Zunami! The 2009 South African Elections
Roger Southall and John Daniel (editors)
Pretoria, Jacana Media 2009
288 pages

The first part of the title of this book is a play on a statement made by Zwelinzima Vavi, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary, in 2005. At the time Vavi had said that any attempt to stop Zuma, then the ANC’s deputy president as he was preparing a challenge to Thabo Mbeki’s leadership, would be like ‘… trying to fight against the big wave of a tsunami’.

The editors of this volume suggest that the most recent general election in South Africa, April 2009, was mainly a referendum on Jacob Zuma. Though a number of other developments were also interesting — a decline in national support for the ANC with the exception of KwaZulu-Natal (it lost 5-10% of its vote share in eight of the nine provinces), the emergence of the new opposition party, the Congress of the People (COPE), among others— events around Zuma since 2005 dominated these elections.

The result is now well known. The ANC won by a large majority, just short of two-thirds, while COPE — a party of former ANC leaders closely associated with Zuma’s predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, established late 2008 — mustered 7 odd percent of the national vote. ‘… There was no serious suggestion during the 2009 election campaign that South Africa would have to confront the ‘turnover’ test — the willingness of an incumbent government in a new democracy to hand over power if defeated at the polls — which theorists consider the ultimate test of democratic consolidation’ (p.6).

University of the Witswatersrand political scientist Anthony Butler points out that the ANC hardly stretched itself. ‘Its manifestoes were moderate, uncontroversial, and anti-populist in economic policy’ (p.66).

The largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), which has participated in postapartheid elections since 1994 in various disguises, only increased its vote — still largely limited to the majority of whites and some coloureds — by single digits. (In the chapter on the DA, University of Cape Town academic Zwelethu Jolobe, concludes otherwise: he claims that the DA has achieved ‘considerable success’ [p.146] since 1994.)

However, the election pointed to a number of exciting developments. The 7% earned by COPE is remarkable given that it was only formed in 2008. Compare that to the DA, which has not reached even 20% despite participating in elections since 1994. Though the editors agree that the emergence of COPE does not signal the ANC’s monopoly over voters, it still represents a significant development, especially as it emerged from within ANC ranks. In her chapter on COPE, political scientist Susan Booysen — who dismisses the smear that COPE is a mere extension of Thabo Mbeki loyalists — argues that COPE’s impact on South African politics was twofold: ‘It rendered the ANC more vibrant than it would have been without it, and it helped breathe life into opposition politics’ (86).

The book also contains two chapters dealing with the smaller opposition parties — the ethnic Inkatha Freedom Party, the United Democratic Movement, Independent Democrats, Freedom Front Plus (a white sectarian party whose leader was co-opted into Zuma’s new Cabinet). The prognosis on these parties is not as positive as with COPE. Instead, this may have been the last electoral showing by some of these parties.

Another exciting development was the participation of young people. A first time 18-year-old voter in 2009 was not even born when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. ‘A full third of the potential electorate had become eligible to vote’ (p.9). They were four when some of their parents voted for the first time in 1994. The only government they know is the ANC. They feel less of a recidivist attachment to the ANC or the party’s role in defeating Apartheid. Though most of them still voted ANC, increasingly they’ll judge the ANC on performance and for them the ANC is associated with deepening inequality, homelessness, lack of healthcare, and poor education, little accountability by public representatives and increased public corruption. Since 2004 there has been an increased in protest actions by poor black people. Zuma has some sympathy with these voters. However, it is unclear how that support will last the further we move away from the end of Apartheid.

In what may be good news for opposition parties, Collette Schulz-Herzenberg, a pollster at the University of Cape Town, argues that, contrary to popular wisdom, South African voters have become ‘less predictable’ and ‘significant potential exists for electoral fluidity’ (p.24). However, Schulz-Herzenberg points out that South African voters still learn much about politics ‘racial cues’ (p.44). In what reads like veiled criticism of the DA and its leader, Helen Zille, Schulz-Herzenberg writes ‘… to contest future elections seriously, [opposition parties] need to be more attentive and responsive to subtle shifts in political identity’ (p.44). Schulz-Herzenberg’s findings also suggest that voters increasingly factor in government performance evaluations.

Three chapters deal with topics that are not specifically focused on the political parties. Jane Duncan studies the media while Idasa researcher Judith February evaluates the electoral system and electoral machinery. February concludes that the election was ‘well run and well managed’. She has nothing but praise for the electoral commission. However, she points out that South Africa’s electoral system requires reform. While the party-list driven proportional representation-system that South Africa uses since 1994 ‘supports democratic values of fairness and inclusivity,’ crucially it lacks accountability, with representatives reverting to party bosses.

Finally, Shireen Hassim, who is probably the country’s foremost scholar on the relation between politics and gender, writes that gender was a ‘major fault-line’ in the 2009 election, but not in the way feminists preferred. Hassim points out any casual (feminist) observer of the 2009 elections ‘might conclude that she had finally arrived in heaven’. ‘Two of the top four contending parties are led by women, half the number of candidates on at least two parties’ lists are women, and the country has one of the most advanced legal, constitutional and institutional frameworks for ensuring gender equality in the world’ (p.195). However, politically active women were smeared as monstrous (Helen Zille became ‘Godzille’), as witches (supporters of COPE) or as benign mamas (the leaders of the ANC’s Women’s League).

Three of the first four South African presidents — Nelson Mandela, Kgalema Motlanthe, and now Jacob Zuma — were incarcerated on Robben Island for substantial periods of time. (Govan Mbeki, the father of the fourth and longest-serving president to date, Thabo Mbeki, served 23 years in the island prison.) Moreover, Zuma told Motlanthe about Robben Island long before the Motlanthe’s own imprisonment, in a sense preparing the younger man for what might — and did — await him.

The important experience of prison is usually noted in the biographies of the four men, above all Mandela. Indeed, the iconic Mandela is key to much of the legend of Robben Island; witness, for example, the focus on Mandela’s cell in the guided tours to the once prison, now museum. Although Mandela is essential to understanding the Island, the frequent narrowing of the Robben Island experience to Mandela obscures rather than highlights the broader impact of the Island on South African politics and history. This influence is perhaps most significant in the shaping of leadership and the African National Congress (ANC), including in the case of Jacob Zuma.

What makes Robben Island substantively and not only symbolically important is that the political prisoners used their incarceration to sustain and strengthen themselves, their organizations, and their cause(s). Particularly in the period Zuma and Mandela arrived on the Island, the early 1960s, conditions in the prison were harsh, soul destroying, and dangerous. Insufficient food, woefully inadequate medical care, the legacy of torture and dislocation in the months that preceded most inmates’ arrivals on Robben Island, hard labor, callous and often brutal guards, and criminal thugs (later removed) were key features of the prison. The men — variously members of the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), or other smaller groupings – successfully resisted and reconfigured much of this hostile environment by challenging the perilous conditions, resurrecting their organizations underground in prison, and enhancing their individual as well as group skills, education, and understanding.

Jacob Zuma is very much a ‘poster child’ for the use of the Island to broaden and deepen his education, knowledge, and understanding. Zuma came to Robben Island with basic literacy skills, largely self-taught, and a modest profile as an ANC leader, especially at the regional level. Although some biographies of Zuma paint him arriving in prison as illiterate and a political neophyte, this profile is not correct. Journalist Fred Khumalo reminds us that at the time of his trial, The Star newspaper called him a ‘prominent’ member of the ANC, and one of its ‘rising stars’. In a 1994 interview with me, Zuma corrected the common misimpression of his illiteracy, one that he had indeed fostered at least with his police interrogators who almost caught his lie when he began correcting their spelling of his name! Thanks to night schools he organized with others as well as from other sources, Zuma recalled that ‘by the time I was grown up I could read and write Zulu. It was absolutely no problem. I could speak the language English precisely because I had spent some time in Durban. I stayed with Indian kids at Greyville,’ and even played with white children there, with whom he and his playmates ‘tried to communicate’.

On Robben Island he furthered his academic education. Acquiring a formal education was difficult for Zuma, as for other prisoners. On reason was they were poor and had little access to funding. Another reason was that the apartheid prison authorities considered education a privilege which the regime allowed and denied at will, sometimes arbitrarily and sometimes to try to increase inmate compliance. Zuma was, however, able to acquire some formal correspondence education. He studied some ‘standard 6 as well as JC [Junior Certificate] … subjects which I wrote and passed’.

Zuma regarded the informal means of self-education as more important than this certification. With others, he organized and engaged in classes based on mutual education. ‘We also had sort of adult education among ourselves. Those who were educated were educating those who were not educated’. His reputation grew; although from the single cells and another political organization, Neville Alexander had heard that Zuma ‘played a big role in the educational side of things’. Above all though, Zuma read ‘widely’. He loved reading anthropology and ‘studied a lot of Shakespeare … I used to love Macbeth in particular’. Indeed, he recalled always keeping the complete works of Shakespeare with him in prison and exile; only upon his return to South Africa did he not have such a volume. In contrast to the image of the illiterate herd boy and traditional tribalist so common today, Zuma offered a very different self-image. In prison, he recalled, ‘I spent time reading and reading, in other words, further educated myself to a level where I had no problem. I don’t regard myself as an uneducated person. I think I began to have a wider understanding educationally speaking, and values as it were, to a degree that I didn’t think I had anything short in education’. While he did lacked formal qualifications and certifications, his reading and exposure meant that he considers himself ‘a modern person, or a person of today’.

