Why ‘inarticulate’ Zuma is popular

ANC president has no identity crisis leading him to emulate Western norms

 

Seeing Jacob Zuma in the flesh at the Foreign Correspondents’ Association (FCA) annual dinner last week was both disappointing and reassuring. Apart from his baldness gleaming under a spotlight, it was not a polished performance.  He was dressed in a flamboyant patterned waistcoat but spoke haltingly, seeming to lack authority inside and out. Although speeding around the city in a cavalcade fit for a king, the most powerful man in South Africa does not come across as stately but looks and acts like an arbitrary bloke.  The descriptions one hears of Zuma as charismatic probably rely more on comparisons with his predecessor than on his own qualities.
A prominent British journalist nudged me and whispered, “Nice guy, boring speech,” as Zuma plodded through his prepared text without once lifting his eyes to the audience. He claimed there would be “no change in economic policies” yet “an accelerated process of building a better life for all”. After cautiously flashing a cheesy grin in anticipation of questions from the international press corps, the ANC president slowly relaxed, not least because the hacks didn’t mention the c-word or dwell on the Aids denialism that cost thousands of South African lives on Zuma’s deputy-presidential watch. Once confident and spared the anticipated media attack, he came across as a warm man who responds intuitively to people, unlike his intellectually superior predecessor who was patently cut off from his feelings and incapable of connecting genuinely with ordinary citizens.
Zuma’s apprehension in a roomful of Western journalists who threaten his political dreams is hardly surprising. He is well aware not only of the foreign media’s interest in his recent legal history and suspected misogynism but also of their ambivalence towards his populist credentials. While at Polokwane a year ago they delighted in the new ANC chief’s unseemly war chants and knees-up routines because those were the images that played well on faraway TV screens, their true reaction to Zuma is more complex. The idea of a modern leader with several wives and a leopard skin slung over his bare shoulders is undoubtedly disquieting abroad. It reinforces the scariest of African stereotypes, making Zuma’s popularity a worry not only for middle class South Africans but Westerners at large.
Many of the world’s diplomats as well as foreign corrospondents deal more comfortably with smooth African intellectuals than populists. Neatly-suited Thabo Mbeki was more familiar in his values and therefore more acceptable abroad than Zuma will ever be, even allowing for the international media’s dismay at the ex-premier’s Aids crack-pottery. Mbeki always looked and sounded reassuringly like we Westerners rather than them Africans, despite his colonised psyche, his lust for foreign goals and his detachment from South Africans.
How unreservedly we journalists applauded Mbeki’s dismissal of his deputy following corruption allegations against Zuma several years ago. We saw it naively as a clear and welcome sign that Mbeki would not hesitate to turn even on those closest to him in order to uphold the law. But what was thought at the time to be just a clinical excision turns out to have provoked revenge on a scale that will infect South Africa’s entire body politic for decades. None of us saw it coming because, frankly, we don’t understand the mindsets and motives involved.
Indeed, African leaders are not much more fathomable under Western scrutiny today than they were a century or two ago – multi-degreed Robert Mugabe being an enigmatic case in point. British-educated and widely-respected Mbeki turned out to resemble Machiavelli rather than thee, me or the FCA membership. Since Zuma could hardly be less like Mbeki, what have we learnt about the ANC’s top brass over the last few years except that it habitually imparts contradictory messages?
If ill-educated, informal and sometimes inarticulate Zuma cannot by definition inspire the confidence abroad that his predecessor once enjoyed, how come he is so hugely popular at home? What does this mean? Is it only because Mbeki looked and sounded more European than African that Westerners instinctively felt comfortable with him when he first came to office? Is it the fact that 100% Zulu boy Zuma, who does not suffer from the identity crisis that leads him to emulate Western norms, is so happy in his own African skin that he reflects, uncomfortably, the unbridgeable divide between them and us?
Mbeki, the avowed Africanist, was ironically so indifferent to the suffering of his own people that he allowed them to die in droves from Aids. He failed to improve clinics and schools nationwide despite throwing a great deal of money into South Africa’s social services. Zuma, by contrast, is the ideological barbarian who says whatever is calculated to appeal to his current audience, true or false. Far from being obsessive in his aims like Mbeki, Zuma has no achievable vision of a better South Africa beyond a cherished image of himself at the helm. But he does have one promising feature: a seemingly human heart. For that alone, he may prove worthy of the trust placed in him by the poor people Mbeki failed.