Jacob Zuma might have corrupted the democratic project with his excesses and plunder, but the capture of the state was not his invention, it predated him by at least a decade. He simply took it to the next level, argues Tony Leon.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that "the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected".
This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance: