The Walking Meme

 

Let’s start with the numbers, because everybody does.

Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa, standing at a podium in front of the faithful at an ANC convention in 2015. The script in front of him said that the party had 769,870 members. Not a complicated figure, not a derivative or a GDP projection. Just a number. Any fourth-grader with a good teacher could have read it aloud.

He couldn’t.

Seven hundred sixty-nine, eight hundred and… Seven hundred sixty-nine thousand, eight hundred twenty-seventy members…

You can almost hear the room go quiet. Not silent, because rooms like that are never silent, but quiet in the way a kitchen goes quiet when somebody drops a plate. Then someone filmed it, someone uploaded it, and the internet, which has the memory of an elephant and the mercy of a wasp, took hold.

That’s the thing about the internet. Moments like that one don’t die. They go into the ground like seeds and come back up years later. In 2019, a Swedish YouTuber named Felix Kjellberg, who goes by PewDiePie, dedicated an entire episode to the times Zuma had stumbled over numbers. “If there’s one thing about Jacob Zuma, and it’s really one thing,” he said, “then numbers are Jacob Zuma’s number one enemy.”

Zuma was used to it by then. His voice, his face, the way he moved his hands and shoulders had been turning into memes for years. News24 put him on a list of South Africans most often “immortalized” online, and called him a walking meme.

But I want you to remember something about the man before the meme. Because he was somebody else once, and the distance between the two is what this story is about.

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He was born on April 12, 1942, and the name on his birth certificate was a mouthful: Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. He grew up in a country where the law said Black people were second-class citizens in their own land. That was apartheid, and it wasn’t an accident or a misunderstanding. It was a system, built board by board, the way you’d build a cage.

Before he was twenty, he had joined the ANC Youth League. Think about that. Most of us at that age are worried about whether the girl in chemistry class knows we exist. Zuma was putting his name on a list that men with guns would one day read.

They did read it. He spent ten years on Robben Island, the same island where the state kept its most dangerous idea in a cell: that apartheid could be ended. He came out, went into exile, and came back, and he came back with the same fire. He rose, as such men do, through the ranks, until he was one of the national leaders of the ANC.

And then apartheid fell. The cage came down. The people who had spent their lives fighting it were finally holding the keys.

This is where the story turns, the way a road turns, and you don’t notice until you’re already on the new one.

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November 17, 1996. A regional ANC meeting in Durban. Apartheid was only a few years dead, the country was still learning to walk in its new democracy, and its new constitution was supposed to be the foundation stone of everything the struggle had been for.

Zuma stood up and said this:

“[The ANC] is more important than the Constitution. There is no political force that can destroy the ANC. Only the ANC can destroy itself… [The ANC exists] to run things.”

Read it again. Slowly.

A veteran of the struggle, a man who had paid for freedom with ten years of his life, was telling a room that the party stood above the law of the land. It was the kind of sentence that makes you ask a question you don’t really want answered: when the fighting stops and the winning starts, what do the fighters turn into?

He didn’t stop, either. He was elected Deputy President in 1999, the country’s number two, and the promotion did nothing to change the way he talked. In March 2004, addressing ANC campaign teams in Gauteng, he said:

“The ANC will rule South Africa until Jesus comes again.”

An ANC spokesperson cleaned it up afterward, the way spokespeople do. It was just an expression, they said, a figure of speech. He only meant the party would govern as long as the people wanted it to.

Joe Seremane of the opposition Democratic Alliance wasn’t buying it. To him, that wasn’t campaign rhetoric. It was the language of a one-party state, the kind of talk you hear in countries where the elections are a formality and the ballot boxes are just furniture. And here’s the part that raises the hair on your arms a little: Zuma kept saying it. In 2007. Again in 2008, at a rally in Khayelitsha. Not a slip. A refrain.

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Then came the presidency, 2009 to 2018, and the speeches got worse. Or bolder, depending on how you look at it.

January 12, 2013. A dinner in Durban, marking the ANC’s 101st anniversary. Zuma looked out at the businesspeople in the room and made them a promise:

“We don’t force anyone… You can give your support and become a supporter, but if you go further and become a member, and if you’re a businessperson, then your business will flourish.”

