’s political influence Zuma was speaking of, then he was proven right days later. His party, still only months old, won 14.6 percent of the vote, with the opposition Democratic Alliance taking 21.8 percent. The ANC took 40 percent. The rest of the vote was shared by smaller parties. Crucially, an analysis of the results showed that the ANC had lost most of its support to MK, especially in the vote-rich Zulu heartland of KwaZulu-Natal. Does this make Zuma a Zulu nationalist as he has long been alleged to be? Perhaps, but this doesn’t explain some wonders. For example, why did Thabo Mbeki, an elder statesman long retired from politics, feel it necessary to come out and campaign for the ANC outside KwaZulu-Natal? How could a politician as discredited as Zuma still be able to command the following of millions, even if those votes were cast by his own tribespeople? If Zuma’s enduring strength as a South African leader testifies to something, anything, what is it?
In order to try to answer these questions, it is important to start from the beginning. Zuma was born in 1942 in impoverished Nkandla in what was then the British territory of South Africa. The son of a police constable and a domestic worker, he lost his father before his fifth birthday and had no formal schooling. The scourge of fatherlessness, the fact of being without a father, would have been one of the first realities Zuma became aware of, and one imagines that the orphan boy would scrape whatever material he came by to build the portrait of the father he never knew. His middle name Gedleyihlekisa refers to “the one who destroys his enemies while smiling,” and an obstacle that Zuma, like any other black child in apartheid-era South Africa, had to overcome very early in his life was illiteracy. It is said that he attended lectures around a bonfire every night, another Zulu boy imbibing lessons in courage from his elders. As a young boy, he participated in Zulu traditional stick-fighting games and drills that emphasized the identity of the Zulu boy as a warrior built to fight and defend Zulu independence. Seventy years later, there were still, in the septuagenarian president, flashes of the boy he once was when he leaped and danced at political rallies, appearing to boogie as in a traditional dance.
In 1959, when Zuma was 17 years old, he joined the ANC. Later, in 1962, he joined the active ranks of uMkhonto weSizwe militants at a time when the ANC was banned. In 1963, while still a teenager, he was arrested, tried and convicted over allegations of a conspiracy to overthrow the apartheid government of Hendrik Verwoerd. He spent a decade behind bars on Robben Island, where his interactions with the other heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle would have contributed to his education. There’s no indication that Zuma ever matriculated from a school, grade school or whatever, and yet he has never struggled to express himself.
In 1975, after he had served his prison term and resumed his clandestine work, he fled to exile in Swaziland and then to Mozambique, where he was the long-time head of intelligence for the ANC. He first became a member of the ANC National Executive Committee, the party’s highest-ranking organ, in 1977. Zuma returned to South Africa in 1990 with the unbanning of the ANC and the release from jail of Mandela, who would be elected president four years later in the country’s first democratic elections.
What one discerns from Zuma’s personal history is a lot of suffering as a boy, as a teenager, and as a young man, so that one, at last, may think of his pre-1990 period as the sort of life insurance policy he accumulated for his immense liabilities in the period that followed. Whether or not he’s to be believed, Zuma repeatedly says he still sees himself as a freedom fighter in a way that his rivals are not.
To understand Zuma better, it is important to look at two of the ANC men with whom he has feuded as a politician: Mbeki, who first fired Zuma, and Ramaphosa, who helped orchestrate Zuma’s resignation as president. The erstwhile friendship between Mbeki and Zuma started in the 70s when the two were exiled across southern Africa. It has sometimes been claimed that Mbeki taught Zuma how to shoot a gun. Zuma was Mbeki’s deputy from 1999 to 2005, when the president dismissed Zuma over corruption charges related to the arms deal that continues to dog Zuma. But these charges that would have buried the career of any other politician were somehow not enough to destroy Zuma’s. Most importantly, he kept his post as ANC deputy president and forged ahead as the powerful leader of an anti-Mbeki faction of the ruling party.
Later in 2005, in what many South Africans saw as a politically motivated case, Zuma was charged with raping a 31-year-old woman who was his friend’s daughter. For its details, the ensuing rape trial shocked not just South Africa but the entire world: although Zuma denied the charges, he testified that he had had unprotected but consensual sex with a woman he knew to be infected with HIV. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation was Zuma’s admission that, to avoid catching HIV, he had taken a cold shower immediately after having sex with the woman. He was acquitted of the charges but shamed forever. Still, it wasn’t enough to stop him from becoming the next president of South Africa.
Mbeki, the intellectual leader in Savile Row suits who’s said to feel more comfortable in the air-conditioned environs of the academy, had been defeated by the ground-stomping, dust-raising Zulu populist with many wives and concubines. Indeed, this latter aspect of Zuma’s persona – his polygamy – offers some hues that would never be left out of a truthful painting of Zuma. For the “100 percent Zulu boy,” polygamy was a tribal obligation, and Zuma, the holder of powerful positions in government, had the means to look after his women. Some outsiders look at Zuma’s behaviour and see a primitive, appalling man. But some Africans look at Zuma from afar and see a man who is honest with himself.
