On a blustery southern winter’s night last year, Jacob Zuma hosted a small dinner in the Rand Club for a dozen sceptical guests. Founded by Cecil Rhodes, the dark-panelled club in the centre of Johannesburg was in the old days the preserve of the white English-speaking business establishment. In the early years of majority rule, senior officials of the African National Congress were wary of admitting to membership, fearing headlines insinuating they had become the new ‘Randlords’, the old nickname for Rhodes and his peers. But 15 years into the new era the new guard are feeling rather surer of themselves. None other than the Rhodes Room, a private dining-room dominated by a life-size portrait of the old colonialist in shooting clothes, was selected as the venue for the coming man to set out his stall.
He had arrived early and was chatting to one of his bodyguards at the top of the club’s sweeping wooden staircase. Outside, the city centre was at a standstill as a gun battle raged between rival police units — striking city policemen were trading shots with national police officers brought in to restore order. As we waited for the late arrivals delayed by the drama, he regaled us with a series of anecdotes from his extraordinary life. South Africa’s next president has, as he likes to say, ‘lived a lot’.
The 67-year-old former herd-boy, turned political prisoner, turned exiled spy chief, turned scandal-wracked populist who is the most powerful man in sub-Saharan Africa following this week’s South African elections, has the build of a prize-fighter. This is a tough man, schooled in township scraps in the 1960s and then in the treacherous world of exile politics when he made his share of ruthless decisions. But in small groups he is more of a pastor than a pugilist. He did not seek to dominate, still less impose his views. Rather he sought to disarm, and he listened. It was the very same mellow routine that has served him so well throughout his improbable ascent to the top.
Mr Zuma’s formative years, far more than those of Nelson Mandela or Thabo Mbeki, his two immediate predecessors as ANC leader, encompassed what the anti-apartheid struggle meant to most black South Africans. Unlike most ANC leaders who came from the middle-class black elite, he grew up in one of the least developed areas of the country and gained only the most rudimentary education before spending a decade as a political prisoner on Robben Island. Ebrahim Ebrahim, one of his old comrades, has told me how he was singing old Zulu songs to keep their spirits up in the police vans and then the boat that transferred them to captivity.
I first witnessed the Zuma phenomenon at close hand at his 65th birthday party, when he held court to hundreds of relations, businesspeople, admirers and friends. Resplendent in a black and gold Nehru suit, he took to the stage for a solo performance at the microphone and a twirl on the dance floor. For South Africans this is all rather refreshing after the hauteur and would-be intellectualism of his predecessor. Mr Mbeki is a behind-the-scenes man mocked for staying up late surfing the internet. Indeed, even as Zuma was performing at his party late that Saturday night, Mr Mbeki telephoned me and talked about the peace process in the Sudan, and other issues vexing the man who aspired — in vain — to be a great African statesman.
At rallies, when Jacob Zuma is not reading prepared speeches, which he does rather poorly, he has the appeal of a revivalist preacher. For his fellow Zulus, South Africa’s largest tribe, there is also the prospect at long last of seats at the high table of government — and some openly anticipate business contracts — after years in which the Xhosas, the tribe of Mbeki, Mandela and Oliver Tambo, have dominated the party. Yet Msholozi (Zuma’s clan name) does not just appeal to Zulus. ‘Lethu Mshini Wami’ (‘Bring me my machine-gun’), the old anti-apartheid hymn he sings lustily at rallies, sparks a rapturous response across the country. He is the ‘Messiah’, I was told by one ecstatic fan some 500 miles from the Zulu heartland.
However, the routine may wear rather thin if the Zulu Mr Everyman proves unable or unwilling to give the direction the country so desperately needs — and there are reasons to have misgivings on both counts.
Mr Zuma has been steadily accruing authority since he finally vanquished his old rival, Mr Mbeki, in the December 2007 election for the leadership of the ANC. White businessmen and ANC grandees who previously dismissed him as a country bumpkin raced to ingratiate themselves with him, and to talk up his talents — as they continue to do. Yet still he has much to prove. Despite the best efforts of the ANC spin-doctors, he has in the last year reinforced the impression that he has few fixed opinions and is happy to say what suits his audience. He talked of supporting a referendum on reintroducing the death penalty and then, amid a furore, backtracked. He made pro-business pledges and then under pressure from the unions did a U-turn. More worrying for the health of South Africa’s democracy, he has stood by as his supporters have issued broadsides at the courts. His dislike of them is unsurprising, given how he has spent much of the last three years fighting off corruption allegations in pre-trial court appearances, and also in light of evidence of some politicisation of the prosecution. But that does not excuse his recent remark that the country needs to ‘look at’ the authority of the top court. That is troubling.
