MANY years ago, in the 1980s, a Michaelis student’s work was vandalised on the eve of a final-year exhibition. The culprit later claimed the student had neglected to inform the wider community at the University of Cape Town that her father was an apartheid cabinet minister, and this provocation had somehow warranted the destruction of her art.
No such apparent insolence, though, with the fruit of our leader’s loins. They readily and regularly inform all and sundry of their particular heritage, especially as they shove their way into the public discourse and there unbidden throw their weight about with much impunity.
And so it was with Edward Zuma’s touching defence of his father this week. It was the injunctive tone of the headline that did it for us, here at the Mahogany Ridge: “Max du Preez, stop spreading lies about my DAD (President Jacob Zuma) — Edward Zuma.”
The parenthesis was a clincher. Because we had actually momentarily forgotten who, in fact, his father was. But no matter. There followed from young Edward an emotional, perhaps paranoid, outburst accusing the veteran commentator of being a “bitter old white man” and a “hypocrite and a liar” who was in the employ of mysterious and shadowy Boland billionaires.
It would appear that Zuma junior was particularly annoyed at a passing reference in a recent Du Preez column that he and his siblings and other clan members had become very rich very quickly as a result of his father’s ties with the Gupta family.
Edward denied that he had a “relationship … that is business related” with the family, insisting that he was very much a “self made business person in my own right”.