There may be reasons other than those that are commonly quoted for Cyril Ramaphosa being targeted by a smear campaign. The first is that he is neither from exile nor Robben Island. As a result, he is not trusted with state power. Second, he comes originally from Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and joined the ANC perhaps in the early 1980s. Members of the BCM who joined the ANC in exile after the 1976 students uprising were never completely trusted, which led to their ill-treatment, and even torture and public executions in ANC camps in Angola. Two of them were Zaba Nkondo, younger brother of antiapartheid activist Curtis Nkondo, and Chief Seremane, whose brother Joe Seremane was a former Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) political prisoner on Robben Island in the early 1960s. Third, ethnicity could be an issue. In their book, Comrades Against Apartheid: The ANC and the SACP in exile, Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba expose how ethnic prejudice was linked to excesses in AN...
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