Over dinner, however, he painted an alluring picture of a Zuma presidency. He would reinstate the reconciliatory ethos of Mr Mandela’s era, which Mr Mbeki had cast aside. He belittled a furore over Afrikaner students who had forced five black cleaners to take part in a humiliating mock initiation ritual. That was not representative of white attitudes, he said. Recalling an encounter with Robert Mugabe when they were in exile in Mozambique in the 1970s, he made a few arch remarks about Zimbabwe’s leader. He ridiculed Mbeki’s reluctance to accept the standard science on Aids. ‘We had a good policy until the president discovered the science,’ he said.
He also talked movingly about the blight of crime, which drives thousands of professionals into exile every year. One night, he recalled, he had been escorting a woman friend back home through downtown Johannesburg, when he sensed they were being followed. Then two more figures materialised ahead of them. ‘I thought now is a time to fight,’ he said. ‘Then suddenly there were four or five blades at my stomach and my back. And I thought, no. Now is the time to talk.’ Hurray, South Africans will say at such stories — he understands us. (Mr Mbeki bridled once when asked if crime was out of control and suggested that was a racist perception.)
But the question everyone wants an answer to is: what lies behind that bluff exterior? Ever since his financial adviser was convicted of corruption and fraud in 2005 for, among other things, procuring a bribe for him from an arms company, Mr Zuma has been assailed by scandal. While he denies any guilt, he has twice been charged on multiple counts of corruption. (A judge dismissed the first case on a technicality. Then last month the prosecution controversially withdrew the second set of charges, which included money-laundering, racketeering, corruption and fraud, citing irregularities.) There was also the embarrassment of his 2006 trial for the rape of an HIV-positive family friend. (He was acquitted but in his testimony he displayed a terrible lack of judgmen t. He said that after having sex he had had a shower to ward off infection, an appalling statement for a senior politician to make in a country with the world’s highest number of people with Aids. He also argued that in Zulu culture when a woman wears a short skirt in a particular way it is an invitation to have sex.)
When I returned to the Rand Club last week for the first time since the Zuma dinner to talk about international views of South Africa, I was rightly asked whether it was not wiser to trust in politicians’ actions rather than words. It was, for example, always assumed that South Africa’s controversial foreign policy of recent years — in particular its refusal to criticise Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe — was an Mbeki-ite foible. But earlier this month South Africa was ridiculed when it bowed to pressure from Beijing and refused to give a visa to the Dalai Lama, an initiative which one adviser told me came straight from Mr Zuma.
While Mr Mbeki’s pseudo-intellectualism led South Africa down several blind alleys, there is now a countervailing anti-intellect-ual drive in the party. This could prove equally if not more destructive to South Africa’s institutions than the creeping interventions of the Mbeki years, when the ANC’s policy of ‘deploying cadres’ undermined the independence of several state institutions.
The more hysterical whites seize on Mr Zuma’s polygamy to suggest he will be a caricature African leader. That is wrong. There is, conversely, even a chance he could be a Ronald Reagan figure, and allow the country a breathing space while it recovers from the wrenching questions of the Mbeki years. And yet a more credible scenario is of a vacuum as he struggles to assert his authority and as the ANC further corrodes. For even if he is genuine when he says he wants to restore the ANC idealism of the past, given his record, will people heed him? As the Dalai Lama told me earlier this month, too many of South Africa’s leaders have become more focused on money and power than principle, a trend that has debilitated liberation movements over the years.
‘Bra’ (Brother) Bricks, a burly township activist who was tortured and left for dead by the apartheid security forces, told me that the man who sang ‘Bring me my machine-gun’ will end up on the dustbin of history. Anyone who cares about South Africa and, indeed, Africa has to hope he is wrong.
Alec Russell is world affairs editor of the Financial Times. His new book After Mandela: the battle for the Soul of South Africa is published by Hutchinson.