By Carol Paton

Jacob Zuma – traditionalist, polygamist and sometime tribalist – has become the Left’s unstoppable tsunami.

How did it happen?

Of all his generation of ANC leaders, Zuma is possibly the most conservative. He had humble beginnings in rural Nkandla in KwaZulu Natal. A boy from a poor family whose mother became a domestic worker in the suburbs of Durban, he never had the opportunity to go to school. He learnt to read and write on Robben Island, where he spent 10 years after being arrested at 16 while trying to leave the country.

In daily interaction his lack of formal education is not apparent. Intelligent, articulate and engaging, Zuma is a master politician with charm and style. Whether he understands economics or not doesn’t matter much: a lot would depend on how he was advised.

His lack of education has hamstrung him, though, in a less obvious way. His inability to distance himself from his own culture – to take an historical view of cultural practices rather than an absolute one that assumes “these practices are good because they are cultural” – is one of Zuma’s biggest failings, says a female friend from exile.

One example is virginity testing. Zulu intellectual women are adamant that virginity testing, as practised now, stigmatises girls who are not virgins, presents women as possessions of men and has been perverted from a private, family ceremony into a money-making racket.

But Zuma has supported the practice publicly, even where it has no historical roots and has been recently introduced, in northern Pondoland, for example.

Women, including many in the ANC Women’s League, were appalled by the ideas Zuma expressed during his rape trial, describing them as a perversion of Zulu culture. Among these were the idea that a man could be arrested for rape if he left a woman in a state of arousal – an explanation he offered for having sexual intercourse with the young woman who visited his house and, to his mind, sent him positive sexual signals.

His attitude to women is another way in which Zuma is a captive of his culture. Polygamy, though not condemned by the Women’s League in name, is condemned by the progressive women’s movement in general for the way it subjugates women and demeans them as possessions of men. Yet Zuma, for most of his life, has had three wives concurrently and several years back attempted to marry a fourth – a princess from Swaziland.

Most shocking of all about Zuma’s marital history is that he took his third wife, Kate, without even informing the second, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who was living in London at the time. When Dlamini-Zuma heard about the marriage from a third party, she was said to be devastated. (Zuma’s first wife, Sizakele, whom he had left behind in SA after he left in 1975, was the result of a marriage arranged while he was on Robben Island. He made his first public acknowledgement of her in 2001.)

Dlamini-Zuma later divorced Zuma but only after having shared him with Kate for many years. Kate, who developed a history of psychological problems, committed suicide seven years ago.

His affinity with Zulu culture certainly does not make Zuma a tribalist. But his silence on the controversial “100% Zulu boy” T-shirts printed and distributed by his close supporters raised more than eyebrows in the ANC, where tribalism is taboo. It’s not known whether Zuma sanctioned the T-shirt, but what is known is that, publicly, he has never spoken out against it.

People who know Zuma well have no hesitation in using the word “conservative” to describe his view of the world. Homosexuality, as another example, does not sit easily with him, though he apologised for his homophobic remark last year that, as a young man, he would never have tolerated the presence of a gay.

He has identified himself with charismatic churches and recently became “an honorary pastor”.

Many of the social issues on which Zuma holds strong opinions are clearly at odds both with the constitution and ANC policy. Virginity testing is outlawed and sexual preference is protected. His comment that the population should be given the opportunity to revisit the death penalty (made to a deeply conservative community in Mitchells Plain) last week is yet another example of where Zuma strays far from the human rights culture that the ANC post-1994 has tried to entrench. What of other liberal freedoms then? Would these also be up for debate? If the masses chose to support a state clampdown on an “anti black press”, for example, or against gays, would this make these freedoms negotiable?

Gender equality and liberal freedoms are issues that the Left in SA have always strongly backed, even if sometimes ahead of the rank-and-file membership. But when it comes to support for Zuma, these things do not matter, not even to the Women’s League.

That’s because for all his faults Zuma is a warm, personable character with an affinity with the poor completely lacking in his rival, Thabo Mbeki. Most of all he is not Mbeki and people are hungry for change.

In KwaZulu Natal, Zuma spends a good deal of time visiting people who have been bereaved or who have problems. Says Cyril Madlala, editor of UmAfrika newspaper: “Usually politicians arrive at funerals with everyone else so they can be seen. He goes at night, he travels to faraway places and spends hours there, sharing the food they give him… He’s so humble, really. He’s genuinely at home with ordinary people.”

To the politically disaffected – Cosatu, the SACP and the ANC Youth League, who have been marginalised by Mbeki’s centralised approach – and the personally disaffected – individuals like Tony Yengeni and Mac Maharaj – Zuma provided a listening ear.

It was this, and his close proximity to power as deputy president of the ANC, that presented Zuma to the Left as a path to state power.

Whether he will turn out to be that, nobody knows. And how far he will go in allowing his own social views to take precedence, nobody knows either.