It is likely the ANC has not had a more complex president than Jacob Gedleyihlikisa Zuma (65) or posited in a single individual all things that the party is to its constituency.
Abroad he is a diplomat whose initiatives saw Burundi achieve peace, while at home he leads songs calling for his machine gun.
He is at home with communists and workerists at a time when his most trying political moment will relate to his association with Schabir Shaik, a beneficiary of the government’s macroeconomic strategy to build a black capitalist class.
Though deeply rural and traditional in his outlook, Zuma’s main political education came from his experience as a migrant labourer in Durban, where he joined the ANC as a 16-year-old illiterate former herd boy.
Though castigated by some within the party for a lack of formal education and distrusted because of the many times he put his foot in his mouth during his rape trial, Zuma’s diplomacy was trusted enough by the exiled ANC for him to be among the first leaders to hear the then-ruling National Party’s plans for a negotiated settlement.
What has not been in question is that he is fiercely loyal to the ANC, to a point of frustrating journalists and analysts hoping to hear him say anything that would go beyond what is already ANC policy.
If the ANC is a broad church, then, in Zuma (appointed a honorary pastor by a charismatic church earlier this year), the party has found its high priest, able to reconcile in his person the complexity that is his party.