The crux of Zuma’s emphasis on education on Robben Island was political education. That education was partly in the ANC’s and South African Communist Party’s history and ideological understanding — an education of syllabi, lectures, and readings, partly experiential and focused on training, doing, and living as a political activist. Zuma reviewed his political education noting that soon after he arrived in prison, about five people from his pre-prison ‘labor theory discussion’ group resurrected the classes on Robben Island. There were additional ‘political lectures for everybody during lunch time, which was one hour; we used that to … analyze news items’. It was in this context that Stephen Dlamini and Harry Gwala, ‘our political instructors [from] outside,’ were especially important. The ‘nucleus of the culture in Robben Island [was] the culture of political education’. Attendance at the classes grew to inmates from other parts of the country, and the initiatives became increasingly structured and organized; ‘we were actually looking at grading people in terms of their understanding’.

More broadly, political education was a key part of reconstituting the ANC on Robben Island, albeit illegally and clandestinely. ‘We had a political committee that was in charge of preparing political discussions with representatives of all the cells coming to take the political discussions to the cells over the weekend. More than above that, we actually had these groups which were study groups, specifically to develop cadres, politically speaking’. For Zuma, developments such as these ‘turned Robben Island into a political school in the true sense of the word’. There was a ‘culture of learning, the culture that we are here as politicians, we needed to understand more. We discussed the world, the country, the organizations more than anybody else. We had the time to do so’.

Zuma offered incisive analyses of how the political education system in prison fed into and was part of the ANC’s ‘serious underground structure’ in what might be called the movement’s Robben Island branch. Under a secret executive in the general sections, necessary to protect against exposure or infiltration, was a complex organizational structure ‘with different levels of authority and function’ from small cell structures to sections, section committees, and section leaders. This secret structure ‘communicated with’ the ANC outside prison, ‘took … disciplinary decisions,’ required reports and debriefing from incoming inmates, and facilitated the communication of messages: ‘We ran one of the most effective, and efficient underground structures’.

Political and academic education, in addition to the revival and honing of (usually clandestine) organizational skills, was critical to the role of Robben Island in producing as well as refining leaders. Zuma offered himself as emblematic of how and why people sent to Robben Island often returned as more skilled, as well as credentialed, in the arts of political struggle. Identifying himself as ‘an ordinary young cadre’ upon arriving at the Island, he described his political ascent through the organizational hierarchy, and the growing skills training and trust required at each step. In prison, he was initially put to ‘work in the smallest unit of the ANC, as a member of the group, and I was changed from one group to the other. Then at some point [I] became one of the cadres identified to collect news for the cell … . [Later] I was appointed a group leader, which was different than me serving as a group member. Once you are a group leader you actually attend cell leadership meetings of all the groups. In other words you are now at the cell leadership collective grouping. At another point I was a PRO, the public relations person, in the cell,’ one of the few semi-public positions in the otherwise clandestine structures. ‘At times we’d be asked to prepare a lecture to give to comrades…. By the time I left Robben Island I was the chairman of the political committee that was responsible in disseminating political lectures throughout the prison’. For Zuma, his biography summarized the role of prison as ‘a clear example of how that leadership grew’.

Importantly, in many senses, Jacob Zuma’s Robben Island prison experience was more typical, and more emblematic of the overall Robben Island experience, than Nelson Mandela’s—all, of course, a result of the apartheid state, not the prisoners. Given their shared ANC membership and their different ages and sentences, probably the most important difference in their Island terms was where in the prison they spent most of their time. Mandela was in the single cells, imprisoned apart from the majority of inmates in what were called the general sections. The other men in the single cells were disproportionately educated and much more likely to be leaders in the eyes of both the regime and their organizations. Mandela’s fellow single-cell neighbors, for example, included fellow ANC members Govan Mbeki and, until their sentences ended in the 1960s and 1970s, Mac Maharaj as well as the PAC’s Zeph (Zephania) Mothopeng and Neville Alexander from the National Liberation Front.

In contrast to the small, individual cells of the leadership section, the majority of Islanders were in the general sections with barracks or dormitory style housing. While in prison, most of the men in the general sections never met Mandela, Mbeki, Sisulu, and other known leaders in prison, because they were incarcerated separately. There were people in the general sections who regarded as leaders by their peers, probably without the state realizing their status. In addition to the limited contact between and among the sections of the prison, people’s sentences did not always coincide or overlap; recall that Zuma met Motlanthe in Umkhonto we Sizwe training camps, after Zuma’s incarceration and before Motlanthe’s. But as Zuma’s preparation of the younger man attested to, movements in and out of the prison as sentences began and ended also facilitated shared knowledge and communication. Furthermore, within the prison there was a complex smuggling network that enabled intra-ANC communication and ANC political education, including between the single cells and the rest of the prison. (Other organizations had more or less similar structures.)

The political training and networks with which Zuma left prison helped and shaped his secret political work after release, before being forced into exile. He further credits the self-critique he and others engaged in on Robben Island, better understanding the apartheid state, as allowing him to avoid capture and instead escape out of the country. Those same insights and networks advanced his underground work. The late Harry Gwala attributed re-establishing the ANC in Natal to Zuma; Gwala recalled that ‘When I came out we kept touch with those who came out with me … . It was not until Jacob Zuma came out’ that the ANC’s underground structure was reestablished, especially in Pietermaritzburg.

Zuma identified both Robben Island and exile as important to his political development. His self-identified gains from his time in prison include deep political understanding, education, and broad political understanding. But he also emphasized that ‘When you came out of Robben Island in the majority of cases you are not an emotional and sloganeering politician. You are a politician that looked at things with a strategic mind’. This emphasis on acting on strategy and substance rather than passions is why he argued Robben Island ‘produced people of a special quality in terms of leadership’. He identified the Island ‘progeny’ as including thinkers, lawyers, ‘real intellectuals,’ the ‘best negotiators,’ and the most ‘tolerant people in the political arena’.

While many of these characteristics might be dismissed as self-serving or familiar platitudes, they offer us insight into what Zuma values, at least in part. Furthermore, these perspectives were offered less than two months into South Africa’s newborn democracy, when Zuma was in a very different place, a regional leader in a province still reeling from years of political violence and controlled by the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party. Indeed, the very context of that June 1994 interview was revealing. Zuma had recently been elected to the KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature when I arrived for our 2pm meeting to his nondescript and slightly shabby downtown Durban office. If there was a record of the appointment, it was irrelevant to the many people who also waited to see Zuma. While I was not privy to his conversations with people, my impression was that the visitors had come to ask for his help. My sense was not that he was a cacique delivering patronage but a chief delivering intercession and advice.

When I eventually got to see him it was about 8pm; we were the last two people in the office. Someone had brought him an ordinary dinner on a paper plate. I certainly did not imagine that fifteen years later this man would be president and, I suspect, neither did he. But I did learn of his more admirable qualities and astounding history that long day; there was no hint that alleged corruption, rape trials, and an electoral campaign invoking machine guns would be part of his future either. Perhaps South Africans need to hope to be governed by this Zuma, the Robben Islander who earned many of his achievements and status in a prison he rightly called ‘a hell of a place’. ‘A lot of political prisoners who went to Robben Island,’ he noted, ‘today are equal to the tasks of the nation’. That is the hope — and the question.

About the author

Fran Buntman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Washington University. This article draws primarily on research for the author’s book Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and the author’s interviews with Zuma and other Islanders, details of which are available in the book. This article also draws on Fred Khumalo’s insightful series on Zuma for the Sunday Times (South Africa), particularly ‘An improbable president’ (April 12, 2009) and ‘Long road to recognition’ (April 19, 2009).

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From ACAS Bulletin 84: The Politics of Jacob Zuma

In April 2006, African National Congress (ANC) president and one-time South African deputy president Jacob Zuma appeared in court to defend himself against a charge of rape. When called to the stand and asked to recall the events of 2 November 2005, Zuma chose to deliver his testimony in his Zulu mother tongue. This was his constitutional right, the right of an accused individual to defend himself in any one of South Africa’s eleven official languages. Yet Zuma’s linguistic choice was laden with political meaning and opportunity. Speaking isiZulu within a court that had thus far proceeded in English highlighted his membership to a particular cultural group and invoked his well-established reputation as a ‘man of tradition’. Furthermore, it drew attention to the courtroom also as a specific (as well as adversarial) cultural space, with Anglophone traditions, European legal origins and an Afrikaans-speaking judge who used Latin legal phrasings in his ruling. In the context of a nation with a deeply racist history, including decades of state-sponsored ethnic management and subjugation, Zuma’s linguistic medium was part of a powerful message: that this trial was also about the politics of culture.

