R.W. Johnson writes:

Anthony Butler’s Cyril Ramaphosa is a campaign biography of the man most South Africans wanted to succeed Thabo Mbeki, but not only did he refuse to run, he also refused to co-operate with his biographer. Ramaphosa, an immensely private person, began as a workaholic young lawyer who, after a period of religious and student activism, worked for the National Union of Mineworkers, one of the country’s largest unions, eventually becoming its leader and thus one of the most significant figures in the internal resistance to apartheid. With the unbanning of the ANC, he became its secretary-general and conducted the negotiations that led to the country’s first democratic election and its impressive constitution. Outranked only by Mandela on the ANC’s election list in 1994, he had every reason to expect high office, but Mbeki worked ceaselessly to undermine him, in the end manufacturing a ‘presidential plot’ in which Ramaphosa was, absurdly, accused of conspiring with foreign intelligence services to overthrow him. Ramaphosa left politics and became a businessman. Two months ago, at the ANC executive meeting that finally removed Mbeki from office, he gave a decisive 90-minute speech in which he made it plain that Mbeki had deployed the same Machiavellian tactics against every imaginable peer and rival over the past thirty years. The result was to put the followers of Jacob Zuma in power, initially with Kgalema Motlanthe as president. Ramaphosa remains not quite on the sidelines, an enigmatic and independent figure of considerable stature.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Currey | hardback 442 pp. |ISBN: 9781847013156