The new president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, may have emerged just in time to rescue his country from the fiasco of his predecessor’s time in office. It has been the misfortune of most post-colonial African countries to embody the national spirit – the unifying spirit – in one man. These men typically intoned the rhetoric of liberation at the same time as perfecting the subjugation of those they claimed to have liberated. South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma was in this cynical mould, displaying the familiar pattern of self-enrichment and self-aggrandisement, at the expense of his fellow citizens.