In this article, we examine how issues of gender power were framed by and, in important ways, subsumed within a politics of culture. Of course, a rape trial, by its very nature, raises questions about ideologies of gender and sexuality, about normative practical relations between men and women, their relative status and about the nature of gender power. The case of State vs. Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma was no exception. The Judge even saw reason to complain—quoting a journalist—that ‘this trial is more about sexual politics and gender relations than it is about rape’.[1] Yet, in fact, these crucial issues were remarkably circumscribed. In the fervour surrounding this trial, the burning political question of women’s status was continually cast as a private matter: debates about relations between men and women came to be focussed on issues of propriety, behaviour and etiquette rather than on questions about rights and power. The point we wish to make here is a simple one: that this privatization of gender was effected through the politics of culture.

This trial was not, of course, the only incident to draw national attention to the interface between sexuality and politics, nor was the high profile nature of this case merely a function of Zuma’s standing as an elected official, ruling party leader and possible presidential successor. Zuma’s celebrity itself had become politically charged when, a year earlier, prominent Durban businessman and one-time apartheid activist Schabir Shaik was convicted of fraud and corruption for a deal in which Zuma was alleged to be squarely implicated. Upon Shaik’s conviction, Zuma was deposed as the nation’s second-in-command by its president, Thabo Mbeki, in an action which supporters of Zuma condemned as opportunistic and pre-emptive, and which saw the figure of Zuma emerging as a alternative to the perceived elitism of the Mbeki ‘camp.’ While a split in the ANC was officially denied, bodies affiliated to the Party—the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) members—openly rallied behind Zuma, who also enjoyed enormous popularity with a sector of the public disaffected with Mbeki.

The charge of rape followed upon these tense events and created new ones surrounding the trial itself. Jacob Zuma’s accuser was an HIV positive woman many years his junior, the daughter of a former anti-apartheid struggle comrade, who had been staying in his home. All of these details were considered pertinent, not only to the legal debates about whether a crime had been committed, but also to the political debates raging around the nation’s key challenges of high rates of sexual violence and the ‘denialist’ state response to devastating levels of HIV infection. In his public capacity, Zuma had been outspoken about the need for sexual caution and ‘condomizing’. He outraged health professionals and AIDS educators when he told the court that, after consensual sex with an HIV positive woman he had acted to remedy the absence of a condom by taking a shower. Meanwhile, many Zuma supporters saw the accusation of rape as politically motivated and as evidence of anti-Zuma conspiracy, citing the complainant’s presence in Zuma’s house, and her choice to wear a kanga, as cause for believing her to be a honey trap. Expressing this conviction outside the courthouse, pro-Zuma constituents rallied in T-shirts bearing Zuma’s face and holding placards with phrases like ‘Burn the Bitch’. In visibly smaller numbers, women’s rights groups were present on the streets as well, trying to draw attention to the general problem of the nation’s extraordinarily high rates of sexual violence and the general failure of the justice system to address cases of rape.

Jacob Zuma was acquitted of the crime of rape. Still, the trial was one of several important legal events that have affected the trajectory of his leadership and which continue to shape and reflect the broader political ferment in South Africa.[2] This article does not recount all of these events. Rather its focus is on this trial as an empirical case which highlights the interface between the politics of gender and culture, and the way these are locally grounded. In this article, we first briefly sketch out a theoretical and historical background for what we mean by ‘politics of culture’ to contextualize its power in contemporary South Africa. The second section reflects on Jacob Zuma as the centripetal figure in the drama of rumour, conspiracy and patriarchal morality that surrounded the trial. Finally, we turn to the trial itself to demonstrate how a politics of culture effected a de-politicisation of gender, by relegating it to the moral domain of the customary private sphere.

The Politics of Culture in South Africa

We recognise that common usage of the words culture and tradition can refer to intergenerational social continuities, for example of practices and beliefs, which children learn as normative from their elders in the process of socialisation. These words can also be employed to express the longevity of social structures and principles which organise relationships, modes of production, political authority and so on.

Our concern here, however, is with the application of these concepts within the politics of recognition (Taylor 1994), that is, as words claiming both authority and morality. In this sense, tradition is a theory of history which informs, legitimates and authenticates identities, peoplehoods, or nations. Tradition is premised on a conception of time as a medium for social replication; and it represents itself as a guiding principle of human agency. In the strong, ideological invocation we are concerned with, tradition is suggested to be comprised of an intergenerational loyalty to an imperative called ‘culture’. Putative obedience to the ways of ancestors or named forefathers infuses this vision of the past with a profound and essential morality. The longevity and immutability attributed to culture lends it the certainty of functionality, of ‘tried and true’ norms and mores and from this, too, culture gains its authority. Authority and morality are at the conceptual heart of the politics of culture and tradition.

As Zygmunt Bauman has noted, the idea of traditional community becomes salient and of political value when it has largely passed out of reality (2001: 3). It is probably true that utterance of the word ‘tradition’, even in its benign reference to lived experience, heralds a reality of doubt, challenge or threat to the field of existence which it proposes simply to name. Lived experience does not, in its own right, necessitate the concept of a ‘tradition’. The politics of culture rides on a sharp edge of loss; and it is sensitive and responsive to the moral anxiety generated by that sense of loss. Tradition and culture become resources through which new power relations can be negotiated in a context where the independence and material subsistence of the community is greatly diminished.

Invoked also in times of crisis, or brought about by social demise or rapid change, the appeal of culture/tradition is expressed as moral longing and a faith in its promise of moral resolution. But the politics of culture is framed as longing for a particular kind of morality, the morality of patriarchy. Indeed, the authority and morality of culture derives much of its legitimacy from the institution of the patriarchal household in which it is historically rooted. It offers a vision of an order kept by the firm but benevolent hand of senior men, of paternal protection and the wisdom of elders who maintain and provide for community. The framework of that morality is not merely authoritarian—it also denotes plenitude and care, as well as power that is personal. The community it imagines contrasts with the alien and abstract political realities characteristic of modernity. This social vision need not belong to deep psychologies; rather it resides in language and collective historical narrative, combined with the harsh materiality of want or need. Tradition’s desire is millennial in character, yet takes a secular political form in the domain of public life. Bauman warns that ‘community’ as ‘dream fulfilled’ ‘demands unconditional loyalty and treats everything short of such loyalty as an act of unforgivable treason’ (2001:4).

In South Africa, a country that is emerging from a deeply troubled past and facing the challenges of persistent divisions, desperate unemployment and economic inequalities, as well as a deadly and highly stigmatised disease, the longing for moral order goes very deep indeed. But there are critical elements in the specific history of South Africa which bear on the politics of culture, and which compound its complexity and power in the life of the new democracy. Here in this context, prevailing ideas about culture as an identity are linked to the idea of race. Both race and culture are uncritically considered to be fixed and immutable human classifications; both are designations that have divided divide South Africans into political categories. Race and culture have combined to designate human beings in South Africa as ‘tribal’ or ‘civic’, as ‘citizens’ or ‘subjects’, as rights-bearers, or criminalised, or propertied, or communal, and so on. While apartheid’s strategy of ethnic separation and preservation has now been overturned, the idea of distinct cultural groups—each with the right of self-expression, if not self-rule—has shown no sign of ebbing. Rather, the pursuit of cultural expression and cultural rights has come to signify a stand against the legacies of racism. Indeed, apartheid is often radically misconceived as a force which tried to destroy cultural distinctiveness in favour of imposing a Eurocentric and supremacist assimiliationism. This conflation of apartheid with the more paternalistic segregationist era which preceded it is understandable: both forms of exclusivist white racial rule grossly assaulted the freedom of black people and precluded the evolution of a civic, non-racial cosmopolitanism. What is beyond doubt is that this complicated history has made the issue of culture a sensitive political trigger in an unevenly transforming society.

Colonialism and apartheid altered the political meaning of culture. Culture was salient long before Afrikaner ethnicity (and its preoccupation with cultural survival) became the banner under which the National Party came to power (Giliomee 2003). Indigenous cultural identities relating to language, kinship, geography and organizational structures were appropriated and rationalised into tools of political management under British imperialist policy concomitant with the mineral revolution; and before that by Theophilus Shepstone in the colony of Natal (for example, Welsh 1973, Mamdani 1996). The resilience of many indigenous cultural practices and beliefs, the alteration of some, and the destruction of others, highlight both the unevenness as well as the necessary flexibility of power as groups of indigenous Africans were subjugated through violence, law and changing economic circumstance, first into residents of native reserves and, later, ‘Bantustans’. Indigenous authority structures were accommodated and incorporated, dismantled or restructured, always subordinated to state power (Ntsebeza 2006).

