Of Blocked Paths, Borrowed Dreams and Zuma's Appeal

The following article originally appeared in Business Day. Jonny Steinberg is an Open Society Fellow.

If historians ever come to write about Helen Zille's recent outburst—that President Jacob Zuma is "a self-confessed womaniser with deeply sexist views, who put all his wives at risk by having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman"—it will probably be as a footnote to one of the most remarkable characteristics of our times. And that is that sex has achieved an extraordinary salience in South African politics.

It keeps coming back: in former president Thabo Mbeki's AIDS denialism, in Zuma's rape trial, and now, again, in the first volley of fire between the official opposition and the new Zuma government. Why does sex matter so very much in South African politics? The answers tell us much about what we are becoming and where we are going.

During the early stages of Mbeki's decline and Zuma's rise, I spent a great deal of time in the old Transkei. Among many other people, I shadowed several doctors as they went about their work: in the end, about 12 of them. Without exception, each had young men come to them with a sexual complaint.

"Doctor, there is something wrong with my penis," these young men would typically say. "It isn't working properly."

"What do you mean 'not working properly'?" one of those Transkei doctors, Hermann Reuter of Me decins Sans Frontie res, would ask his patients: "I cannot give a girl an orgasm," his patients would reply.

"Hold on, hold on," Reuter would say. "Can I ask you something? How many times a night do you ejaculate?" To which his patients would reply: "Maybe six times."

"Six times!" Reuter would exclaim. "There is nothing wrong with your penis. But can I tell you something about the female orgasm?"

I suspect that this story is more poignant, its political ramifications far deeper, than may appear at first blush. In most times and places, boys have become men either by having children who bear their names, thus giving them a legacy, or by doing work that is meaningful enough to create pride. In SA, one in two men will not find any work at all until he is 24. And a great many will probably never have children who bear their names, for they have insufficient wealth to marry. The usual paths to manhood are not available.

It is something of a catastrophe, or, rather, thousands of private, unspoken catastrophes, played out in thousands of lives. Becoming a man when the conditions are propitious is hard enough. When the foundations of manhood have come apart beneath your feet, it can become a nightmare.

This is perhaps why doctors in poor districts have young men come to them to talk about their penises. When manhood cannot be achieved through work or through progeny, so much is invested in sexual performance. During the time I spent among young men in the Transkei, I witnessed a veritable cult around pleasuring women - and an anxiety, too. For when too much of the meaning of manhood is placed in sexual performance, the burden it must carry is far too great; it becomes a site of worry, of a fear of failure.

The young men who go to see the doctor are trying to medicalise a social and economic condition; they deceive themselves into hoping that their difficulties can be cured with a pill.

When I see young men's enormous affection for Jacob Zuma, I think about the stories the Transkei doctors told me. The excitement over Zuma cannot be reduced to one thing. That young, low-income South Africans identify with him in ways they never did with Mbeki has many roots. But the image he created during his rape trial is integral to his attraction.

When the trial started, Zuma's enemies believed that it was fated to sink him. Even if he was acquitted, he would surely never recover from the indignity of the proceedings. Yet the opposite happened. He emerged emboldened, more popular, more loveable. One reason is that the spectacle of the trial gave strength to a story that had already gathered steam: Zuma was a salt-of-the-earth man who had been wronged by the powerful and the devious; despite the best efforts of presidents and prosecutors, he simply would not die.

But something else happened, too. A particular moment in the trial is now emblazoned in memory. A Zulu man, Zuma said, does not leave a woman in a state of arousal. To leave her thus is wrong.

To the chattering classes, this was a massive blunder, second only to Zuma's admission that he had had a shower to wash off the AIDS virus. He had revealed himself as sexist and a nai f. Yet many a young man across the country responded to Zuma's words with both surprise and enormous warmth. They surely had not expected the matter of pleasuring women ever to find a place in politics. Now, their prospective president was talking of it in open court, in relation to his own life, as an expression of his own personal code. It was massively exciting, a moment of extraordinary recognition between young men and an ageing leader.

While Zuma was on trial, the young men I spent time with were interested primarily in one piece of news: that he had lasted 34 minutes in bed. They were deeply impressed.

I am not saying that poor young men voted for Zuma in droves simply because he sleeps with, and, if he is to be believed, pleasures, many women. It is considerably more complex than that. People's love for Zuma has been shaped by a context, the most important aspect of which is the dire state of our political economy, which prevents the majority of youths from becoming the adults they aspire to be. Zuma is not just sexually competent: he is also a patriarch, a man with a meaningful vocation, and a father of children who bear his name. People love him because they trust that he will deliver at least a sliver of his own fate to them.

The question is what Zuma will do with this love. There are two options. One is that he will try to show young people how to find the place in SA's economy they so crave; he will use the extraordinary connection between himself and South Africans to recalibrate the entire relationship between people and state, making society as a whole more productive.

The alternative is that voting for Zuma becomes a little like the trip to the doctor. The young man in the voting booth is taking a pill, an opiate, to be precise. He has forgotten, for a moment, that he does not have work meaningful enough to give him pride, and that he will not have children who bear his name.

One can only hope and pray that this is not what voting for Zuma comes to mean. Young men do not thrive on opiates for long. They will soon want much more from Zuma than a borrowed dream of sexual prowess.

As for Zille's outburst, she has stumbled upon one of the great issues of our times, but with the finesse of an old colonial in a pith helmet, raging at his naughty manservant.