Jacob Zuma, former president of South Africa, has consistently refused to acknowledge the authority of the country’s courts, producing bogu...
Jacob Zuma, former president of South Africa, has consistently refused to acknowledge the authority of the country’s courts, producing bogus medical excuses, offering legal arguments without substance year after year, and declining to appear before Justice Raymond Zondo, who chairs the inquiry into corruption during Zuma’s time in office, on the shaky ground that Zondo once fathered a child with the sister of a woman who decades later became one of Zuma’s many wives.
By the first week of July, Zuma’s long duel with the court system seemed to come to an end when the Constitutional Court, the highest body in the judicial system, ordered his imprisonment for 18 months on the charge of contempt of court.
For several days Zuma’s homestead in rural Zululand, paid for by public money, became the face of defiance. Zulu militias, supposed veterans of the guerrilla war of the 1980s, and various disgraced politicians joined a subset of the former president’s children, one apparently very drunk, and vowed that their leader would never set foot behind bars. On July 7, an hour before the deadline set by the court, Zuma nevertheless surrendered to the police and was transported to jail.
Two days later, dozens of trucks were set alight...