The other thread in the contest between Zuma and Mbeki concerns Zuma’s record as president of South Africa. That Zuma presided over massive corruption isn’t in dispute. But did he do nothing for his people as some observers suggest? In December 2017, for example, Zuma announced that his government would provide free tertiary education to students from households with an annual income of less than 350,000 rand, an amount that included most students seeking higher education. By that year, the National Student Financial Aid Scheme Fund had risen to 15 billion rand from 2.4 billion rand in 2008. Zuma’s government championed a program to provide free nutritious meals to millions of schoolchildren across South Africa. He wanted to see racial equality in South African schools, from kindergarten to university. South Africa was a global leader in the delivery of subsidised housing for the poor, with more than four million houses put up by 2018. South Africa’s household electrification rate rose from 77 percent in 2002 to 84 percent in 2016, and the rate for kitchens with electric power rose from 58 percent to 76 percent in the same period.
When it came to public health, Zuma oversaw the rolling out of life-saving ARV drugs to more than 3 million people infected with HIV; mother-to-child transmission of HIV fell to 1.5 percent in 2015 from 8.5 percent in 2008. Where Mbeki doubted the effectiveness of ARVs in prolonging the lives of AIDS patients during the worst days of the epidemic, Zuma presided over a more serious handling of the matter.
There are other reasons for many South Africans to look back on the Zuma years with some nostalgia: South Africa, in 2010, became the first country in Africa to host the soccer World Cup, an event whose success was a source of pride for many Africans; South Africa’s entry into the BRICS bloc of nations, giving it a new measure of geopolitical influence, investment opportunities, and access to a market of over 3 billion people. To list these achievements is not to say that South Africa would not have progressed without Zuma. But it’s an indisputable fact that he was his country’s leader when all of the above happened.
Which brings us to Ramaphosa, who succeeded Zuma as ANC leader and has just been re-elected to his second and final term as South Africa’s president. Ramaphosa, a former trade unionist who was often seen at Mandela’s side during negotiations to end apartheid, had always been tipped for national leadership. Some thought he would be chosen to become Mandela’s deputy after the 1994 elections, but his circuitous path to the presidency followed stints as chairman of the assembly that promulgated South Africa’s constitution, as a member of parliament, and then as a businessman with interests in everything from mining to farming.
In 2012, the same year he was elected deputy president of the ANC, the local press leaked details of Ramaphosa’s emails to a senior executive with a platinum mining company that had faced a weeks-long wildcat strike at Marikana in South Africa’s North West province. Before the police were sent to quell the strike, in the process killing thirty-four miners, Ramaphosa had written many times to Albert Jamieson, the chief commercial officer of Lonmin Platinum who, in prior correspondence, had urged strong police action:
Dear Albert Thank you for your email. I am currently in Cape Town … I thank you for the consistent manner in which you are characterising the current difficulties we are going through. The terrible events that have unfolded cannot be described as a labor dispute. They are plainly dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such. In line with this characterization there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.
Ramaphosa held shares in Lonmin Platinum at the time, and the day after he wrote this letter police moved into Marikana and committed a massacre. A Zuma-appointed commission of inquiry cleared Ramaphosa of any wrongdoing, but he was subsequently sued by survivors whose lawyers charged that his emails were a prelude to the carnage. Ramaphosa’s involvement in that sad episode helped cement the image of him as a thoroughgoing capitalist, and many South Africans still despise him for his epistolary warmth towards a representative of ‘white monopoly capital’ in a country that remains the world’s most unequal society. A more recent scandal, known as Farmgate, concerns the theft from Ramaphosa of a huge sum of cash in U.S. dollars that had been hidden in a sofa at his farm in the province of Limpopo. Ramaphosa has denied any wrongdoing, but questions remain about the source of the money and its purpose. Zuma’s supporters have sought to cast Ramaphosa as a privileged businessman who is far removed from the harsh realities of the poorest South Africans, and after the May election Zuma spoke of “an unrepentant thief” he didn’t name.
The results of the South African election have left the ANC weaker than it has ever been. Gone are the days when the ANC’s chosen leader was almost certainly destined to become the next president of South Africa. But Zuma is in a stronger position because he has shown that he has a huge personal following that doesn’t depend on his membership of the ANC. Ramaphosa, on the other hand, can’t claim such authority; he has been utterly humiliated as the ANC leader on whose watch the party of Madiba lost its governing majority. Zuma’s supporters mock Ramaphosa as “Mr. 40 percent,” a reference to the ANC’s failure to hit the 50 percent mark it needed to stay firmly in control of South Africa’s government. Zuma’s MK had said one condition of joining hands with the ANC would have been the ouster of Ramaphosa as president, a clear indicator that, even though Ramaphosa has kept his post, he is vulnerable and instability is not far away.
The ANC must be careful: many of its members opposed an alliance with the DA, the white-led opposition party that struggles to win substantial support among black voters despite its progressive, non-racial manifesto. Julius Malema, leader of the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters, was an option as a partner, but his rise would have discouraged investors. Zuma will never return to executive power, but in his last years he can do even more damage to the ANC if reconciliation is elusive. Some see this latest development – a coalition government bringing together the ANC and the DA, if it lasts five years and leads to measurable results in inclusive development – as not entirely bad for South Africa: a more accountable government, perhaps, and the end of ANC hegemony are desirable outcomes. If this proves to be the case, Zuma – the wild, confounding, flawed, heroic son of Nkandla – will have played no small part. ▪