SOUTH AFRICA’S leader-in-waiting, Jacob Zuma, will depart from his country’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” and attack Zimbabwe’s embattled President Robert Mugabe during a series of talks with European leaders this week.

As the leader of a delegation from the ruling African National Congress (ANC), Zuma is expected to meet Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.

Zuma will argue that contrary to President Thabo Mbeki’s insistence that “there is no crisis” in Zimbabwe, the region cannot afford to see the situation worsen and delays in releasing the results of its presidential election increase anxiety each day.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Zuma went out of his way to praise the courage of Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader.

“I’ve met Tsvangirai. He’s a worker, too. And he’s certainly a brave man,” said Zuma who, like Tsvangirai, is a strong trade unionist. In a wide-ranging conversation, Zuma promised a fresh start for his country on issues ranging from Zimbabwe to a possible amnesty for South African prisoners convicted of political crimes.

He also wishes to invoke the spirit of Nelson Mandela in reassuring whites and Indians, who have felt excluded by Mbeki’s government, that they have a vital role to play in building the country’s future.

Zuma, 66, a polygamist with at least 18 children by five women - who shocked South Africa in 2006 when he admitted to having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive young woman he was later acquitted of raping - is engaged in a no-holds-barred struggle for supremacy with Mbeki, who steps down as president in May next year.

The clear frontrunner to succeed Mbeki since winning the leadership of the ANC last year, Zuma showed during his interview that he tends to view almost everything, including Zimbabwe, through the context of his long and bitter battle with the president. For eight years the state has spared no effort in trying to convict Zuma - of corruption and tax evasion, as well as rape.

He was ignominiously sacked from the deputy presidency and pilloried in the state-owned media. Thus far he has seen all the charges against him thrown out, although he faces a corruption trial this summer.

“There were times,” he said, shaking his head, “when I just wondered how on earth am I going to navigate my way through this? Every part of the state machine was out to get me.”

If the corruption case, in which he is accused of accepting money from a French arms dealer, goes against him, he could be jailed, although his allies in the ANC insist that they simply will not stand for the imprisonment of their leader.

Zuma himself says that while “I knew I was innocent, I also knew that wasn’t enough. Sometimes, when I realised there was year after year of this to come, I found I couldn’t even talk to friends about how high a wall I faced”.

He is in no doubt about what a formidable opponent he faces in Mbeki: “He is a ruthless man and he is thorough.”

Zuma and Mbeki could hardly be more different. Mbeki’s father was a senior ANC leader and he was brought up as a prince of the movement. It was assumed from the first that he, in turn, would play a leadership role and he was given scholarships to elite schools, ending as a Sussex University graduate. Mbeki played a diplomatic role and never participated in the underground resistance against apartheid.

Zuma, in contrast, was a poor boy from Zululand who left school aged 12. He joined the armed struggle, spent 10 years in jail on Robben Island, went into exile and risked both torture and death at the hands of the apartheid security police.

Whereas Mbeki was a man of ideas, but often uncomfortable with people, Zuma was barely educated but has a warm, genial presence.

He always seems glad to see you and quite quickly confides things which most politicians would not. He is a man who is happy in his own skin, whether wearing the traditional dress of a Zulu warrior for a ceremonial occasion or the garb of a Christian minister, which he recently became.

Zuma has wholly lost his initial awe of Mbeki. “I have mixed with some very great men in the ANC,” he says carefully, “and with some who are not great men at all.”

As a man who is deeply conscious of his own lack of education, Zuma has always respected those more educated than himself. In this, his tussle with Mbeki has been a hard lesson. “Learning can, of course, be a great force for good,” he says slowly. “But sometimes learning can end up doing nothing but hurt and harm.”

I ask Zuma why there should still be hundreds of activists in jail for crimes committed before the launch of democracy in 1994? “To be frank, I don’t know why those men are in jail. I can’t see the sense of it.”

The phrase “general amnesty” is politically sensitive - strong grievances are still felt against certain individuals - and Zuma does not want to use that phrase: “But let’s say I’d like us to make a fresh start and put old quarrels behind us.”

And a return to Mandela’s spirit of racial reconciliation? Zuma nods. Anyone who knows his native KwaZulu-Natal knows that things work properly only when you get the Zulu people, whites and Indians all pulling on the same rope, he says.

The same applies to the whole country. He talks of how he has met Afrikaner farmers who have been crime victims and how he has met Solidarity, the Afrikaner trade union movement - something Mbeki has never done. Outside his hotel room a queue of veiled Muslim women are waiting to see him. His two mobile phones go all the time.

Everyone wants to see him, whether businessmen wanting to talk deals, his allies in the trade unions and Communist party advising him in his struggle with Mbeki, or just the mass of ANC followers to whom he is almost magnetically attractive.

He radiates a spirit of natural inclusiveness. It is evident in his keenness to hold out an olive branch to whites: “We can’t have a situation where some people are given jobs they’re just not qualified to do, while those who are qualified are not allowed to work - that’s unacceptable.”

It is no secret that Mandela finds Mbeki difficult but has a soft spot for Zuma and one can see why: Zuma talks the same language of reconciliation: “We have to make all South Africans, no matter what their race, feel they have a contribution to make, that they’re wanted here and that they’ll be protected here.”

You realise, listening to Zuma, that he longs for the time when he can help the country make a fresh start. Is he not tempted to try to force Mbeki out before the end of his term next year?

“I certainly face difficulties,” he replies. “But I feel I must be patient. If we went the way you suggest, there would be a huge fight and the ANC would develop a dangerous wobble. And if that happened, the whole country would develop the same wobble. One has to think of the country first.”

Is it not difficult to have to remain a target for everything Mbeki can throw at you for that long? Zuma picks his words carefully: “In some ways a year is a very short time.” Then the strain of waiting shows through. “Though there are other senses in which it is a terribly long time,” he adds.

He has another appointment and his handlers and bodyguards are nervous that he will miss it. I get up to go. Immediately he is all smiles, warm handshakes and first names: “Come again, any time. Any time!”

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