In this process, indigenous gender relations and household structures proved both a centre of cultural resilience as well as a stabilising (though hardly stable) feature in the developing migrant labour system and in maintaining the political authority of the amaKhosi[3] (for example, Bozzoli 1983, Walker 1990). African men were increasingly recruited from rural homesteads as wage workers on a temporary basis, accommodated in company compounds in highly disciplinary circumstances, with documentary ‘passes’ mediating the legality of their geographical mobility in the urban spaces that were racially designated as ‘white’. Incorporated into industry as labouring bodies, rationalised as costs in production, these men were separated from the conditions of their social sustenance for sets of weeks, months, or years. As many revisionist historians and critical sociologists have pointed out, this dramatic separation between work and home was profitable for capital in that it kept wages low and the costs of social reproduction squarely on the backs of women, who sustained home for the working classes through agricultural and reproductive labour in the countryside. Gender scholars have also pointed to a confluence of patriarchal interests sustaining this arrangement: it suited both capital and African male wage earners to contain the labour power of women under local, tribal authority. In this way, agrarian family life, with distinctive social practices, languages and cosmologies, became institutionalised as ‘culture’ within South Africa’s racialized, industrial development. Politically and economically it was designated as a sphere of private authority—at the level both of household and community. The legal (political) and ideological (race) demarcation of ‘customary’ space in South Africa was a specific feature of the nation’s political and economic development. Indigenous tradition was therefore not ‘preserved’ in the sense of being left behind in historical time: rather it was the very premise of South Africa’s modernisation.

This is as much to say that current political meanings of ‘culture’ were constructed historically through spatial relations also of gender. These meanings are also racialized. As the bedrock of racial strata was gradually engineered by the state into four distinctive ‘levels’—‘Bantu’, ‘Asian’, ‘Coloured’, ‘European’—their nature was described overwhelmingly in the discourses of cultural tradition. Indeed, part of what gave apartheid its longevity was the legitimacy derived from the idea of culture, an idea sustained by the social science of anthropology (Dubow 2006), and from the way that culture supplied race with a political plausibility. The belief in culture, as a kind of nationality, was widespread.

It is not surprising then, that culture arose as a point of conflict during anti-apartheid political mobilisation. The organic power of culture as a designation of identity was made most apparent through the mobilisation of Zulu ethnicity by Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha during the latter decades of apartheid (Maré and Hamilton 1986, Maré 1993, Waetjen 2004). Yet the politics of culture, both as instrumental control and as resistance to that control, faced a massive challenge from other identities mobilised in the broad church approach of political liberation. Black nationalists, workers, religious bodies, and non-racial democratic movements joined forces to create a South Africanist end to apartheid. It is notable that, as an alternative mobilisation strategy, Buthelezi’s campaign speeches were characterised by detailed and relentless reminders of what Zulu culture was and what it meant politically. In the 1980s and 1990s, the political meanings of culture were far from obvious and required persistent descriptive and historical narratives to link ideas about culture both to the contemporary political climate and to Inkatha’s own political agenda. Even the allegiance of Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, who for many years appeared as a legitimising figure for Inkatha’s ethnic politics, quickly defected to the ANC after a victory for the latter seemed overwhelming, leaving little space for exclusively regional politics after 1994.

Culture has been a politically slippery discourse—but at the same time it is one that is powerfully felt precisely because it is considered so deeply authentic and personal. In the last 12 years, culture has been newly valorised by a wide range of players, from neo-traditionalist Afrikaners and Afrikaans-speakers to the ANC’s project of the African Renaissance, and Christian and Muslim parties. Moreover, the persistence of clashes between the state and traditionalists over matters such as circumcision rituals and virginity testing, as well as in conflicts over rural service delivery and land restitution, makes culture a prominent and competitive political field. The politics of race are never far from these relationships, given its ongoing (though diminishing) visible correlation with economic stratum. The meteoric rise of a small but growing black middle class has, in this racialized context, left many of the poor feeling left behind (Seekings and Nattrass 2006). And, as the poorest of the poor continue to suffer and to be treated to removals, police actions and criminalization that is astonishingly reminiscent of apartheid authoritarianism, the political landscape of social transformation has become very complicated indeed.

A Man of the People: The Trials of Jacob Zuma

Zuma is viewed by the rural poor, and by traditionalists, as their champion in the ANC. While comparisons have been drawn between Zuma and Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Zulu Inkatha movement (now a political party), Zuma has not shown himself to be interested in splitting from the ANC to head up an ethnically based party. Yet he commands widespread popularity as a Zulu and as an African: he is viewed as a ‘traditionalist’ who cares about the fate of the rural poor in a way that many ANC leaders who have advantaged themselves of the state’s neo-liberal economic policies do not. In this sense, Zuma’s perceived financial vulnerabilities—the borrowing of money from friends and his alleged involvement in corruption—have added to, rather than diminished, his appeal.

It would be impossible to pin down to one element the nature of the populist fervour surrounding Zuma. On the ‘Friends of Jacob Zuma’ website, even a cursory reading of the thousands of letters of support show that his base is broad and varied. He is called a ‘man of the people’, a ‘traditionalist’, a ‘man of God’ and an ‘advocate of the poor’; addressed as ‘Baba’, ‘Msholozi’ and ‘My president’; described as ‘humble’, ‘kind’, ‘good’, ‘purely human’ and a ‘born leader’. He is petitioned as a representative and rescuer by writers who feel their interests to have been forsaken, proclaimed as a leader who stands against ‘BEE [Black Economic Empowerment] beneficiaries’. Some Zulu writers see him as a Zulu among a mainly Xhosa political elite and express confidence that a Zuma presidency would mean service delivery for marginalised areas. Others, who decry tribalism find in him an appealing universalism. The debates about gender, ethnicity, national politics, and morality which are argued in the space of the Friends of Jacob Zuma website, while obviously not a representative sample of voices, yet evidence a wide range of perspectives, concerns, interests and identities mobilised around the figure of Zuma.

Zuma can be seen as a career politician with an uncommon personal history. While many prominent political figures, Mandela and Buthelezi among them, could claim privileged or royal backgrounds as well as high educational achievements, Zuma derives much of his current legitimacy from his humble origins and lack of education, and his life as a military cadre. He was born in 1942 in the Nkandla district of Zululand, part of what was then Natal, nearly three decades before the KwaZulu Bantustan was created under apartheid. He grew up with the deprivations relating to education that still affect many rural children. His situation was aggravated when his father died at the end of WWII, and he ‘was never able to attend school’ (Gastrow 1990: 367). His mother became a domestic worker in the city of Durban, and the young Zuma ‘spent his early years moving between Zululand and the suburbs of Durban’. Gastrow notes that by the time he was 15 he started taking odd jobs. It was in the urban environment that he was exposed to a new set of influences, especially through his elder brother, a trade unionist, and in 1959 he joined the ANC. Two years after the banning of the organization in 1960, Jacob Zuma joined its military wing. Some work at sabotage followed, but in 1963, with a group of some 45 recruits, he was arrested near Zeerust, in what was then the Western Transvaal. Zuma was found guilty of attempting to overthrow the state and sentenced to ten years on Robben Island—where he studied formally for the first time (Callinicos 2004:305).

Upon his release he participated in forming under-ground structures for the ANC with Natal SACP firebrand Harry Gwala (Callinicos 2004:372, 402, Sisulu 2002:244-5). When Gwala was again arrested in 1975 Zuma left the country where he soon became a National Executive Committee member of the movement (1978), re-elected to the executive at the Kabwe Conference (1985), and later became ANC ‘chief of intelligence’. He also served on the ‘military council’ from the mid-1980s. After leaving South Africa he worked alongside Thabo Mbeki with the ‘young exiles’ making their way through Swaziland and Mozambique. Zuma returned to South Africa immediately after the unbanning of the organization and was the ANC’s representative in one of the first committees to oversee the return of exiles, release of political prisoners, and other such steps preparatory to the actual negotiation process (Gastrow 1990: 367-8).

What is striking in this brief biographical sketch is the presence of two central influences and the absence of two others. The former are, first, his rural upbringing that continued even with, or because of, his mother’s peripheral and subordinate location in the urban environment; and, second, the political and military influence of the politics of the ANC, an organization which he joined at age 17, and whose military wing he entered three years later. He spent ten years of his young life under the harsh conditions of political imprisonment, but also under the formative influence of ‘movement politics’ with political comrades, a masculinist environment; and the rest of his adult life in the direct service of the ANC, both internally and in exile. The absences are a stable family life and home in the rural area where he was born; and of the socializing influence of school, and even tertiary education that was experienced by most of his ANC senior colleagues. In some ways, since returning to South Africa Zuma has tried to recapture both the camaraderie of the military, through his new allies and through his signature song ‘awuleth’ mashini wami’[4] and to confirm that rural upbringing, also establishing an own homestead. His homestead site, located at Nkandla, was made possible by benefactors who stood to gain from a Zuma presidency. Zuma has also married several wives. These women (with the exception of one from whom he is divorced) have not achieved the limelight into which his rape accuser was thrust, and seem to be firmly located in the ‘traditionalist’ part of his life.

When Thabo Mbeki took presidential office and a deputy president was to be chosen, the speculation was that it would need to be ‘a Zulu’. The ANC clash with Inkatha was still raw and still wielded significant sway in the east coast region of the country. Buthelezi’s name was mentioned, yet when Zuma was put forth he appeared the obvious candidate, a Zulu man who was also an ANC man. Zuma’s troubles as a politician has been interpreted by many of his supporters as the persecution of a Zulu African of humble heritage and traditional values, the persecution of a man of little education whose home is rural. Indeed, arguably the most important basis for his popular appeal is the aura of persecution surrounding him, which enables many to view him as a kindred sufferer at the hands of an unfeeling government. The more crimes he is accused of, the more fiercely he appears to be defended. The conspiratorial logic with which his supporters virulently defend him displays the depth of the social mistrust and crisis experienced by a sizable section of the nation.

