If the greats of world literature were telling this story, Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago would call it O ano da morte de Jacob Zuma (The Year of the Death of Jacob Zuma).

Across the Atlantic Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have it as Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada (The Chronicle of a Death Foretold). Or it could be told simply as an African tale, Things Fall Apart, as a brutally apt rendition of how swift the fall from grace can be.

There is, after all, no other way to account for the reality that in the space of just six months, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma has moved almost inexorably from being called the Deputy President of the Republic to the rather less grand title, Accused Number One.

Zuma was yesterday charged with rape following a month of speculation and innuendo.

He will appear next February in the Johannesburg High Court to answer for himself.

Almost six months later he will have to shift focus — and geography — when he answers two counts of corruption in the Durban High Court.

And it remains a possibility that other charges will be added before the start of the Durban trial, probably perjury and tax evasion.

Therefore, the story should be called, simply, Der Process (The Trial), if for no other reason than because there is more than just a hint of the Kafkaesque in the downfall of Zuma.

Like Josef K, Zuma has pleaded with a sense of wounded innocence. He reacted with a seemingly genuine sense of puzzlement when it first emerged that the Scorpions may be investigating him.

There was an official obfuscation from the investigators, who said they may or may not be probing his affairs. There were and still are investigations and counter-investigations.

There were bizarre public statements from the head prosecutor, and finally a proxy trial that ended with Zuma being condemned and fired.

To recast The Trial’s opening sentence: “Someone must have been telling lies about Jacob Z, for he awoke one fine morning in December to find two gentlemen waiting outside his bedroom, ready to escort him to the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court.”

Unlike K however, Zuma knew what he was accused of as he appeared in court yesterday, his third appearance since his June dismissal from the second-highest political position in the land.

He will also not be as powerless and victimised — despite his public protestations — as Franz Kafka’s weak and innocent K.

Chronicling the fall of Zuma is hindered by the world of smoke and mirrors in which he has always moved.

Last month, as the national executive of the African National Congress (ANC) issued its highly coded statement to the media following a marathon meeting, its secretary-general, Kgalema Motlanthe, gave an unintended glimpse into this world.

“The deputy president may have uncovered some things about some of his comrades in the course of his own investigations,” Motlanthe said when asked why Zuma should believe there was a political conspiracy against him.

“He was head of (ANC) intelligence and knows the tricks of the trade.”

So it appears that Zuma has been conducting investigations into some of his comrades, piecing together “links” to international agencies and private spy networks.

When Zuma tells it, his removal from the powerful post of head of ANC intelligence was the beginning of his problems in the party. This led directly to increased marginalisation at the hands of a growing power cluster in the ANC.

At the helm of this cluster was none other than President Thabo Mbeki, though Zuma himself has not explicitly made this connection.

Mbeki’s ascendancy in the period following the party’s unbanning was accompanied by the unfortunate rise of a privileged black middle class that soon had the ANC firmly in its grasp.

It quickly adopted a conservative world view, revising the history of the ANC-led liberation struggle as one focused on racial emancipation. The economy was to be “deracialised” rather than fundamentally transformed.

For Zuma’s backers in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), he was made the target and later the victim of this new class, though why Zuma in particular should be so targeted is not articulated.

What is known and spoken of freely, however, is the story of his appointment as national deputy president in 1999. His election as ANC deputy president in 1997 was widely viewed as a stopgap measure to prevent all-out war for the succession between more fancied candidates.

It was not understood that Zuma automatically became a potential successor, or even the party’s candidate, to be the country’s deputy president. Insiders contend that Mbeki flatly refused to consider him for the post in the weeks before his 1999 presidential inauguration, preferring Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

The post was even offered to Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi in return for surrendering his KwaZulu- Natal fiefdom.

Although the ANC’s 1997 conference had argued that holding the party’s deputy presidency did not entitle one to an equivalent position in the state, Zuma secured the post through the intervention of party seniors and his backers in the tripartite alliance.

Zuma then entered the Union Buildings in 1999 with the distinct impression that he was an unwanted passenger, foisted on Mbeki and his power clique by old-order ANC politics.

Nothing that happened during his six-year tenure as the country’s deputy president changed that view.

Rumblings about his relationship with his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, began almost immediately. Hardly 18 months after his appointment, Zuma was seemingly under investigation by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA.)

A steady stream of media leaks linking him to impropriety in the government’s multibillion-rand arms deal then ensued.

The government-appointed Hefer Commission would later conclude that these emanated from within the NPA, which only reinforced Zuma’s suspicion that the office was being used not to prosecute him legally, but to tarnish him politically.

This is a theme that has been maintained by Zuma’s backers, and has even galvanised public support for him. Rather cleverly, Zuma has managed to harness a series of insubstantial complaints into the makings of a nascent social movement centred totally on him and his “rights”.

Moneyed business tycoons and middle-class types are united with down-at-heel proles in the defence of these rights.

Zuma is today the beneficiary of the Friends of Jacob Zuma Trust — a charity-style fund that is unprecedented for any South African politician.

Many of those who gathered in their thousands when Zuma twice appeared in court truly believed that he was the victim of a vast conspiracy engineered by his enemies, calculated to eliminate him as a contender for the party’s presidency in 2007.

However, a crippling problem for Zuma’s backers and strategists has been an acute lack of substantiating evidence.

Whatever their origin, Zuma’s troubles reached boiling point this year.

The criminal conviction of Shaik was bad enough. But this was soon followed by his dismissal from the cabinet and the corruption charges he now faces.

But even for a country that has come to accept the interchangeability of “Zuma” and “trouble with the law”, the rape charges come straight out of left field.

For Zuma’s political backers, the writing is on the wall. It is impossible to recall a political career that survived a rape charge, even when the final verdict was “not guilty”.

This perhaps explains the rash of “clarifications” that have been issued since last month. Both Cosatu and the SACP have said that their support has always been for a “principle”, not Zuma personally, let alone any ambition he might have for the presidency.

With acknowledgements to Vukani Mde and the Cape Times.