Jacob Zuma as a young man. Picture: Twitter/Jacob Zuma
Former president Jacob Zuma shared a black-and-white professional photograph of himself at the age of 18 or 19 on Wednesday, saying it was taken shortly after he joined the ANC.
In the photo he and his son Duduzane share a striking resemblance.
Zuma has clearly been enjoying being on Twitter, and many were quick to comment on his more than 50-year-old photo.
According to biographical information about Zuma, his mother was a domestic worker in Cato Manor in Durban when he was younger.
As a young man, he walked the streets of Durban, trying to find work. He went to the cinema three times a week to attempt to make sense of the English language. He also read Durban’s daily English broadsheet The Mercury, along with Bona magazine, which was published monthly in both a Zulu and English version. He would read the Zulu version first and then use that to decode the English version.
When he encountered a group of ANC volunteers, they struck a chord with him because he had already been politicised by a family member who was active as a trade unionist.
The young Zuma began to attend their meetings and soon joined the party through its youth league in 1959 – when then Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd banned the ANC in 1960 following the Sharpeville massacre.
Zuma then became involved in the armed struggle through its military wing Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), which he joined in 1962. He took part in sabotage operations in the province and planned to go into exile for proper military training abroad.
He was meant to be sent to Zambia with 44 other recruits for military training but the security police got wind of their plan and arrested Zuma’s group near Zeerust while they were en route to Botswana.
He was detained in solitary confinement for 90 days at the Hercules Police Station near Pretoria, during which he was interrogated and beaten. His trial was held at the Pretoria Old Synagogue where Judge Fritz Steyn sentenced the then 21-year-old Zuma to 10 years on Robben Island for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government.
He spent the next decade on the island, never receiving a single visitor.
(Compiled by Charles Cilliers)
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