Jacob Zuma is in Britain this week, paying lip service to the West. But, says Alec Russell, his vision for South Africa’s future is of ever closer ties with the emerging superpower
When Jacob Zuma addressed the banquet at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday night, he will have nodded at his host and saluted the Commonwealth. South Africa’s President is a stickler for traditional protocol. He also has warm memories of his flits through London when he was in exile under apartheid and the UK was a home from home for many in the ‘struggle’.
Yet Zuma’s audiences should not be misled by his anecdotal after-dinner repertoire. The one-time herd boy turned freedom-fighter turned president may have a reputation for populism, vacillation and scandal. But he is also a shrewd politician. While he has nodded courteously to the old colonial overlord in his state visit, he has long since calculated that the future for Africa may lie with China, as much as if not more than with the West. However embarrassing his latest indiscretion — a love-child, born even as the ANC prepared to launch a one-partner campaign to combat Aids — the challenge for commentators is not to get so diverted by his traditional ways, in particular his proud embrace of polygamy, that they lose sight of this critical geopolitical shift.
Zuma’s visit, just under a year after he took power, comes at a critical time for relations between South Africa and the West. He may be something of an equivocator over economic policy, but he has from his earliest days in power made very clear one key belief: the merits of being close to Beijing. He was in charge of the party, and effectively the country, when the Dalai Lama was controversially refused a visa to South Africa.
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