ABSTRACT
To resume the story from the mid-1970s: class politics at this moment provided both an opportunity and a threat to the strategies of activists and organisations across the spectrum–and the same, of course, for our three characters: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, King Goodwill Zwelithini and Jacob Zuma. The latter had returned home from his decade-long education in ANC politics on Robben Island. He went to prison with his identity shaped largely within rural Zuluness, but with his youthful political socialisation firmly in class and nationalism. Moses Mabhida, his pre- and post-incarceration mentor, was a communist, linked to Harry Gwala, another communist–both of them also from Natal. On Robben Island Zuma was with Gwala, who had taught Mabhida during the final year of his schooling (ninth grade) and was said to have been influential in the political education classes held among the prisoners. But Zuma’s left politics was certainly as much a performance as his trademark dancing and his smile. It existed, in the ambitious eyes of others in the lead-up to his presidency, in a belief that he was a manipulable leader–and a ‘not-Mbeki’ in his interaction with people–rather than any actual evidence of a socialist inclination.
