Word: south
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma was born in April 1942 in the dirt-poor town of Nkandla among the deep gorges and steep ridges of the Zulu heartland in the southeastern province of what is now called KwaZulu-Natal. Unemployment in South Africa hovers at around 40% but in Nkandla it is 90%. Tarred roads, electricity and running water are a novelty if they exist at all, a quarter of the population is infected with HIV and only 3% graduate from high school. Though he grew up before AIDS, bad health was rife - his father, a policeman, died when...
...President disapproves of alcohol and television (both are "killing the nation," he told the teachers' conference in Durban), has boasted about how as a boy he used to "knock out" homosexuals and laments the disappearance of corporal punishment. Such back-to-basics views may be offensive to South Africa's élite and the ANC's more liberal members but they're also incredibly popular...
...Mbeki too spent years in exile studying Marxism in Britain and the Soviet Union. Even Mandela was a chief's son and one of the country's first black lawyers before he became a revolutionary. For these men, the struggle was as much intellectual as physical. (See pictures of South Africa after 15 years of ANC rule...
Zuma, in fact, seems most comfortable at his most African, drawing political lessons from folksy tales of his upbringing and, at rallies, dancing in leopard skins and singing the doggedly politically incorrect Zulu anthem "Bring Me My Machine Gun." As Gordin says, he is "South Africa's first real African President." "I am a Zulu," says Zuma, in an echo of his predecessor's famous "I am an African" speech. "I should not be trying to be an American or more British. I must be a Zulu." (See Jacob Zuma's profile in the 2008 TIME...
Just a Beginning Can he succeed? The problems South Africa faces would challenge even the best- run nation, and South Africa is far from that. State institutions have been hurt by the departure or exclusion of apartheid-era workers and their replacement with officials too often appointed for their political connections. Zuma's aide says the biggest obstacles to success are "corruption and ineptness in the bureaucracy." But reforming the civil service would mean turning on many of those who put him in power. "There is one very bold thing that can be done," says Andrew Feinstein, a dissident former...