In the context of the rape trial, this mistrust and conspiracy was channelled very specifically through the lens of gender. The scapegoat became the person of the accuser and— beyond her—the more general figure of young womanhood. Declarations of Zuma’s innocence were linked to the guilt of women: Zuma’s accuser came to stand for a general treason to patriarchal morality, affected by the undisciplined sexuality of young women. The complainant was herself accused of bringing down the reputation of a great man (who was most importantly a man of the people) in accordance with the designs of his enemies. In the discussions that surrounded the trial, a prominent theme was that the interests, as well as the defining features, of community were under threat due to a generalized loss of morality. This loss was linked to the undisciplined sexuality of young women.

Womanhood on Trial

Articulating his explanation of why sexual intercourse had proceeded without a condom, despite the risk of HIV transmission, Zuma told the court that the complainant was in a state of sexual arousal. He asserted that this placed him under an obligation:

And I said to myself, I know as we grew up in the Zulu culture you don’t leave a woman in that situation because if you do then she will even have you arrested and say that you are a rapist.

According to his own account, Jacob Zuma’s sexual actions are not to be interpreted as either aggressive or irresponsible but rather as those prescribed by the wisdom of culture, familiar to him since his youth. He was acting, he claimed, as a Zulu man. And what it meant to act as a Zulu man in such a context was to act with an awareness that he was confronting a potential danger. This danger, according to his interpretation of Zulu wisdom, was none other than the nature of women.

Through this single remark, Jacob Zuma proposed a strange reversal. Zuma the accused became Zuma the vulnerable; the alleged victim was invoked as example of the hypersexual womanhood he had been warned a about as a child, a womanhood which required fulfilment and which could draw upon the powers of retaliation, using the legal system vindictively. Indeed, the insinuation was that this was precisely what had happened—he was in court because he had been victimized by the sexual irrationality of a woman. Further, his explanation removed the locus of actions from the specific circumstances of the night in question to a generalised ‘situation’, one which depersonalised the encounter. It removed the locus of responsibility from an individual male body to a collective male body, a collective body that prescribed specific forms of etiquette and behaviour.

The sleight of hand affecting these shifts was the ideological work of a politics of culture. Zuma’s claim to culture was a bid for the legitimation of his actions. Culture, in fact, was the real agent on trial. As we have argued, what gives such a claim its power is a national context in which culture is highly politicised. Invoking Zuluness in this case not only diffused his individual responsibility and his own will to action into a corporate field. It also placed his action in a domain historically persecuted by the various dominating forces of Eurocentrism; it was therefore a political claim. And it is a claim which has widespread resonance. One supporter who saw cultural prejudice as the reason Jacob Zuma was in court, wrote on the ‘Friends of JZ’ website:

We are tired of being refered to as lessor Citizens only because our culture allows a man to marry more than one wife. It is also disgusting to see that most of this media and complains about Women and child abuse are sensationalise as if is a culture thing. How long should our culture be demonised to our silence? How long we should allow ourself to feel inferior about who we are? And most hurting is the fact that, all is a lie. This is done to crush our spirit, and that spirit is also evident enough within the man we support. It is the African in JZ that is maybe a problem…[5]

Such a statement is filled with the pain of South Africa’s racist past, and it also highlights the way that cultural claims have come to be framed as a means of defying structures of power. Some of the issues arising in the course of his trial are described by Zuma himself as matters of cultural etiquette, matters pertaining to private domestic arrangements of patriarchal morality. He was in court, he implied, because of the cultural ignorance of the state prosecutor when it could have been settled in a customary manner of offering lobola[6] :

I accept that learned counsel might not know Zulu custom and traditions … and it happens in our custom, even if you don’t know a girl … she can be dropped off at home and here she is and you have to pay lobola for her … you just have to do that.

Here ‘you’ refers to a generic Zulu male, one who is obligated to obey the demands of culture and its prescribed patriarchal morality. Zuma’s alleged offer to pay a lobola for the complainant is portrayed as evidencing that the entire matter would have been best settled as a private matter of ‘culture’, that is, apart from the jurisdiction of a Eurocentric civil court.

Zuma’s invocation of Zulu culture in this context has, of course, invited heated debate about what can be claimed as a cultural norm. These debates are about cultural representation, authenticity and historical accuracy. Such debates are important, not least because interpretations of customary practices are in some cases being re-coded into national law—for example over land and the position and powers of amaKhosi (Ntsebeza 2006). Yet, our concern here is not with the validity or non-validity of Zuma’s specific claims. Rather it is the political power and masculinist content of cultural claim-making, and its effects, that we wish to highlight. Women are situated in an ambiguous and painful position in the politics of culture. As culture is politicised as a legal and secular ‘right’, gender is de-politicised to become a normatively ‘private’ and ‘customary’ domain. Asserting the rights of women can come to be defined as cultural treason. Women who do so risk losing access to resources and important kinds of community, over which men preside. This is not merely a South African dilemma, but a dilemma which is concomitant to the social conditions of modernity itself. Practising one’s culture, like one’s religion, is a matter of rights and human dignity. And yet, as is indeed the case around the world, this sets up a contest between cultural rights and gender equality.

In the context of this trial, Zuma’s statement about the sexual arousal of the complainant and the mistrust of women’s sexuality it expressed appears to have drawn broad agreement. Indeed, the criminalization of womanhood it denotes was frequently supported by Zuma’s supporters as an observation of human nature or as a religious principle, implying universality rather than cultural specificity.

It may be useful to include here a few examples of statements made by some supporters of Jacob Zuma, to demonstrate the high level of suspicion expressed about the complainant and to reveal the normative expectations which she is accused of violating. One woman interviewed by the news media during the trial said she believed Zuma not guilty of rape and that ‘Women in this country should change their attitudes; they should stop crying rape whenever their boyfriends disappoint them.’ Another woman declared: ‘This mama is speaking lies because she was in Zuma’s room with that [kanga] on and he could see everything. After that Zuma slept with this mama and then she put the case against him. She’s got too much money and she didn’t really work, where’s this money coming from? This woman is a isigebengu[7] , she is Zuma’s girlfriend, otherwise why would she sleep with him without a condom?’ The issue of money was raised often, with the implications of a contract of exchange between Zuma and the complainant. For example: ‘That woman went to Zuma to ask for money, you can’t do that with someone you don’t like.’ Other comments draw attention to the expectations considered normative in matters of sexual relations: ‘I don’t want any woman to be raped. But her story! Firstly, she was invited, then she agreed to cook. Third, she agreed to stay with Zuma for the night and fourth, she didn’t lock the door.’ And yet another woman said, ‘It’s nice that they burnt that picture [of the alleged rape victim]. Somebody who doesn’t like Zuma has paid something to her. I want Zuma to be the next president. This rape trial is not right because somebody raped this girl before Zuma, so why does she not bring him to court before Zuma? Why does she want to destroy Zuma?’[8]

Discussions appearing on the Friends of Jacob Zuma website reveal variations on this theme. Druza, a regular contributor, writes that:

…JZ is purely human and maybe that’s what we tend to like about him. It is purely human for a man to be sexuaully attracted to a women and normally, dressing is a way a women, in the context of sex, can woo men to the most human act, of sex.
Normally Mini skirt and revealing clothing are used to distract the attention of men and in most cases, seduce them, to get what they want. Hence it will take feminist maybe another century to can convince the human folk otherwise, that the way you wear and your actions can lead to other, normal human being to think of you as a sex object, and prefers to engage you in that activity.[9]

On the other hand, what gives Madisha the conviction to pronounce on the mistrust of women’s sexuality are religious texts:

The bible in proverbs 7 from verse 10 says: ‘And behold, there met him a woman, dressed as a harlot and sly and cunning of heart. She is turbulent and willful; her feet stay not in her house. (Verse 21)she persuades him, with the allurements of her lips she leads him (to overcome his conscience and his fears) and forces him along’. Go and read the whole chapter I am just showing you how dressing can have an effect on a man. Mark the following from the verses: 1. DRESSED as a harlot; 2. Turbulent and willing; 3. Her feet stay not in her house. You know very well that JZ is not made of steel, [but is] flesh and blood like every man. This woman (K) knew that by getting Cmd to bed she could gain something because the weakest point in men is in bed. So the bible tells us about woman ‘DRESSED’ as a harlot, with inviting eyes. Its just that [K] was not the owner of the house she should have shown her the door because her intentions was evidenced by the way she dressed, not to mention her greedy for money. If the bible says Dressed as a harlot, I see no reason why JZ can’t complain about dressing.[10]

Such discussions about the relations between women and men are centred on issues of behaviour and propriety, the significance of dress, gesture, private financial transactions, and sexual messaging which are meant to showcase the power of women over men. It is on this premise that charges of political conspiracy, and the suggestion that the Zuma’s accuser was in fact a plant by his enemies, are intended to make sense.

