VZCZCXRO9866
RR RUEHBZ RUEHDU RUEHGI RUEHJO RUEHMA RUEHMR RUEHPA RUEHRN RUEHTRO
DE RUEHSA #0939/01 1281504
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 081504Z MAY 09
FM AMEMBASSY PRETORIA
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 8404
INFO RUEHZO/AFRICAN UNION COLLECTIVE
RUCNSAD/SOUTHERN AF DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITY COLLECTIVE
RUEHUJA/AMEMBASSY ABUJA 1363
RUEHTN/AMCONSUL CAPE TOWN 6820
RUEHDU/AMCONSUL DURBAN 0931
RUEHJO/AMCONSUL JOHANNESBURG 9165
RHEFDIA/DIA WASHINGTON DC
RHEHNSC/NSC WASHDC
RUEAIIA/CIA WASHINGTON DC

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 PRETORIA 000939 
 
SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: KDEM PGOV PREL SF
SUBJECT: PART 1 OF 3:  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SOUTH AFRICA'S 
NEXT PRESIDENT 
 
PRETORIA 00000939  001.2 OF 003 
 
 
------- 
Summary 
------- 
 
¶1. (SBU)  Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, President of the ruling 
African National Congress (ANC) party, is a controversial but 
not well understood personage who emerged from obscurity to 
where he now occupies the apex of South Africa's political 
pyramid.  He is deeply loved and revered by his closest 
constituencies; he is mistrusted by opposition parties; and 
is hated by those here who believe he is "wrong for South 
Africa."   Zuma's nearly five decades of involvement with the 
ANC, has brought him to this moment.  Zuma is now poised to 
become the fourth post-apartheid President of South Africa, 
following Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and Kgalema Motlanthe. 
 
 
¶2. (SBU)  The National and Provincial elections held on April 
22, 2009 resulted in the ANC winning its fourth consecutive 
governing majority (65.9%).  Under the South African 
constitution, the Parliament elects the state president; thus 
the ANC majority in Parliament elected Jacob Zuma to be 
inaugurated in Pretoria on May 9, 2009.  This message weaves 
together various sources to provide a comprehensive look at 
the life and times of Jacob Zuma.  Our goal is to dispel the 
caricatures that dominate the media and present a more 
realistic picture of the man who will soon lead the most 
dynamic emerging democracy in Africa.  This is the first in a 
series of three related cables.  End Summary. 
 
----------------- 
The Boyhood Years 
----------------- 
 
¶3. (SBU)  Zuma was born on April 12, 1942 in the rural 
village of Inkandla in the heart of Zululand (now, Kwa-Zulu 
Natal).  One hundred or so years before Zuma's birth, the 
Zulu War leader Shaka led a bloody expansion of the Zulu 
kingdom against other African tribes, and fifty or so years 
before, the last Zulu War was won by the British Empire.  Two 
centuries of colonial incursions into the heart of South 
Africa and the advent of the Afrikaner Boers into central and 
eastern territories reduced the Zulus to dependency status in 
a racist system that placed all blacks at the bottom of a 
segregated system of governance.  Jacob Zuma was born the 
first-born son of the second wife of a provincial policeman 
and had two full brothers and two full sisters.  The first 
wife of his father had three boys and four girls.  His 
father, whom he says he never saw, died while Zuma was very 
young. 
 
¶4. (SBU)  The death of his father left his mother destitute 
and displaced her from her home in Inkandla.  She returned to 
her own village of Maphumulo where she worked for low pay as 
a domestic.  As the war ended, she relocated to a Durban 
township and worked as a domestic to feed her children. 
Zuma's childhood was spent between Durban and the rural 
interior of Zululand.  In 1947, the National Party won the 
election and instituted apartheid and racial categories as 
the policy of the state.  The Group Areas Act, pass laws, 
Bantustans, separate facilities and amenities were in place. 
The racial segregation of the colonial period became the law, 
and the authoritarian police state was prepared to enforce 
wit with violence.  In reaction, the violent, chaotic 
relations between the state and the oppressed Africans led to 
an atmosphere of periodic bloody riots, political 
suppression, torture, murder, strikes, townships in flames, 
Qsuppression, torture, murder, strikes, townships in flames, 
and widespread suffering. 
 
¶5. (SBU)  Zuma was forced to work odd jobs from a young age 
to supplement his mother's meager income -- as a herd boy, a 
gardener, a domestic, in tea houses, and small shops.  He 
faced the same problems of life of all Africans in the 
apartheid state.  In the rural, pastoralist cattle culture of 
the Zulu, Zuma's first job as a herd boy linked him to an 
ancient traditional occupation of African boys throughout the 
continent.  He once wrote, "I used to look after them (the 
cows) very well.  That was the first time I was praised for a 
job well done." 
 