He wasn’t finished.

“Everything you touch will multiply. I’ve always said that a smart businessperson will support the ANC… because supporting the ANC means making a very good investment in your business.”

Nobody had to hold a gun on anyone. That was the genius of it, if you want to call it genius. The offer was right there in the open, in a nice room, over dinner.

The Democratic Alliance’s parliamentary leader, Lindiwe Mazibuko, said it had the potential to undermine the principles of good governance at the foundation of the constitutional democracy. She said Zuma was blurring the lines between the state and the party.

Which, if you were paying attention, was the same line he had crossed in Durban in 1996. He’d just gotten more comfortable standing on the other side of it.

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So what was going on inside the man?

Prince Mashele, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation, had a theory, and it’s a cold one. He wrote in The Conversation that the speeches were controversial because there was a poverty of ideas behind them. Zuma had climbed to the top on the story of himself as a victim, a man persecuted, a man wronged, a story that got louder as the corruption scandals piled up around him, and he told it while dancing and singing “My Machine Gun,” an old anti-apartheid struggle song.

“That’s why, throughout Zuma’s eight years in office,” Mashele wrote, “it was hard to pinpoint what the core of his state of the nation addresses actually was.”

Zuma was never an orator, not like Thabo Mbeki, not like Nelson Mandela. Those men gave speeches that went into the history books.

But maybe Zuma knew something about stages that the great speakers didn’t. A stage doesn’t have to be filled with words. Sometimes it can be filled with a voice, a rhythm, a pair of feet.

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And boy, could he fill it.

It goes back to Robben Island. According to the BBC, when the senior ANC men were locked up in that place, with all the weight of it pressing down, it was Zuma who kept their spirits up. He sang. He put on spontaneous bits of theater. He was funny. That was the side of him that made ordinary South Africans love him long before he held any office at all.

He never put the act away. In 2010, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a room full of the world’s money and power sitting through a session on Africa’s future, Zuma danced. In May 2011, at an ANC victory celebration in Johannesburg, IOL reported that when the singer Chomee took the stage, he joined his supporters in dancing as soon as his speech was done.

And always, the song. “Umshini Wami.” My Machine Gun.

He sang it everywhere. He sang it long after the apartheid state had crumbled and the machine guns it was written about had gone quiet. There was a reason for that, and scholars have gone looking for it.

In 2008, Liz Gunner published a study called “Jacob Zuma, the Social Body and the Unruly Power of Song.” Her argument was that the song had helped make him, that it built the popular persona that carried him into political life.

Almost two decades later, in 2026, Mabunda M. Thompson went deeper. Zuma, Thompson found, used the song to bind his supporters together by waking up their memories of what it had meant in the fight against apartheid. And it wasn’t only the singing. He performed it with his whole body, movements and gestures that drove the message home, and the crowd didn’t just listen. They sang. They moved. Thompson ties this to something called kinesthetic empathy: when music and movement work together, the audience begins to feel what the performer feels.

So it was never just a song. It was a wire running from the man on the stage to every person in front of him, and the current went both ways. Emotion, solidarity, loyalty, all of it passing through that wire.

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Carla Lever, a researcher at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town, put it simply. If there’s one thing South Africans agree on, she said, it’s that Jacob Zuma has always been a master at putting on a show.

That was true when he was in power. It stayed true after 2018, when they pushed him out.

You’d think that would have been the end. After more than a dozen corruption cases, the rape allegations, the state capture scandals, the repeated stints in prison, any other politician would have been a ghost by 2024.

But the lights were still on.

He came back under a new banner, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, MK, and the 2024 election proved that the stage had never gone dark. MK took a major victory in KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s home province. Nationally, it finished third with 15 percent of the vote, behind the ANC at 40 and the Democratic Alliance at 21.

And when it was done, there he was again, under the lights, doing the thing he’d always done.

Singing “My Machine Gun.”

Dancing with his people.

The walking meme, the man who couldn’t read a number, the old prisoner of Robben Island, still knowing exactly how to hold a room.