The Quiet Death of an Anti-Apartheid Hero

Zuma was cast as something of a leftist, but he was in fact an ideological vacuum, and in the intervals between his innumerable court cases, he has proven an expert practitioner of chaos capitalism: whip up as much legislative tumult as possible; play dumb to the tenets and the spirit of the constitution; ignore the rulings of “so-called” judges; destroy the administrative functioning of the state. Into the void steps a shadow state, run by the powerful and the connected. The technique, with which Americans are growing familiar, is as simple as it is effective.