Cyril Ramaphosa - The Road to Presidential Power by Anthony Butler

Preface to the Third Edition

Author Anthony Butler shares why this book was two decades in gestation, and why it was appropriate to provide a comprehensive update for the third edition's publication in February 2019. The Preface is followed by 27 chapters telling the story of the South African and African Union president, Matamela Cyril…

Season 1 / Episode 1 21 min

Chapter One - No place to rest

In the opening chapter of Anthony Butler's biography, we meet Cyril Ramaphosa's family and get a feeling if what it was like to be a black person born into the South Africa of the early 1950s.

Season 1 / Episode 2 44 min

Chapter Two - High school

In this chapter, we follow the future president's secondary schooling career, notable for the continued deep links to Christianity. The first, a Sowetan high school named after the cleric and educator SG Sekano Ntoane. The second, to introduce teenage Cyril to his family's Venda roots, at the Mphaphuli High School…

Season 1 / Episode 3 59 min

Chapter Three - Turfloop

This chapter of Anthony Butler's biography of SA president Cyril Ramaphosa provides an insight into the way the Apartheid government applied its social engineering policies to the country's five black universities. Ramaphosa enrolled at the Turfloop campus of the University of the North in early 1972, one of almost 1,150…

Season 1 / Episode 4 41 min

Chapter Four - Detention

As a young man, South Africa's president Cyril Ramaphosa was among the 70,000 who were jailed, without trial, by the Apartheid Government, In this Chapter, biographer Anthony Butler revisits a little remembered fact of how, in 1974/5, Ramaphosa was put into solitary confinement for 11 months. And explains how this…

Season 1 / Episode 5 28 min

Chapter Five - 16th June 1976, the day Apartheid began crumbling

In this fascinating chapter, the biography revisits the Soweto Riots when schoolchildren in South Africa's largest township arranged their own mass protest against being taught in Afrikaans. June 16th, and the SA Police's shooting of four protesters, was a turning point for the country - and for the Ramaphosa family…

Season 1 / Episode 7 47 min

Chapter Six - Behind enemy lines

The biography now starts to hone in on Ramaphosa's rapid rise to the upper echelons. This chapter, set in 1978, tracks the 25 year old Sowetan's relationship with the Menell family which led to an elevation onto the board of the Urban Foundation, serving alongside what were then the most…

Season 1 / Episode 8 53 min

Chapter Seven - Start of Part Two: Black unions

This chapter of the audiobook, which starts with an incredibly ignorant (and insulting) quote from the leader of the all-white Mineworkers' Union Arrie Paulus, exposes seeds of the massive role Cyril Ramaphosa was to play in defeating Apartheid. Pressure from trade unions was one of the major forces that shifted…

Season 1 / Episode 9 43 min

Chapter Eight: NUM - Small beginnings

Historians point to the Wiehahn Commission's recommendations that changed South Africa's labour legislation as one of the most important steps in the peaceful transformation of a country widely tipped for a bloody civil war. In this chapter we hear of how Cyril Ramaphosa met the man who was to become…

Season 1 / Episode 10 41 min

Chapter 9 - The Great Negotiator

Listen carefully to this chapter and you'll end up realising that those who under-estimate South Africa's president do so at their peril. Biographer Anthony Butler exposes how CR's negotiation skills were put to the test in the mid-1980s against a powerful, far better resourced opponent - and found not to…

Season 1 / Episode 11 35 min

Chapter 10 - Entrenching union power; streetfighting in the corporate's boxing ring

Streetfighters have little time for the Marquis of Queensbury. Similarly, when Ramaphosa-led National Union of Minerworkers came up against the establishment, discussions were never going to be "gentlemanly". The mining houses had the money, but Cyril the numbers. In this chapter, biographer Anthony Butler unpacks the journey that made NUM…

Season 1 / Episode 12 58 min

Chapter 11 - August 1987

This is the last of five chapters where biographer Anthony Butler focuses on his subject's successful mission to create a counterbalance to the Apartheid government. It details the events leading up to the fateful 10 August 1987 when 300 000 mineworkers went out on strike - forever changing the balance…

Season 1 / Episode 13 1 hr 03 min

Chapter 12 - Domestic opposition

In this chapter, while the developments suggested that a change of regime would one day become inescapable, organised political opposition was required to close down the National Party's avenues for evasion and delay. In this 1980s endgame of the struggle against apartheid, domestic rather international actors played the decisive role.

Season 1 / Episode 14 35 min

Chapter 13 - Becoming ANC

In this chapter, Cosatu was widely and immediately recognised by liberation movement exiles as a triumph. Resolutions adopted at the inaugural congress - including demands for the withdrawal of troops from townships, the release of political prisoners, the unbanning of illegal movements and parties, and the imposition of economic sanctions…

Season 1 / Episode 15 53 min

Chapter 14 - By Mandela's side

At the end of the 1980's, popular unrest swept the country. In reaction, the besieged National Party (NP) desperately used state coercion to contain a growing crescendo of protest. Many of its leaders now recognised that a negotiated settlement, on its own terms, was the only way to avert disaster.

Season 1 / Episode 16 27 min

Chapter 15 - ANC Secretary General

As a result of Ramaphosa's skilful management of the release and reception of Robben Island prisoners, he was now something less of an ANC outsider. He was still just a trade union leader with a limited UDF base, regarded as a 'Johnny-come-lately' by many exile and Robben Island grandees. Yet,…

Season 1 / Episode 17 38 min

Chapter 16 - BC: Negotiations, 1984 to 1991

The road to talks had been long and winding. Throughout the 1980's, powerful forces pushed by leaders of the ANC and the NP towards negotiation. By the time FW de Klerk seized the state presidency in late 1989, there had been a wide variety of contracts between liberation movement leaders…

Season 1 / Episode 18 1 hour