In their hands, the work of constitutional negotiations became a delicate art. They exuded the easy grace of victors and the intelligence of people who knew they were in control. The ANC's chief negotiators, Cyril Ramaphosa and Joe Slovo, were suave and elegant men. Quite simply, they possessed the poise of people who knew they were making history. More particularly, it was the spirit exuded by the men and women who represented the ANC. What has stayed with me from those months I sat taking minutes is not a particular incident but a feeling, a spirit. I was a 22-year-old university student lucky enough to have landed a part-time job taking minutes at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, the forum that negotiated South Africa's transition to democracy. I first saw the ANC up close in 1992, not long after the ban on the organisation was lifted and its leaders returned from exile. The organisation's flag remained the same, its headquarters in downtown Johannesburg remained unchanged, but the organisation itself was becoming an entirely new beast, and Malema was only the most dramatic manifestation. But in the meantime, he has changed the face of South African politics.Īt another moment in the nation's history, Malema's star would have burned up and vanished early, but what the pundits who laughed at him didn't seem to want to understand was that when Malema rose to prominence, the tectonic plates under the ANC were shifting. It seems that Malema's dramatic and tempestuous political career may be over for now. Among his wrongdoings was to have called for regime change in Botswana, South Africa's peaceful and prosperous neighbour. Last Saturday, finally, a disciplinary committee of the ANC upheld a five-year suspension slapped on Malema for bringing the organisation into disrepute. He became known as the organisation's kingmaker, the man whose support any pretender to the presidency would need to capture. As his speeches grew more outrageous, so his influence in the ANC seemed to grow. Malema grew fat and rich, the sources of his wealth increasingly suspicious. But as 2008 turned into 2009, and nobody stopped him, the laughter became increasingly nervous. He was written off as a joke, a flash in the pan. I will bring the roughest streets of this country on to the national stage, he was saying. Julius Malema was lean and young and casually dressed, his taste for champagne and Breitling watches as yet unacquired, and from the moment he opened his mouth, it was clear he was offering a dare. So used were white people to these genteel black leaders that when the character of their nightmares stepped into the real world in 2007, they mistook him for a clown. But Mbeki was a far stretch from the ogre of white nightmares: he was evidence that black leaders could be difficult and opaque, not that they could be scary. He was also a self-proclaimed prophet with some alarming ideas. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, was an altogether different creature, brittle and secretive and quick to take offence. That he could forgive without losing honour was the secret to his magic. That his forgiveness was genuine was apparent for all to see. Nelson Mandela opened his arms and forgave. And so, when black South Africans voted the African National Congress (ANC) into power in 1994, the organisation's gentility and grace seemed a rebuke to these rude fears.