Just before midnight on July 7, a previously unthinkable event took place in South Africa. Former President Jacob Zuma was taken into custody by South African police at his rural homestead in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, and transported to a prison within the province where he started a 15-month sentence as legal punishment for a guilty verdict handed down by South Africa’s Constitutional Court—the country’s highest—for being in contempt of that court.
The imprisonment of Zuma represents a triumph for constitutionalism in a region where former liberation movement heroes, such as Zimbabwe’s first democratic president, Robert Mugabe, often became neocolonial thugs who reproduced the anti-democratic abuses of the colonialists they defeated. In fact, the story of Zuma’s imprisonment carries many important political lessons for the international community, including for long-standing constitutional democracies like the United States, Canada, and Germany.