¶6. (SBU)  Not unusual for the times, as an unregistered 
African, Zuma only achieved schooling to Form III, or Fifth 
 
PRETORIA 00000939  002.2 OF 003 
 
 
Grade equivalent.  However, friends and relatives recognized 
his hunger for learning and helped him with what they had 
learned.  He claims to be self-taught and that he taught 
himself to read and write.  In his teens, in 1955, a cousin 
encouraged him to attend night school in Durban.  In this 
era, African churches, trade unions, and civic organizations 
offered educational opportunities to their members that were 
otherwise lacking from the state.  Throughout South Africa 
and beyond, Zuma's life exemplified the distinction between 
education and intelligence -- the former he lacked, the 
latter he had in abundance.  In 1985, in a biography penned 
for the Communist Party, he said he was self-educated up to 
the Junior Certificate level.  Later in his life he said, 
"Education is education whether it is formal or not."  He 
continued, "I have done everything that the educated have 
done." 
 
-------------------------- 
To Political Consciousness 
-------------------------- 
 
¶7. (SBU)  The ANC was established in 1912 as one of several 
civil agencies seeking to end racism and segregation and to 
protecting the human and civil rights of the African 
majority.  By mid-century, it had attracted the support of 
African intellectuals and traditional leaders as well as the 
average neglected African who was denied the rights of 
citizenship in the land of their birth.  Zuma's elder half 
brother from his father's first wife was a secret member of 
the ANC.  A maternal uncle was a trade union activist.  They 
talked to him about the struggle for equality and freedom, 
setting the spark for his developing political consciousness. 
 
 
¶8. (SBU)  Zuma actively took to politics, resistance, and 
activism as a young man of 17 years.  He attended public and 
underground meetings where the goals of groups like the ANC 
and the South African Communist Party (SACP) were discussed. 
In 1958, he hovered around the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) -- an 
organ made famous a decade earlier by the young revolutionary 
Nelson Mandela -- and in 1958, Zuma joined the ANC and its 
Youth League.  He said he was not an active participant, but 
he attended meetings and rallies.  In 1959, he joined the 
South African Council of Trade Unions (SACTU) with his 
brother and soon was involved in an anti-pass campaign in the 
Noxamana district as well as in demonstrations opposing the 
Bantustan policy.  In these activities, he found a fraternity 
among like-minded groups that defined his life's work. 
 
¶9. (SBU)  In 1961, the year Nelson Mandela was arrested and 
jailed, Zuma was 19 years old and committed to fighting 
apartheid.  That year, in Durban, he began courses with SACTU 
on Marxism-Leninism, the labor theory of value, and political 
discussions about colonialism, imperialism, the anti-colonial 
movement, and the nature of the struggle inside South Africa. 
 While a member of a political study group in 1962, the year 
Mandela was sentenced to life in prison, Zuma was recruited 
into the militant armed wing of the ANC -- Umkonto wa Sizwe 
(the Spear of the Nation, aka "MK").  The following year, he 
was recruited into the SACP, though in his words, he did 
"little party work."  It was Zuma's associations with these 
organizations at this critical tipping point in South 
Africa's history that became the guiding commitment of his 
QAfrica's history that became the guiding commitment of his 
life up until today. 
 
-------------------- 
Life in the Struggle 
-------------------- 
 
¶10. (SBU)  As an underground member of the banned ANC and the 
SACP, young Jacob Zuma was urged to go into exile, gain 
military training, and join the fight against apartheid. In 
June 1963, the 21 year old Zuma was arrested with 45 other 
young comrades in Zeerust, in the Transvaal (now North West 
Province), as they were walking to Botswana into self-imposed 
exile.  He was detained for ninety days, then tried and 
sentenced to ten years in prison for "conspiracy to overthrow 
the government."  Zuma spent the next ten years incarcerated 
with many other political prisoners, including the senior ANC 
leadership in prison such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, 
Govan Mbeki, among other political prisoners at the infamous 
Robben Island.  While in Robben Island, in what had become 
 
PRETORIA 00000939  003.2 OF 003 
 
 
the ANC's graduate school, they discussed the U.S. civil 
rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the African 
independence movement, and the global ideological contest of 
the Cold War. 
 
¶11. (SBU) Zuma rarely discusses this period of his life in 
public, nor did his biography speak frankly about that 
experience, his relationships, and what he learned.  He does 
say that many important people there engaged in serious 
political debates and disagreements, but he failed to say who 
they were or what they argued about.  The only insight he 
provided says he held many responsible positions within ANC 
structures at Robben Island, he was a mentor for students, 
and at the end was Chairman of the Political Committee.  In 
the culture of the revolutionary anti-apartheid movements, 
his presence at Robben Island during Mandela's first decade 
there is the best possible "struggle credential" he could 
possibly have acquired to rise in the movement.  Released 
from prison at the age of 32 in 1974, Zuma immediately 
re-engaged the struggle with the ANC Natal underground. 
 
End of Part One 
LA LIME