By attributing such views about women to a specific cultural tradition (Zulu culture) Zuma made a bid for the normativity of his own gendered behaviour. Through the highly politicised language of culture, and the assertion of his membership to a cultural group with distinctive patriarchal norms, he designated the relationships between men and women as a matter of customary concern rather than one of liberal, universal or humanistic rights. In effect, identified gender as a field of propriety and etiquette, in which the chaotic power of women is rationalized and domesticated through the moral codes of (patriarchal) culture.

The relegation of gender to the private sphere is a structural feature of the historical rise of the modern public sphere (Habermas 1991[1962]). In South Africa it manifested in its current form with colonial rule which polarised the ‘customary’ and the ‘statutory’ as distinct legal spaces and as domains of political authority, subordinated to the colonial (later apartheid) state. The invocation of tradition in the rape trial could not but be political. It constituted the courthouse as the space of a cultural face-off: the man from Nkandla who kept a rural homestead and lived traditionally as the husband of several wives, up against hegemonic, Eurocentric secular legal forces. Here was not one of the most powerful leaders of the most powerful nation-state on the continent; here was the Zulu man persecuted by enemies from all sides. Supporters, many of whom saw in Zuma a victim of conspiracy, could see in the trial of an individual a more general, collective—and cultural—persecution, confirming the loss of a once-stable moral order.

Conclusion

Many observers of the Jacob Zuma rape trial were struck by the visible presence of women outside the courthouse who, donned in t-shirts bearing Zuma’s face and the words ‘100% Zulu boy’, hurled abuse and threats (such as ‘burn the bitch’) at the complainant. Advocates of women’s equality, in particular, registered distress at the absence of gender solidarity and at what seemed a vulgar, not to say militant, display of ‘false consciousness’. With national statistics for sexual violence and rape at astronomical levels, how could such confidence be expressed in the innocence and benevolence of a powerful man while such outrage, blame and violence was directed at a woman compelled to keep her identity as secret?

We argue that mediating the politics of gender is a politics of culture. Culture offered to Zuma a legitimate forum in which to express the normativity of gender inequality and patriarchal morality within the forum of a court of law, a court supposedly premised on the defence of civic individual rights. By invoking culture, he suggested that the proper place in which gender power be negotiated was in the private, customary sphere, rather than in the public arena of civic rights. It is clearly a powerful plea: culture was also invoked by ANC chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe who was reported to have told the young woman who accused him of sexual harassment ‘I thought you were a real Xhosa girl.’ In Goniwe’s case Xhosa clan leaders offered a fine of a number of cattle to assuage Goniwe’s accuser in the traditional, rural, cultural sphere and, thereby, earn him forgiveness in the public sphere of democratic politics.[11]

What the voices in support of Jacob Zuma express is confidence in a broad patriarchal morality. In this moral framework, young women and their sexuality bear the burden of a clearly profound social anxiety. This is expressed through insistence on virginity testing, in campaigns of moral regeneration, in accusations of teenagers purposefully becoming pregnant to get welfare grants, and in the widespread idea that girls commonly ‘cry rape’ to bring down the reputations of males. The sexuality of young women is seen to pose a threat not only to individual men (in which the case of Jacob Zuma may be one with unusually high stakes attached) but to a future of social and political justice and moral order that the leadership of men like Zuma appear to promise. The greatest social danger is projected onto what lies just beneath a short skirt, just under a kanga. But it is the politics of culture that depoliticises the kanga and renders it as an object rather of tradition’s desire.

About the authors

Thembisa Waetjen is a historian and Gernard Maré is director of the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity, both at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa. This article was first published in Theoria, Volume 56, Number 118, Spring 2009, pp. 63-81(19). It is reprinted here with the kind persmission of the publisher.

References

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Callinicos, L. 2004. Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains. Cape Town, David Philip.

Dubow, S. 2006. A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820 – 2000. Oxford, Oxford University Press; Cape Town, Double Storey.

Gastrow, S. 1993. Who’s Who in South African Politics. Johannesburg, Ravan.

Giliomee, H. 2003. The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. Cape Town, Tafelberg.

Gordin, J. 2008. Zuma: A Biography. Jeppestown, Jonathon Ball.

Habermas, J. 1991 [1962]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MIT Press.

Mamdani, M. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Maré, G. 1993. Brothers Born of Warrior Blood: Politics and Ethnicity in South Africa. Johannesburg, Ravan.

Maré, G and G Hamilton. 1986. An Appetite for Power: Buthelezi’s Inkatha and South Africa. Johannesburg, Ravan; Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Sisulu, E. 2002. Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In our Lifetime. Cape Town, David Philip.

Ntsebeza, L. 2006[2005]. Democracy Compromised. Cape Town, HSRC Press.

Seekings, J and N Nattrass. 2006. Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa. Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Taylor, C. 1994. ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutmann (ed), Multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Waetjen, T. 2004. Workers and Warriors: Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation in South Africa. Champaign, University of Illinois Press; Cape Town, HSRC Press 2006.

Walker, C. 1990. ‘Gender and the Development of the Migrant Labour System’, in Cherryl Walker (ed), Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945. Cape Town, David Philip.

Welsh, D. 1973. The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Natal (1845-1910). Cape Town, Oxford University Press.

Notes

1. W. J. Van der Merwe, High Court Witwatersrand Division of the High Court of South Africa. Opening Comments to Judgment, State vs. Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, 4 May 2006, p. 3.

2. At this writing, it must be acknowledged that political change is extremely rapid in South Africa. Thabo Mbeki was removed from the office of state president by the ANC in late September 2008, following a legal ruling related to the National Prosecuting Authority’s handling of Zuma in relation to allegations of corruption. These various legal events, as well as others, which we do not recount here, will certainly shape the elections of 2009.

3. Clan chiefs.

4. The song says ‘Bring me my machine gun’. Local political cartoonist ‘Zapiro’ made much of the ‘gun’ metaphor during the rape trial. Here we use the title as referenced by Jeremy Gordin, 2008. p. 234.

5. Entry of Druza, 17/3/2006 3:58:00 PM, http://www.friendsofjz.co.za, accessed 10 June 2007. All quotations from the website have been copied verbatim.

6. Lobola refers to a bridewealth, traditionally paid in cattle, but can also include money or other valuables.

7. Criminal, troublemaker.

8. These responses were from a single Mail and Guardian article (by Niren Tolsi, Kwanele Sosibo, Tumi Makgetla and Monako Dibetle, 24 March 2006) in which various views about the trial were solicited. They provide an example of a discourse that was also prevalent on the Friends of Jacob Zuma website.

9. Posted by Druza, 4/6/2007 12:52:10 PM. Accessed 10 June 2007. The quotations used in this article cannot begin to capture the vast and emotionally expressed ‘letters of support’, which themselves highlight the very interesting and complex discourses at play about gender, class, culture and a number of other issues.

10. Posted by Madisha, 2/6/2007 9:51:44 PM. Accessed 10 June 2007.

11. The Mail and Guardian, 17 November 2006, and 24 November 2006.

***

From ACAS Bulletin 84: The Politics of Jacob Zuma

‘Cosmopolitan’ is not exactly a word that comes to mind when describing South African society — both contemporary and historical. Yet, if we take the word ‘cosmopolitan’ as implying an embrace of the globe; an unbounded vision of humanity; then South Africa has been in the embrace of the world for quite some time. Whether one is thinking of Adamastor — the Grecian-inspired mythological character invented by the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões in his epic poem Os Lusíadas (first printed in 1572) — or the indentured labourers (Indian and Chinese) who were transported to South Africa in the 1860s and early 1900, South Africa has been in the world’s line of vision for centuries and a destination for many. What has complicated South Africa’s ‘cosmopolitan’ history is its racialisation: the history of apartheid is in some way a history of the denial of the hybridity and indeterminancy created by the forced and voluntary migrations and presence of innumerable cultural influences. The search for purity — a core value of the Afrikaner Nationalists of the 1930s — was a symptom of this fear of ‘otherness’. The ascendancy of Jacob Zuma to the presidency of the African National Congress (ANC) and his inauguration as South Africa’s fourth democratically-elected president has once again forced South Africans to reconsider what they understand to be the cosmopolitan values of the society. ‘Cosmpolitanism’ should not be confused with that other perennial debate in South Africa, namely, the ‘Rainbow nationalism’ debate. The manner in which Jacob Zuma rose to power brought to the fore not only questions of cultural tolerance and relativism but also the unspoken and uneasy history of ‘exile’ in South African politics. While the sensationalist reporting and analysis of Zuma focussed on his personal life — his polygamous household; the corruption and rape charges; his relationship to Schabir Shaik; his personal finances and alliances — there were historical echoes and questions that remained unexplored. Zuma is not only a ‘Zulu’ but he is also a former exile and guerrilla operative and in all the debates that swirled around ‘JZ’ — as he is affectionately known — the meaning of Zuluness was a question mark and a taken for granted assumption. Whether he was singing Umshini Wami or choosing to testify in court in isiZulu, Zuma’s ethnic identity was easily available to be parodied, pilloried and purloined while at the same time he also played into the hands of his critics by constantly playing the ‘Zulu card’. What was often forgotten in these debates is that Zuma was not the first ‘Zulu’ to lead the ANC. Now that the election drama is over, perhaps we have the time and the reason to examine the historical antecedents of Pixley ka Isaka Seme (1881-1951) and John Dube (1871-1946), who were both ethnically Zulu and committed nationalists and cosmopolitans. Their instrumental role in the establishment of the ANC may help us understand why JZ’s Zuluness is simultaneously a return of ‘ethnic politics’ and a revival of long-forgotten nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism. If we are to de-racialise the country’s history, then we need to excavate the lives of those South Africans who embraced and were embraced by the world; South Africans who chose to be citizens of the world. Even this process of excavation is fraught — for a long time it’s been dominated by the biographies and autobiographies of the exile community — those South Africans who wilfully chose exile or were forced into exile in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The problem of the ‘exile’ is a problem of a negative cosmopolitanism; a cosmopolitanism that emerges out of crisis rather than as a celebration of global diversity and difference. Jacob Zuma, like many of his ANC comrades, is a product of this kind of cosmopolitanism. This contrast between the exiled and the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan is central to understanding the persona of Jacob Zuma. The contrast also serves a second function, which is to remind us that the nineteenth-century cosmopolitans were also in a crisis of sort — the crisis of being a colonized subject — but that they nevertheless tried to imagine a different place for South Africa both in Africa and the world.

