Dinner at the club with the Zulu Mr Everyman

On a blustery southern winter’s night last year, Jacob Zuma hosted a small dinner in the Rand Club for a dozen sceptical guests. Founded by Cecil Rhodes, the dark-panelled club in the centre of Johannesburg was in the old days the preserve of the white English-speaking business establishment. In the early years of majority rule, senior officials of the African National Congress were wary of admitting to membership, fearing headlines insinuating they had become the new ‘Randlords’, the old nickname for Rhodes and his peers. But 15 years into the new era the new guard are feeling rather surer of themselves. None other than the Rhodes Room, a private dining-room dominated by a life-size portrait of the old colonialist in shooting clothes, was selected as the venue for the coming man to set out his stall.

He had arrived early and was chatting to one of his bodyguards at the top of the club’s sweeping wooden staircase. Outside, the city centre was at a standstill as a gun battle raged between rival police units — striking city policemen were trading shots with national police officers brought in to restore order. As we waited for the late arrivals delayed by the drama, he regaled us with a series of anecdotes from his extraordinary life. South Africa’s next president has, as he likes to say, ‘lived a lot’.

The 67-year-old former herd-boy, turned political prisoner, turned exiled spy chief, turned scandal-wracked populist who is the most powerful man in sub-Saharan Africa following this week’s South African elections, has the build of a prize-fighter. This is a tough man, schooled in township scraps in the 1960s and then in the treacherous world of exile politics when he made his share of ruthless decisions. But in small groups he is more of a pastor than a pugilist.