Zuma Inspires Mix of Trust, Fear in S. Africa

Newly Elected Head Of ANC Has Shared Little of His Plans

NOBODY, South Africa, Dec. 19 -- In his rise to the pinnacle of South Africa's ruling party, Jacob Zuma has thrilled and unnerved this diverse nation.

He has raised hopes of broader economic rewards, but also prompted fears of the kind of strife that South Africans are used to watching from afar, in troubled neighbors such as Zimbabwe. The sharply divergent reactions have taken on racial, class and tribal casts.

Even within a single complex of boxy, government-built brick homes here in the curiously named village of Nobody, views of Zuma range from villain to hero, victim to crook, ruin of the continent's iconic liberation movement to its unlikely savior.

Imelda Maahlo, 42, is willing to give Zuma a chance.

"If he can do something better than [President Thabo] Mbeki, we will have a little hope," said Maahlo, who trained as a teacher at a nearby university only to spend most of the past five years unemployed. "The first thing is creating jobs."

Before Zuma won election Tuesday night to the presidency of the African National Congress, the broad outlines of his biography were already well known to people here. He's the son of working-class parents; he rose through the ranks of the ANC to become the country's deputy president; he was fired from that post by Mbeki on allegations of corruption in 2005. The corruption charges were dismissed, and Zuma was acquitted in May 2006 of unrelated rape charges. Now he is considered the favorite to win the national presidency.

The election this week amounted to a thundering rebuke of both Mbeki's distant, professorial style and his economic policies, which put stability and sustainable growth above relief for the nation's millions of impoverished people.

Maahlo, a mother of six, lives in a three-room home in a tidy complex in which hundreds of houses are arranged in rows, most with water taps out front and small lawns.

Her village is split down the middle by Route R17, the highway between the regional capital of Polokwane and the university campus that is hosting the ruling party conference behind police checkpoints and coils of barbed wire. Residents have watched in astonishment, they said, the legions of Mercedes and BMWs speeding past their homes.

The village was named when it was barely a speck on a map, residents said. A traveler, the story goes, came up with the name "Nobody" after being warned in a dream by a ghost: "Nobody sleeps here!"

The government of President Nelson Mandela, the first of the post-apartheid era, started building the housing development here, but it was Mbeki's administration that finished it after taking control in 1999. Mbeki also expanded a system of social service grants, which has benefited the residents of Nobody.

Maahlo said she receives about $120 a month in child-support payments through the grants. Still, the tap in front of her home often runs dry, the tin roof leaks and electrical service has not arrived.