At a Glance
Soweto, Turfloop, Black Consciousness, and the Making of a Political Animal
Cyril Ramaphosa grew up in two South Africas simultaneously. The Soweto of his childhood and adolescence — the vast township that had grown up on the south-western outskirts of Johannesburg to house the Black workforce of the Witwatersrand's mines and factories — was one of the most politically intense environments in the country: dense, organised, connected to the ANC's political traditions through the Youth League networks that had operated there since the 1940s, and increasingly shaped by the new political current that Steve Biko and the South African Students' Organisation were building on the university campuses. The rural Venda-speaking community of his family's origins in the Northern Transvaal was a different world entirely — more traditional, less urbanised, less immediately connected to the liberation movement's metropolitan networks, but connected to the deeper currents of African consciousness and communal identity that the Black Consciousness movement was drawing on.
When Ramaphosa enrolled at the University of the North — Turfloop, in Limpopo, one of the bush universities that the apartheid government had built to provide separate and inferior tertiary education to Black students — he arrived at the epicentre of the Black Consciousness movement's student politics. SASO, the South African Students' Organisation that Biko had founded, was most active at Turfloop and at the other bush universities, and the combination of Biko's intellectual framework — his insistence on the psychological liberation of Black South Africans, his rejection of the racial categories and hierarchies that apartheid imposed, his argument that Black people had to define themselves rather than accepting the definitions the white system imposed on them — with the specific conditions of Turfloop's isolated campus produced an exceptionally politicised student community.
Ramaphosa was drawn into this community and into SASO, becoming one of its active members and organisers. His first detention by the security police came in 1974 — he was held for six months — and his second in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising, when the political temperature across South Africa was at its most extreme. This second detention lasted eleven months in solitary confinement — a prolonged experience of the kind that the apartheid state used to break political activists, and that in Ramaphosa's case did not break him but deepened his commitments while demonstrating to him directly what the state he was opposing was prepared to do.
He completed a law degree through the University of South Africa by correspondence — one of the relatively few routes through which Black South Africans could obtain professional qualifications during the apartheid era — and the legal training he received gave him both the technical skills and the institutional access that he would deploy with extraordinary effect in the trade union organising that became the defining work of his early career.
Building the NUM: The Most Important Union in South African History
The founding of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1982 was not merely a trade union initiative; it was one of the most strategically significant acts in the history of the South African liberation movement. The mining industry — gold and coal mining — was the economic foundation of apartheid South Africa, the industry whose profits had funded the construction of the apartheid state and whose labour requirements had driven the migrant labour system that was the apartheid economy's most brutal mechanism of social control. Black mineworkers had been excluded from meaningful union representation for decades — the apartheid government had consistently refused to extend labour rights to Black workers in ways that would give them effective collective bargaining power — and the combination of the migrant labour system, the compound housing that concentrated mineworkers in controlled environments, and the racial hierarchy that placed Black workers at the bottom of every mining industry structure made the mines one of the most oppressive workplaces in the South African economy.
Ramaphosa built the NUM by doing the patient, systematic organising work that building mass membership in hostile conditions requires: visiting compounds, speaking to workers in their dormitories, explaining what a union was and what it could do, recruiting shop stewards, building branch structures, and developing the collective confidence that workers needed before they would commit to membership in an organisation that the mine owners and the apartheid state viewed with hostility. The NUM's growth from approximately 6,000 members at its founding in August 1982 to over 300,000 within five years was one of the most remarkable organisational achievements in South African history, and it reflected both the exceptional quality of Ramaphosa's leadership and the enormous pent-up demand among Black mineworkers for effective representation.
The formation of COSATU — the Congress of South African Trade Unions — in 1985, with the NUM as its largest and most powerful affiliate, gave the organised labour movement a national structure with the capacity to challenge the apartheid state in ways that previous union formations had not managed. COSATU's relationship to the ANC — which it aligned with explicitly, making the Congress Alliance a three-component structure of the ANC, the SACP, and the organised labour movement — was one of the defining features of the liberation movement's internal politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Ramaphosa's position as NUM president made him one of the most influential figures in this tripartite alliance.
The 1987 Strike, the Violence, and the Limits of Industrial Power
The 1987 national mineworkers' strike — which Ramaphosa led as NUM president — was the single largest industrial action in South African history and one of the most consequential political events of the late apartheid period. Approximately 340,000 mineworkers across South Africa's gold and coal mines stopped work for three weeks in August and September of that year in a dispute over wages and conditions that was simultaneously an industrial negotiation and a political confrontation. The mining industry, the apartheid government, and the international financial community that had interests in South African gold all watched the strike with the understanding that its outcome would tell them something important about the balance of forces in South Africa's political economy.
The strike ended without a clear victory for the NUM — the mine owners, backed by the apartheid government, used a combination of negotiation and force to end the stoppage, dismissing approximately 50,000 workers and using violence against strikers in a manner that left dozens dead. The settlement was not the comprehensive victory that the NUM had sought, and the organisational damage that the mass dismissals inflicted on the union was significant. But the political impact of the strike was enormous: it had demonstrated that the organised Black working class could challenge the apartheid economy at its most sensitive point, that the migrant labour system and the compound housing system had not succeeded in preventing the formation of a powerful and disciplined union movement, and that the political and economic calculus of the apartheid state was shifting in ways that made the status quo increasingly untenable.
