The Sunday News
Jacob Gedleyehlekisa Mhlanganelwa Zuma is easily one of the most colourful and dramatic politicians of the African continent. A true political animal he is in the way he is a striker in the political game of capturing public hearts and minds, in the positive and the negative, at once.
Zuma (pictured) attracts visceral extremes of reactions. Those that love the man are ready to kill for him and those that resent him are prepared to kill him. Both his supporters and his detractors almost always overrate him, they in their imaginations run away with the titanic shadow of the man and live the humble, sometimes wise and sometimes naughty villager and a trained spy unseen and unknown. He is a champion of political gamesmanship, and what you see in the public is definitely not what you get in actuality, what is advertised is not what you actually receive when you buy.
In his body that over the years he has turned into a political weapon through a combination of Zulu traditional dance, some militarised paces of the Toyi Toyi type and other erotic suggestives, Msholozi combines reality and illusion in their intensity. The Zuma of the public imagination, the Zulu warrior and the machine gun man is a performance and a persona that is a huge distance away from the humble villager from KwaDakwadunuse in iNkandla, South Africa. What circulates in the public domain as Zuma, either the victim or the victimiser, is actually a collection of shadows, myths and fictions that the man has created and that his supporters and detractors in equal measure have exaggerated into epic legends.
Being vividly seen yet not known and being known while not understood has been Zuma’s political strength that has finally become his ultimate weakness and much undoing. The man has practiced and performed politics as both an art and war, and yes, he has been for years a reader and enactor of the Sun Tsu’s The Art of War. Like all artists and warriors of things political Zuma has lived with the knowledge that his audiences, made out of friends and enemies, expect him to say what has never been said before and do what has not been done before.
Spectacle and invention have been Msholozi’s political capital. The massive psychological and political pressure to say the unsaid and do the undone led the man to cross many lines; to trespass boundaries and explode taboos, which has been his novelty and strength that have turned into his ultimate tragedy. Audiences, be they political or artistic, push their actors and performers into extremes. And extremes are always points of no return that lead to triumph and or tragedy, the pinnacle of victory or the abyss, or both at once.
The Thing Itself
In his famous philosophical epistle, The Seventh Letter, Plato wrote of “the thing itself” in philosophy. A thing in its veracity and actuality that is different from appearances, shadows, fictions and symbols. Philosophical analysis if it is true to itself and claims should always be able to separate what seems from what is about things and people. It is my observation that Zuma the thing itself in actuality and veracity remains unknown in the distant background shadowed by fictions, myths and symbols that a political drama-prince has over the years created around and about himself for political use and otherwise.
For example many people out there know Zuma as the battle thirsty machine gun man whose signature military and battle song is: Umshini Wami, a song sung by a warrior demanding his machine gun so that he can jump into battle and shoot the enemy once and for all. But the real Zuma is not and has never been a soldier but an industrious, well-trained and able spy that operates far away from the line of gun fire and does not, even must not, carry or use guns.
When a spook resorts to shooting or is uncovered and gets shot he would have failed in his spookiness.
Up to now the threat that he frightens his political opponents in the high echelons of the African National Congress with that possibility of him spilling some hot beans about them, beans that he has been collecting and keeping over the decades from Robben Island through exile right up to now. Some who is who in the ANC, many of them, lost weight when Msholozi was due to stand before the Judge Zondo Commission of Inquiry, in fear that he would out their soiled political laundry. Zuma the spook, the thing itself, has the power to know about others and yet remain really slippery and unknown, and so is he feared by political opponents.
The many crimes of which Zuma is accused of appear also in a big way as the true crimes of a spy. No personal footprint, fingerprint or signature of his is ever found. What are found are hands, handlers and instruments in form of alleged runners, proxies and agents of Msholozi, not him, not the thing itself.
I Spy: Listen more; speak less!
In the pubs of Maputo in exile, Zuma is said to have spoken a little but loud, and laughed the longest yet he did not drink a drop of liquor. Laughing was and still is a screen Zuma uses to listen and process what people are saying. In power his speeches were short and thoroughly rehearsed. Many words were substituted with action, song and dance, to avoid saying a lot. He wore the constume of an uneducated peasant yet Zuma, in reality, is a well-read graduate of Robben Island. South Africans were mesmerised by an underdog in power, the peasant president that was only a jacket which Zuma wore to cover the sly spy in power.
Zuma hands himself over to the police
He did not. It is once again the imaginary Zuma who handed himself over to law enforcement. The real Msholozi was driven to a prison by his body guards and some police past vigilant mobs of supporters that did not read what was happening until it was too late. The Zuma Foundation had to disclose his handing himself over as an afterthought. A blood bath was avoided in Nkandla after months and weeks of high drama.
With the jailing of Zuma, a former President of South Africa, doors of prison have opened in South African politics, and many politicians, in the ANC and the opposition, have a reason to be afraid.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