Amakholwa — the historical background

It is impossible to understand the lives of John Dube and Pixley ka Isaka Seme without understanding the history of colonialism in southeast Africa. Although the colonial narrative of South Africa properly begins with the Cape, ‘Natal’ became an important site for the grand experiment of indirect rule and has therefore become central to historical interpretations of imperialism in South Africa. Thus, for example, Mahmood Mamdani’s book Citizens and Subjects: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism references and uses the Natal and Shepstonian system of indirect rule as the archetypal example of ‘decentralised despotism’. The amakholwa (educated, converted and Christian Africans) were in the simplest terms, the Africans who were neither ‘tribal subjects’ nor ‘colonial citizens’ — to use Mamdani’s vocabulary. Yet, this dichotomy and schizophrenia of being ‘neither’ ‘nor’ wasn’t the only defining characteristic of the educated Africans of nineteenth and early twentieth century Natal. In fact, their relationship to the colonial state wasn’t purely that of supplicants petitioning for admission into the exclusive sphere of colonial civil society. Much of their writing and thinking focussed on the possibility of an African ‘imagined’ community, that was often removed, both culturally and ideologically, from the colonial state’s definition of tribal society or the ‘educated African’. This alternative public sphere which the amakholwa created and staged in newspapers, books and pamphlets is a repository for re-imagining South Africa in the nineteenth century especially if one is interested in sketching a more demotic picture of who was a ‘historical agent’ in that century. Too often studies of this period focus on the colonial state and its officials as the main ‘agents’ of history in colonial Natal. Alternatively, too much credit is given to the missionaries and their proselytization, which is depicted as the main transformative power and engine of social, political and intellectual reconfiguration of African society in the nineteenth century. What is often occluded in these studies is the fact that colonial society was a polyphonic society; there were multiple voices that spoke to the state and to the missionaries, and this includes the African voices that supported or were ambivalent towards the imperial and the cultural enterprises represented by ‘the Queen’ and her messengers — the missionaries and officials.

Seme and Dube — the biographies

The biographies of Pixley ka Isaka Seme and John Dube have become ‘public’ or ‘common’ knowledge since they were both instrumental in the foundation and establishment of the African National Congress in 1912. There are therefore several websites where you can just ‘cut and paste’ their biographies. There is little room for an original biographical interpretation and it is therefore easier to borrow and acknowledge these sources. The South African History Online (SAHO) project — an educational and encyclopaedic source on South African history — gives the following account of John Dube’s life:

“John Langalibalele Dube was born in Natal in 1871. He was the son of Rev. James Dube one of the first ordained pastors of the American Zulu Mission. John Dube’s grandmother was one of the first Christians to be converted by the American Daniel Lindley.”

“Dube was educated at Inanda and Amanzimtoti (later Adams College). In 1887 he accompanied the missionary W.C. Wilcox to America. There he studied at Oberlin College while supporting himself in a variety of jobs and lecturing on the need for industrial education in Natal. He went back to Natal but soon resumed to the U.S. for further training and to collect money for a Zulu industrial school – as he called it – along the lines of the Tuskegee Institute.”[1]

Or, alternatively you can read his biography on the African National Congress website, which states:

“B.W. Vilakazi, a poet and author, wrote in 1946 that Dube was “a great, if not the greatest, black man of the missionary epoch in South Africa” and earlier A.S. Vil-Nkomo had written in the same vein: Dube was “one who comes once in many centuries – No one else in his education generation has accomplished so much with such meagre economic means. He was scholar, gentleman, leader, farmer, teacher, politician, patriot and philanthropist”.

There were other judgements. To the Governor of Natal in 1906 Dube was “a pronounced Ethiopian who ought to be watched” and John X. Merriman, a Cape “liberal” described Dube in 1912 as a “typical Zulu, with a powerful cruel face. Very moderate and civilised, spoke extraordinarily good English …”. A little later he commented:

“Dube in conversation gave me a glimpse of national feeling which reminded me of Gokhale. How they must hate us – not without cause.”[2]

On Pixley ka Isaka Seme the SAHO website states:

Pixley Seme was born on 1 October 1881 in Natal. He was the son of Isaka Sarah (nee Mseleku) Seme. He obtained his primary school education at the local mission school where the American Congregationalist missionary, Reverend S. C. Pixley, took an interest in him and arranged for him to go to the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts in the USA. He then attended Columbia University in New York and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree (B.A) in April 1906. At the same time he won the University’s highest oratorical honour, the George William Curtis medal. His topic was “The Regeneration of Africa”.[3]

These and other biographical treatments of the two men give us a sense of two visible factors that dominated and structured their lives: first, the missionary education they acquired in colonial Natal and second, their worldly travels and contact with people and institutions beyond the parochial intellectual culture of Natal and South Africa. The latter factor is what constitutes their cosmopolitan identities.

The competing power and pull of Zulu nationalism and cosmopolitanism

In trying to understand the impact of the ‘wider world’ on Dube and Seme it is tempting to focus only on the American and African-American connections evident in their biographies. However, in conceiving of themselves as educated Africans who were obliged to ‘spread’ their knowledge and invite other Africans into modernity, both Dube and Seme presented themselves using a kaleidoscope vocabulary of Zulu nationalism, Pan-Africanism and cosmopolitanism. This trilogy of –isms was not neatly arranged and packaged by the two men; these ideas competed with each other for prominence. These competing ideologies have led many scholars to conclude that the modernity represented by the amakholwa was inauthentic, ambiguous or at worst, a naïve mimicry of the Western version. When however one hears Seme speak of what it meant to be a ‘modern’ African, then these conclusions seem hasty and incomplete. In his 1906 speech, he told his Columbia audience:

I am an African, and I set my pride in my race over against a hostile public opinion…The races of mankind are composed of free and unique individuals. An attempt to compare them on the basis of equality can never be finally satisfactory. Each is himself…In all races, genius is like a spark, which, concealed in the bosom of a flint, bursts forth at the summoning stroke. It may arise anywhere and in any race. (Karis and Carter 1972: 69)

Compare this statement on being an African, to Dube’s vision of a future Africa enunciated in 1892 in a pamphlet titled ‘A Talk Upon My Native Land’:

Oh! how I long for that day, when the darkness and gloom shall have passed away, because the “Sun of Righteousness has risen with healing in His hand.” This shall be the dawning of a brighter day for the people of Africa. Christianity will usher in a new civilization, and the “Dark Continent” will be transformed into a land of commerce and Christian institutions. Then shall Africa take her place as a nation among nations… (Karis and Carter 1972: 69)

Although Dube more than Seme gives his vision of a new Africa a Christian foundation, the common thread that binds both men is that they thought of Africa as being on a point of renaissance and rejuvenation. In his oration, Seme focussed both on the glories of the African past — the pyramids of Egypt and Ethiopia — and on the impact of Africans on European culture. On the latter he cited ‘one professor of philosophy in a celebrated German university’. He was referring to Anton-Wilhelm Amo (b. 1703 – d. 1756) who taught at the universities of Halle and Jena in Germany. This reference to the achievements of Africans outside the continent is the first of many examples of Seme’s cosmopolitan perspective and his attempt to link his struggles as a Zulu-speaker and colonial subject with those of other Africans in the diaspora. Dube on the other hand emphasised the role of Christianity in ushering in modernity into Africa. This is not surprising since he was a convert, but it has been inordinately highlighted as an example of the extent to which Dube and other amakholwa had succumbed and been seduced by the elusive promise of Christian humanitarianism and Victorian progress. This is partially true — the language of missionary emancipation and equality was certainly attractive to the amakholwa, but this is not a symptom of seduction as it is a sign of their ability to grasp and understand the power and effect of the discourses introduced by the missionaries. The discursive appeal of Victorian modernity was not a chimera for Dube and Seme; it was a horizon of possibilities in which they read not only the modernization of the Zulu and African peoples but also the modernization of the colonial state, which was intent on excluding them from the boon of progress. As representatives of an African modernity, they were therefore not just committed to Christianization but also the democratization of modernity, albeit in the form of Victorian respectability and civility.

