I finally had a chance to read Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s profile of South African President Jacob Zuma in “The New Yorker” on the eve of the World Cup final.  You need a password to read the piece. There isn’t much new in there for junkies of South African politics. Written in a dry tone, it rehashes the political contests of the last five years between Zuma and the now-vanquished Thabo Mbeki, Zuma’s predecessor as president of the ANC and of South Africa.

Hunter-Gault worked as a foreign correspondent in South Africa in the 1990s. Her piece briefly becomes interesting when she touches on the subject of who could be Zuma’s successor after 2013, when his term expires. Remember, he said he’d only run for one term; add to that the fact that ANC presidents can only serve two terms, and the same applies to the country’s president. Hunter-Gault highlights the race politics of leadership within the ANC:

Zuma’s position is secure for now. His term runs until 2013, and he does not have an obvious successor within the A.N.C., a political behemoth so dominant that South Africa is essentially a one-party state. Trevor Manuel, currently the head of the National Planning Commission, may be the most respected government official in the country, but he has a fatal political flaw. He comes from a mixed-race background, and was classified as “colored” [spelling: coloured] by the apartheid government, even though he identifies himself as black. When I asked people about the prospect that Manuel would himself become President, they often responded with a silent no, pointing a finger at their skin.

But before it gets interesting, however, Hunter-Gault moves on, predictably, to write about Julius Malema, the leader of the ANC Youth League, which usually serves as an incubator for the next generation of ANC leaders.

But to return to Manuel. Some may point out that rank-and-file ANC members do not favor Manuel because he is associated with the ANC’s neoliberal economic policies. He served as Minister of Finance to first Mandela and then Mbeki between 1996 to 2009. During that time, the ANC discarded its social democratic RDP policy for GEAR, a policy that trade unions – a significant part of the ANC’s base – blame for some of South Africa’s economic woes, especially for the suffering of the black masses.  And Manuel is one of the faces of the rightward economic turn.

At the same time, Manuel has been one of the most popular members of the ANC.  He had been a member of the United Democratic Front, the broad movement that dominated open resistance to the apartheid government in the 1980s, but had been a member of the ANC underground for a longer period. For his activism, he spent time in detention.

When the ANC was unbanned in 1990 and held its first national conference inside the country since the 1950s the following year, he was elected to the organization’s National Executive Committee (NEC) by delegates. He subsequently headed up the ANC’s Department of Economic Planning. During his tenure as Finance Minister in 2002, he placed first in the conference election for a position on the ANC NEC. Although he would drop a few places by the next conference, in 2007, when he was associated with Mbeki (Zuma was elected leader at that national conference), Manuel retained his place on the NEC. Surprisingly, Zuma subsequently appointed him to head the National Planning Commission.

Nevertheless, despite its longstanding rhetoric of non-racialism, the ANC has grappled with internal racial tensions. At various points, influential factions within the party have shifted from the inclusive formulation of “blacks in general” — intended to encompass Africans, coloureds, and Indians — to a narrower emphasis on “Africans in particular” when articulating who should be prioritized for socioeconomic uplift after liberation and who should lead the organization.

It is also forgotten that, until 1969, coloureds were allowed to be members of MK, the ANC’s armed wing, but not the ANC itself. They had to join the Coloured People’s Congress, an ally of the ANC dating back to the early 1950s when it was known as the South African Coloured People’s Organization. (People like Reg September, Barney Desai and James la Guma, writer Alex’s father, were leading members.)  Coloureds (along with whites and Indians) were only elected to the NEC in 1985. And this was only because of pressure in exile.

The most powerful positions of the ANC are referred to as the “top five.” Cheryl Carolus, a contemporary and close comrade of Manuel during the mass struggles of the 1980s in Cape Town, was elected deputy secretary-general of the ANC in 1994. Notably, she was part of Mandela’s delegation in the first public negotiations with the apartheid government. However, before she could advance further in leadership, she was dispatched to London as High Commissioner.  And after 1994, the ANC, despite its denials, basically organized communities according to apartheid’s racial categories, later also playing into the ethnic politics; think Afrikaners, ethnic nationalism among coloureds and Zulu speakers, especially.

So, all this to say, the ANC’s race politics when it comes to coloureds are complex.

For some good research on this, I’d recommend a long review I did in 2007; this article by Nhlanhla Ndebele, who argues that “… for years the ANC embraced a narrow and exclusive brand of African nationalism, and that its embrace of non-racialism came about only as a result of sustained struggle within largely the post-1960 exiled wing of the organization;” or the 1996 book, Now that we are free: Coloured communities in the new South Africa, published by my former employer, Idasa.

By the way, when Barack Obama was elected U.S. president in 2008, Mozambican writer Mia Couto published a reflection outlining six reasons Obama would be unlikely to win an election in an African country. After noting issues such as authoritarianism and restrictive electoral systems, he turned to ethnicity and race:

Let us be clear: Obama is Black in the United States. In Africa, he is mulatto,” Couto wrote. “If Obama were African, his race would be used against him … predatory elites would mobilize to portray him as ‘not truly African.’ The same Black brother celebrated today as the new American president would be humiliated at home, labeled as belonging to ‘the others’—to another race, another flag, or perhaps to no flag at all.