Songs, books, dance — and a really bad movie

We can’t accuse Zuma of not giving us anything during his reign . . .

In the captivating series Game of Thrones almost every other episode has a character so obsessed with his legacy that he tearfully proclaims: if we do this right, and do it heroically, they will sing songs about us long after we are dead.

Poor things, they must meet our own homegrown hero Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Mhlanganyelwa “Phunyukabemphethe” Zuma, the man who doesn’t need to die heroically in order for songs to be written about him.

During his tenure in his office, numerous songs have been performed in his honour by artists ranging from the maskandi veteran Phuzekhemisi’s

Wenzen’uZuma (what has Zuma done?) to Tboy Daflame’s uBaba kaDuduzane (a humorous take on the fact that Zuma is father to Duduzane who works for the Guptas).

But you have to have done something remarkable to have at least 22 books written about you while you are still in office. That’s right, at the last count there were 22 books in our bookstores dealing with the phenomenon called Zuma.

How impressed these writers have been by Zuma comes through in the titles of their books. Kill Zuma!

(screams the writer Gayton McKenzie). Adriaan Basson and Pieter du Toit proclaim that Zuma is

Enemy of the People. Justice Malala says thanks to

Zuma We Have Begun Our Descent.

Ralph Mathekga tells us what will happen When Zuma Goes. Azad Essa tells us of Zuma’s Bastard, but

Ronnie Kasrils shrugs and says, ah, Zuma is but A Simple Man.

People who must be really pissed off with Zuma are the newspaper subeditors, that species of human being cursed with the task of writing headlines.

For the past two years they’ve been writing stuff like: “Night of the long knives for Zuma!”, “He is about to go!”, “A matter of time”, “NEC shows Zuma the door”, “NEC has forgotten where the door is!”, “NEC eating McDonald’s burgers while waiting for him to go”, “He’ll go now-now”.

But why are we surprised at the sad hilarity of it all? Even before he ascended the throne King Zuma showed us there would never be a dull moment during his reign.

As early as 2002 he had already started attracting media attention when the Scorpions started investigating him for an arms deal bribe.

Then in 2006, Zuma was acquitted of raping a 31-year-old woman who was a family friend. It was during his testimony that we began to get glimpses of his long-hidden brilliance.

When the rape trial began, this conscientious struggle icon never said anything to stop his supporters who came to court brandishing panties and carrying placards that read “Kill the bitch”. Instead, he led them in the deliciously ambiguous song Umshini Wam.

While it is a struggle song about a fighter who wants his machine gun, it is also loaded with sexual innuendo: in street parlance, the penis is umshini, the machine.

It was also during the trial that the country was first exposed to the expression “100% Zulu”.

What balderdash and poppycock! After all the wars of conquests, with attendant rapes, that this country has been through, can anyone be 100% anything? There’s no 100% white, no 100% black. Only in Zumaland does this notion hold true.

After having had unprotected sex with an HIVpositive woman (the rape accuser), Zuma explained that he had had a shower immediately after sex. Contrary to popular belief, he did not say directly that he took a shower to minimise chances of contracting the virus.

But it was a carelessly stupid answer made under cross-examination and it was easy to misread it. In its sheer crassness the statement could only match that infantile Thabo Mbeki gaffe when he said he did not know anyone who had died of Aids.

This newspaper’s cartoonist Zapiro, aka Jonathan Shapiro, took Zuma to task on this. From that day on, whenever Zuma appeared in Zapiro cartoons he had a showerhead attached to his picturesque cranium.

Zapiro’s invention was so powerful that other cartoonists had no option but to copy it. A Zuma without a showerhead was just not Zuma.

But when Zuma became president in 2009 some of us who were senior editors at the Sunday Times thought that depicting our country’s president with a showerhead on his head would be in bad taste.

We had a robust debate about it. Zapiro, who agreed Zuma should be accorded the respect befitting his office, was the one who came up with the solution. He decided he would remove the showerhead from the president’s head. However, in his future drawings of the president the showerhead would hover in the background.

It was a poetic ploy as it showed that while we respected the office that Zuma now occupied, we had not capitulated under pressure from those who’d always objected to the showerhead.

The hovering showerhead spoke eloquently: watch out, comrade, one misstep, I’m back on your skull like a bad rash.

Msholozi being Msholozi, he stumbled big time.

The man who had been appointed chairman of the Moral Regeneration Movement, in which position he made some powerful speeches about Aids and how to deal with it, was exposed as a despicable liar and hypocrite when it transpired that he had fathered a child with Sonono Khoza, the daughter of soccer supremo Irvin Khoza.

With furious indignation Zapiro, in the Sunday Times edition of February 7 2010, gave us Jacob Zuma standing at a podium marked State of the Nation, groaning under the weight of a massive showerhead.

That was a year after Zuma assumed office. The soap opera that was to be the Zuma presidency had come into its own.

When Zuma realised that people were not getting the shocks and laughs they had paid for by putting him in office, he shifted into higher gear.

He beckoned new supporting actors centrestage. The Guptas heeded the president’s call with alacrity. Before we knew it they had become the local version of Tyler Perry — financing the movie, writing the script, directing, acting, and firing actors — all of this masterminded from the Saxonwold Shebeen, our answer to Hollywood.

The Guptas had arrived in the country in 1993. Now that Zuma had put them on the stage, they realised that we, poor viewers, had not seen them entering the country.

So, like good movie directors, they gave us a flashback of the story. This entailed the landing of an aircraft from India at the army airbase in Waterkloof, hitherto reserved for super-special official guests. It took us a while to realise that they were indeed super-special.

A movie is never complete until the hero strides into the sunset. Only the Guptas knew how to create this scene convincingly.

They had created a new world for the hero, beyond the sunset. That world came in the form of a retirement villa for the main man, out there in Dubai.

As the credits roll, the viewer is treated to a smoke-filled landscape strewn with corpses and debris; children with picturesque heads, not unlike those of the main protagonist, are crying, “Daddddy, where’s our republic?” The music gathers momentum, “Yinde

lendlela ...” Then it fades into the final sound-effect: “Heh-heh-heh-heh! Listen carefully now. That was an easy take, Mr Gupta, wouldn’t you agree? Heh-heh-heh-heh!”