In Seme’s terms this democratization of modernity was a rejection of the relegation of Africa to a marginal status in the production of knowledge. His regeneration of Africa therefore necessitated that Africans should, as in times past, contribute to the ‘store’ of knowledge. He noted:

He [the African] has refused to camp forever on the borders of the industrial world; having learned that knowledge is power, he is educating his children…These return to their country like arrows, to drive darkness from the land…

The African is not a proletarian in the world of science and art. He has precious creations of his own, of ivory, of copper and of gold, fine, plated willow-ware and weapons of superior workmanship. (Karis and Carter 1972: 71)

Although there is not space to elaborate on the fullest implications of Dube and Seme’s ideas and how these influenced their decisions to participate in the nascent political organizations that led to the formation of South African Native National Congress (1912), the predecessor of the African National Congress, it is important to point to the one sphere where Dube exerted an influence that was simultaneously political as it was intellectual. In 1903, he established the newspaper Ilanga lase Natal and was editor until 1920. This bilingual Zulu-English newspaper was not only the first newspaper to be established by an African in Natal, it became the main medium through which the Zulu-speaking literati of southern Africa communicated current affairs and opinion while also debating the very ‘essence’ of Zuluness and the meaning of their Zulu cultural heritage. It is this expression of a cosmopolitan consciousness that defines the contribution of Dube and Seme. This leads us to several kinds of theoretical conclusions that we can draw about the historical legacy left by the amakholwa literates.

The first kind of conclusion concerns the terminology introduced by Homi Bhabha (1994: xvi) to describe an alternative cosmopolitanism that as he states, ‘measures global progress from the minoritarian perspective’. He calls this cosmopolitanism a ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’. If we take these definitions seriously and apply them to the colonized amakholwa of Natal, we are confronted with the problem of having to define the extent to which their marginalisation could be called a ‘minoritarian perspective’. Experientially, the amakholwa understood themselves as a deterritorialized Zulu-speakers; they had severed ties with the independent Zulu kingdom and they were even labelled by their former cultural compatriots as amakhafula — ‘those who have been spat out’ — to symbolically and linguistically mark this expulsion.

The notion of a vernacular cosmopolitanism is especially apt when one considers that John Dube was not just a newspaper editor and a founder and first president of the ANC. He was also the first African to write and publish a work of faction in the Zulu language. In 1930 he published the historical novel uJeqe: Insila ka Shaka, translated into English as Jeqe, the body servant of Shaka (1951). The significance of the novel resides in the fact that the ‘bodyservant’ / ‘insila’ is the subaltern of subalterns in the Zulu king’s household — he is the living spittoon upon whom the king expectorates because the king’s spittle was considered to have ritual power and therefore could not land on the ground for fear of being collected and used by wizards, witches and such. I haven’t thought about this book since my teens; it was a ‘set work’ for my aunts in high school and now it has been given the status of a modern classic by Penguin who have recently republished the English translation. The question is: what does it mean when a supposedly elitist kholwa intellectual publishes a historical novel about a Zulu subaltern? In my reading it means that Dube like his contemporaries was establishing a kholwa literature and an archive which deserves a revisiting.

The other cosmopolitan literature that has been archived belongs to the twentieth century when thousands of South Africans went into exile for political and cultural reasons. This is the ‘negative cosmopolitanism’ alluded to at the beginning. Unlike the subject of a colonial state, the twentieth century exile was thrown into a condition of statelessness and for most their departure from South Africa was defined by the ‘exit permit’, which was apartheid’s spiteful version of a one-way ticket. Existentially, the experience of exile was summed up by Mark Gevisser — in a review of Hilda Bernstein’s book The Rift: The Exile Experience of South Africans- — as ‘the mundanity of dates and moves; a train-timetable of displacement’. Another exile, Nat Nakasa described it differently in his essay ‘A Native of Nowhere’, when he wrote that his future ‘lies in a number of diplomatic bags’. This constant shuffling of past, present and future and the feeling that one has been reluctantly forced into a condition not of one’s choosing undoubtedly shaped the manner in which exiles thought of their relationship to the wider world. The grand image of the world traveller, embarking and disembarking wherever they wish, was not for them. The deprivation, isolation and homesickness led many, as Gevisser points out in his review, to alcoholism and fatalism even as they struggled to create new forms of community. This sense of community, formed out of the necessity of survival and the desire to preserve a modicum of homeliness, was what the returning exiles brought back with them in the 1990s. And, in the climate of South Africa’s transition and the anxiety induced by the sudden conversion of freedom fighters into negotiators and ‘stakeholders’, these communities morphed into cliques and factions. These contests over power and influence were the basic ingredients of the Mbeki-Zuma saga and they cannot be understood without understanding the nature of the cosmopolitanism imposed by exile.

Jacob Zuma and his ‘Return’ to Zuluness

As interesting and noteworthy as the biographies of Pixley ka Isaka Seme and John Dube may be, there is no obvious connection with Jacob Zuma and the 2009 South African elections. The main rationale for comparing Jacob Zuma with his kholwa predecessors is that one of the subterranean transcripts of the Zuma saga — especially its conspiratorial version — was that the ANC as a political party had been hijacked by Xhosas and that Zuma was the fitting heir to return the party to its ‘Zulu origins’, namely the legacy of John Dube. This is the evanescence referred to in my title. In the context of the contemporary crisis in the ANC, the legacy of John Dube was utilised to transform a leadership conflict between Jacob Zuma and his erstwhile rival into a ‘return’ to origins — whether these are Zulu or uMkhonto we Sizwe. As my portrait of Dube has shown, his was not an ideology of Zulu chauvinism, even though it was tinged by a desire for a reformed and modern Zulu kingship and identity. When compared to Seme as well, Zuma does not seem to represent the trilogy of forces that were at work in the formation of their ideas namely Zulu nationalism, Pan-Africanism and cosmopolitanism. During the election campaign, Zuma was depicted and sometimes presented himself as a motley caricature of a singing and dancing Zulu warrior who was clutching at the straw of an ethnic identity in the hope that it will transform into the ubiquitous ‘machine gun’ which he conjured up every time he started up his signature song ‘umshini wam’’. His attempt at marshalling Zulu identity for this purpose can be interpreted as a contemptuous reaction to the intellectualism and worldliness of Mbeki and his inner circle. Now that he is president of the republic, and has even passed the dreaded 100-day mark, Zuma seems to have abandoned the Zulu ethnic identity. He is transmogrifying into the president he was elected to be; part pragmatist and part conciliator. His aversion to intellectualism was entrenched in his State of the Nation speech, delivered to parliament in June 2009. It had none of the grandeur and poetics of a Mbeki speech; it was realistic — jobs, service delivery, poverty and social infrastructure were the keywords. Yet, even when he was being a programmatic, Zuma showed off the ‘warmth’ that Mbeki apparently lacked; he spoke in all but the 11th official language. He called for unity in Sesotho, he asked the rural poor for their co-operation in isiZulu and he conjured the spirit of communalism in Afrikaans. Thus, unlike Mbeki his eye for diversity was focussed inwards — the diverse languages and cultures within South Africa — rather than outwards in the direction of the continent or the world.

Although a State of the Nation speech is not a predictor of the style of a presidency, it is already clear that Jacob Zuma is not interested in the kind of cosmopolitan vision represented by Mbeki, especially his diplomatic and foreign politics. This seeming disavowal of the legacy of Dube and Seme’s cosmpolitanism, which Mbeki attempted to emulate with mixed success, is not in itself a sign that Zuma is not cosmopolitan in his outlook. Rather, it creates the false impression and dichotomy, namely that only intellectuals, like Mbeki and his acolytes, can be cosmopolitan. It entrenches the idea that being cosmopolitan is a luxury, reserved for those who have the leisure and the means to contemplate the world. It stifles conversations about history, especially the history of South Africa’s relationship to the African continent. It leaves us floundering for an explanation of our kholwa and creole pasts. And, it does not bode well for our uncertain futures. For a scholar interested in the history of South Africa’s relationship to the world, the equating of cosmopolitanism with intellectualism, complicates any recovery that one may attempt of the other cosmopolitanisms that have created the diversity, which South Africans celebrate in our constitution and our motto.

About the author

Hlonipha Mokoena is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York.

Works Cited

Bhabha, HK. 2004. The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics. London and New York, Routledge.

Gevisser, M. 1994. Home Is Where the Hate Is. The Guardian, 26 April.

Karis, T, GM Carter, and GM Gerhart. 1972. From Protest to Challenge : A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1990. Vol. 1. Stanford, Hoover Institution Press.

Patel, E (ed.). 2005. The world of Nat Nakasa. Johannesburg, Ravan Press.

Notes

1. http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/dube-jl.htm

2. http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/people/dube.html

3. http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/seme,p.htm

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From ACAS Bulletin 84: The Politics of Jacob Zuma