SA needs many presidents with backgrounds like Zuma
One way to understand Jacob Zuma’s presidency is to place it in a long history stretching almost back to precolonial times.
From this vantage point we can grasp just how unusual and consequential his time in power has been.
When Christian missionaries set up shop in Southern Africa in the early and mid-19th century they brought with them the tools that would later prove all-important in fighting colonialism: reading and writing. Though they only dimly knew it, the Africans who attended the early mission schools were thus passing on to their descendants the most consequential inheritance.
Within a generation, they had formed a regional Southern African elite, steeped in reading and writing, hungry to study abroad and bent on giving their children, and their children’s children, the best.
More than a century later, the majority of those who led the struggle for freedom were mission-educated, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki the most prominent among them. And when they grew old and handed over power to the next generation, it was to one of their sons, Thabo Mbeki.
It is a remarkable story. An elite formed in the mid-19th century remained intact across the generations, through the violence of industrialisation and the destruction of apartheid, to lead a democratic SA.
In fact, this elite formed long before the mid-19th century, for overrepresented among the first attendees of the mission schools were the children of the region’s royalty.
One can thus say, with only some exaggeration, that the great-great grandchildren of the aristocracies white people conquered were the ones who eventually claimed power back.
All of which puts Zuma in an interesting light, for he was not the scion of a long line of mission-educated men and women. He was the son of a domestic worker too poor to send him to any school at all.
He thus goes down as the first genuinely ordinary person to exercise power on a grand scale in modern South African history.
The real world always turns out to be stranger than anything we might make up.
Had we asked a fine novelist to invent a story in which a person from the ranks of the poor takes power, she might have conjured a leader mobilising the residents of the informal settlements on the edges of our cities or a romantic proletarian rousing the workers in our remaining factories and mines.
PROVINCIAL CAPITALS
Who might have imagined what we got instead?
In the most industrialised country on the continent, its cities roiled with trouble, the president turned to the sleepy provincial capitals of Mangaung, Mahikeng and Mbombela, where he roused a bureaucratic bourgeoisie to steal the state one public utility at a time.
He did so spitting venom at the descendants of the old mission-educated elite, claiming they had used their generations of privilege to sew up a deal with white people.
The light in this dark story is that most South Africans saw through Zuma. By the time he was unseated, his claims to speak on behalf of the poor were scorned across the land.
One can only hope that Zuma will be remembered by our grandchildren as a blemish on what by then will be a long history of ordinary people in power.
No country should be governed by a self-reproducing elite, one generation after the next. The sons and daughters of peasants and workers must access the highest offices.
Let us hope that 50 years from now SA will have had a string of presidents with backgrounds like Zuma’s — presidents who have governed a thousand times better than he did. Steinberg teaches African studies at Oxford University.