Turning pages for Zuma’s image

Jacob Zuma has a new defender, perhaps even more embarrassing than the army of praise-singers the ANC has been struggling to bring under control.

Zuma’s polygamy ‘is part of African culture”, writes Dr Moss Mashamaite in his self-published apologia, The Moving Finger Writes — Jacob Zuma.

Zuma’s libido is justified: ‘compared to [sic] the white male, the black male is more the philanderer,” Mashamaite states, adding that this is because of the migrant labour system and the fragmentation of families under apartheid.

The book is styled as an attempt to debunk media created ‘mistruths” and perceptions about Zuma. The fourth estate has always been ‘like a condom putting on a condom,” writes Mashamaite.

On the cover is a smirking ANC president, one hand on his chin, the other just below his boep — an unfortunate crop leaving potential readers to muse on what else moving fingers might be doing.

Mashamaite declares that his intention was ‘retelling the untold and the shabbily told story of the last ANC warrior”.

Mashamaite started writing at the beginning of the Polokwane conference in December when, he says, he felt ‘very scared” that a Thabo Mbeki re-election would see South African democracy regressing to the stage when the country was saddled with a president for life — 10 weeks later the book was completed.

A collection of various conspiracy theories surrounding Zuma, it reads like a full-tilt insomniac rant.

Chapter nine, entitled Awuleth’ umshini wam’, has seven blank pages — perhaps there is a sub-text, but the author declares an ‘allergy” to writing ninth chapters.

‘The thing is, I don’t do chapter nines,” he writes.

The Moving Finger mixes bouts of Fikile Mbalula-like sabre-rattling with an apologist’s retake on some of the utterances and actions for which the ANC president has been publicly criticised. So you have the arms deal scapegoat theory (with an imagined conversation between Mbeki and Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad deciding on how to get rid of Zuma); the conspiratorial political campaign spearheaded by the NPA; the smear campaigns; and insights from the rape trial.

Mashamaite is presumably familiar with his subject. After all he has, through his company Stupid Productions, also published books such as Ten Stupid Things Young People Say and Do and Ten Stupid Things Married Women Say and Do.

That isn’t a media creation.

Honest.