Zuma: A Biography (review)

One way of understanding the timing of Jeremy Gordin's biography of Jacob Zuma is as a response to the two biographies of Thabo Mbeki that preceded it. This link is not just chronological, however; it vividly illustrates the paradoxes of public life and leadership in postapartheid South Africa. Whereas the African National Congress (ANC), as a political party, decries and denies leadership struggles and contests, its leaders imprint themselves on the public imagination through infamy, notoriety, and just plain soapbox theatrics. Whereas the ANC would like to present a united front of ideological vigor and democratic consultation, its leaders "go public" with HIV/AIDS denialism and other conspiracy theories. Gordin's book attempts to bridge and explain the gap that exists between the ANC's self-image and its often spectacular public-relations blunders. His subject is obviously Jacob Zuma, the current president of the Republic of South Africa, but the book is as much a biography of the persona as it is of the party of which he is a loyal member.

In Mark Gevisser's Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Jonathan Ball, 2007; published abridged in the USA as A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream [Palgrave MacMillan, 2009]) and William Mervin Gumede's Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (Zebra Press, 2005) we find depicted a leader struggling to position himself between the towering image of Nelson Mandela and the competing ideological demands of inclusiveness made by the ANC's alliance partners, Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the SACP (South African Communist Party). Here the two figures of Mbeki and Zuma also represent a struggle over a nebulous but emotive phenomenon called "the soul of the ANC." Although it is not clear when the ANC acquired this metaphysical dimension, the battle for its "soul" has taken on august proportions. The proliferation of biographies about the ANC's postapartheid leaders has served to magnify these intense and divisive conflicts and machinations around the future of the party and its place in South Africa's body politic.

Gordin's book makes two important contributions to contemporary South African political history. The first is the meticulous manner in which he details the role played by the media in the Zuma saga. The second is his perceptive and incisive explanation of the legal and juridical issues surrounding Zuma's various trials and acquittals. On the media's coverage of Zuma's personal, political, and legal trials, the book functions as a lesson in the hazards that beset a journalistic culture that is at once elitist and extremely vocal and opinionated. On several occasions the media simply underestimated Zuma and his supporters. It proved unable to "read" popular sentiment and perhaps even contributed, through its supercilious and sensationalist reporting, to his popularity. On the matter of the judiciary, Zuma's rise to power exemplifies the meaning of the "separation of powers" provisions of the South African constitution while also illustrating how the country's judiciary is itself a site for contesting the strength and durability of the country's new democracy and still emerging culture of constitutional human rights.

Although Gordin is at pains to distance himself, as a journalist and a biographer, from the seduction of Zuma's rural-to-riches story, his words betray him. Several times in the book the narrative strays into the ethnicist-essentialist language of Zuma-the-valiant-Zulu-warrior. What this depiction fails to explore is the fact that Zuma's "Zuluness" is a product of the contemporary politics of ethnic identity within the ANC. Instead, Gordin presents to us a picture of an atavistic Zulu-warrior ethic of which Zuma is the perfect, if somewhat piebald, embodiment.