LAST week, Wednesday July 7, former South African President, Jacob Zuma, finally handed himself over to the police. He is to serve a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court. It has been a painful and heart-rending saga. The one word that comes to mind is: “disgrace”.

It reminds me of the novel of the same title by the South African Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee. A 1999 fable spun around an English professor, David Lurie, who is dismissed from his job for sleeping with a vulnerable student, Melanie Isaacs. And to make matters worse, he falsifies her grades even after she stops attending classes.

Coetzee has the man ruminating thus: “So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?”

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