Jacob crackers
HIS final election rally ended with 100,000 supporters wildly singing his self-penned anthem Bring Me My Machine Gun.
Pot-bellied former goatherd Jacob Zuma is firm favourite to be South Africa’s next president after polls today.
To the unease of many outside South Africa, the Zulu chief is likely to lead the Rainbow Nation as it becomes the first African country to host football’s World Cup next year.
Zuma, 67, has battled sleazy allegations of rape plus corruption and tax evasion — all of which were eventually defeated.
While acquitted of raping an HIV-positive family friend in 2006, Zuma was ridiculed after he insisted at the trial that he SHOWERED after unprotected sex with the woman to guard against possible infection.
And there was outrage at Zuma’s 'excuse' that the young woman was wearing a short skirt and wanted to seduce him.
And while he is a shoo-in to take over as president from Kgalema Motlanthe, the identity of the new First Lady is less clear.
Zuma — who likes to dress in loincloth and leopard skins — has three wives and at least 13 children. He has divorced another woman and a fifth committed suicide.
Born in 1942 in the deep Zulu countryside of KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma is the son of a policeman and a domestic servant.
Hunting
He said of his rural upbringing: "We did all the things boys should do. Hunting birds. Swimming in the big rivers. Fighting with sticks. What we call in Zulu the man-making. It was absolutely wonderful."
After his father died, Zuma was unable to continue school through lack of money and followed his mum to Durban where he became a "kitchen boy".
He immersed himself in the ways of the Zulu, saying: "The teaching of respect was deep. How to live in a community. How to do the things a man ought to do, like propose love to girls.
"But critically, I was taught bravery. A man must be brave. Nothing must defeat you. In other words, real, fundamental teachings of a warrior."
Later he went to political classes laid on by the anti-apartheid African National Congress Communist Party.
Zuma joined the ANC’s armed wing when it was formed in 1962 but was arrested trying to leave the country for military training and was brutally beaten by the police.
He was jailed for ten years in 1963 for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid regime and was imprisoned with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.
On his release in 1974 he fled to Mozambique then Zambia but returned to South Africa in 1990. During his exile he had military training in the Soviet Union and led the ANC’s intelligence wing.
The ANC has traditionally drawn its leaders from a Westernised elite but after father-of-the-nation Mandela recently endorsed him, his election appears a formality.
Now his first decision will be which of his wives to have on his arm at the inauguration.
Source:- thesun.co.uk
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