Word: zuma
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Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma was born in April 1942 in the dirt-poor town of Nkandla among the deep gorges and steep ridges of the Zulu heartland in the southeastern province of what is now called KwaZulu-Natal. Unemployment in South Africa hovers at around 40% but in Nkandla it is 90%. Tarred roads, electricity and running water are a novelty if they exist at all, a quarter of the population is infected with HIV and only 3% graduate from high school. Though he grew up before AIDS, bad health was rife - his father, a policeman, died when...
...Read TIME's Q&A with Zuma...
...Zuma taught himself to read and write, studied the inequities of apartheid and colonialism and, at 17, joined the ANC. Zuma says it was through stories of the Bhambatha rebellion, during which on June 10, 1906, the British imperial army massacred hundreds of Zulus in Mome Gorge, just below his home town, that he "came to understand and to be angry about colonial oppression." An old-fashioned, almost Victorian outlook remains. He may embrace polygamy - in a nation of millions of single mothers, Zuma calls it socially responsible - but the President disapproves of alcohol and television (both are "killing...
...Zuma is also a fix for another long-standing flaw in many of Africa's liberation movements. Though they claim to represent the masses, Africa's revolutions were mostly led by Western-educated black élites. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's pan-Africanist, earned a B.A., and M.A., in the U.S. Zimbabwean Robert Mugabe is a former teacher who was raised, in part, by the Jesuits and earned four university degrees by correspondence in prison. Mbeki too spent years in exile studying Marxism in Britain and the Soviet Union. Even Mandela was a chief's son and one of the country...
...Zuma, on the other hand, was a low-ranking guerrilla in the ANC's armed wing who rose to the leadership of its ruthless intelligence unit. He plotted bomb attacks and assassinations and ordered the killing of suspected traitors. There was nothing intellectual about such work. In an interview with TIME in early 2007, Zuma summarized his revolutionary ideology in one short sentence: "I was oppressed." Not for Zuma the intellectual contortions that led even Mandela to cast crime as a white, counterrevolutionary plot or Mbeki to see AIDS as a Western drug-company conspiracy. Not for him either...