The Constitutional Negotiations and the Channel
When the ANC was unbanned in February 1990 and the formal negotiation process began, Ramaphosa's combination of legal training, organisational experience, and the personal authority he had built through the NUM and COSATU made him the obvious choice for the ANC's chief negotiator. He was elected ANC Secretary-General at the organisation's first post-unbanning conference in Durban in 1991, and simultaneously took on the role of leading the ANC's negotiating team at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa and its successor processes.
The constitutional negotiations were the most complex and most consequential political process in South African history — a multi-party process involving not only the ANC and the National Party but the IFP, the PAC, the Conservative Party, the homeland governments, and numerous other parties and interest groups, each with its own agenda and its own capacity to disrupt the process if its minimum requirements were not met. Ramaphosa's task was simultaneously to hold the ANC Alliance together — to maintain the unity of a coalition that ranged from the SACP's left wing to the business-friendly moderates around Mbeki — and to engage the National Party's negotiating team with enough flexibility to reach agreement while maintaining the constitutional principles the ANC had committed itself to.
His pairing with Roelf Meyer — the National Party's chief negotiator, a younger generation Afrikaner politician who had concluded that the transition was both inevitable and in his community's interests — produced what became known as "the channel": a back-channel bilateral negotiation between the two men that operated alongside the formal multi-party process and that resolved many of the most difficult sticking points through direct personal engagement. The relationship between Ramaphosa and Meyer — professional, mutual, occasionally warm — became one of the symbols of the transition's possibility, a demonstration that the two sides could deal with each other as equals and that the constitutional settlement could be reached by people who respected each other across the divide that apartheid had constructed.
The Missed Succession, the Business Years, and the Return
The expectation that Ramaphosa would succeed Mandela as ANC President and South Africa's second President was widespread through the mid-1990s. He had the profile, the organisational base, the constitutional credibility, and the personal popularity that succession required. The ANC's 1997 Mafikeng conference, at which Thabo Mbeki was elected ANC Deputy President — effectively selecting him as Mandela's successor — was the moment when this expectation was disappointed, and the manner in which it was disappointed — through the organisational machinery that Mbeki's supporters had built within the ANC — was a lesson in the difference between public profile and internal party power that Ramaphosa absorbed and applied when his own turn came two decades later.
He stepped back from frontline ANC politics after Mafikeng and built a business career that made him one of South Africa's wealthiest individuals — a transition that generated persistent controversy. The accumulation of personal wealth through BEE structures and through investments in industries including telecommunications and mining raised questions about the relationship between liberation movement credentials and post-apartheid economic beneficiation that the broader South African public continued to debate. His stake in Lonmin — the platinum mining company where 34 workers were shot dead by police during the Marikana strike in August 2012, when Ramaphosa was a non-executive board member who had communicated with police officials about the strike — became one of the most contested episodes in his political rehabilitation, with critics arguing that his involvement demonstrated the incompatibility of liberation movement identity with corporate board membership and personal wealth accumulation.
His return to frontline politics — election as ANC Deputy President in 2012, appointment as Deputy President of South Africa in 2014, election as ANC President at Nasrec in December 2017 — was shaped by the political crisis created by the Zuma years: the systematic corruption, state capture, and institutional decay that had characterised the Zuma presidency created the conditions in which Ramaphosa's combination of liberation movement credibility and business-world acceptability could be presented as the corrective that the ANC needed. He became President of South Africa on 15 February 2018.
The Presidency: Renewal, Crisis, and the Unfinished Business
Ramaphosa's presidency has been defined by the tension between the narrative of renewal — the "Thuma Mina" promise to rebuild the institutions that the Zuma years had damaged, to restore the rule of law, to address corruption and rebuild the state's capacity to deliver services — and the structural constraints that limit any South African president's ability to deliver transformative change. The COVID-19 pandemic, which arrived in 2020 and required the most significant exercise of executive power in South Africa's democratic history, demonstrated both his capacity for decisive leadership and the limitations of a state whose capacity had been eroded by years of mismanagement and corruption. The July 2021 unrest — triggered by Zuma's imprisonment and sustained by the structural grievances of poverty and inequality that had not been addressed — revealed the fragility of the social compact on which democratic South Africa's stability depended.
His presidency has not resolved the fundamental tension between political democracy and economic inequality that has defined post-apartheid South Africa since 1994. The structural economic inequality that apartheid created — the concentration of productive assets in white hands, the poverty of the Black majority, the unemployment rates that make political freedom feel abstract to millions of South Africans — remains largely intact, and the economic policies of successive ANC governments, including his own, have not produced the transformation that the liberation struggle promised. This is the unfinished business of the South African liberation struggle, and it is the context in which Ramaphosa's presidency will ultimately be judged.
Legacy in Progress
Cyril Ramaphosa's legacy is necessarily incomplete, because he is still making it. What can be said is that the arc of his career — from Black Consciousness student to NUM founder to constitutional negotiator to President — traces the arc of South Africa's liberation struggle and its democratic aftermath with a comprehensiveness that very few individual lives encompass. He was present at the Turfloop campus when Black Consciousness was reshaping Black political consciousness; he was in the mineworkers' compounds when organised labour was being built into the force that would shake the apartheid economy; he was across the table from Roelf Meyer when the constitutional settlement was being negotiated; and he is in the Union Buildings as the democratic order that settlement created confronts the economic and institutional challenges that determine whether its promise will be realised. The verdict on whether he has used those positions well enough belongs to the future.