'Zuma had been kind to Afrikaners,' Mr Prinsloo was quoted as saying after being asked for his reasons for offering his legal services to Mr Zuma for free.

At the time, it seemed a bizarre and unbelievable claim.

Mr Prinsloo had also been a leading member of the now-defunct Conservative Party, which was formed in 1982 as opposition to the ruling National Party, which was showing a growing reluctance to enforce apartheid and keep South Africa in white hands. An advocate (the South African equivalent of a barrister), Mr Prinsloo has also defended Clive Derby-Lewis and Janus Walusz, who were both convicted in 1993 of the murder of Chris Hani, the charismatic and popular leader of the South African Communist Party, of which Mr Zuma probably was, and still may be, a member.

More recently, Mr Prinsloo had been employed by the mining house Angloplat, in its attempts to take over disputed land for a platinum mine in the northwest of the country. Mr Prinsloo's 'interrogation of community members in the land-claims court was reminiscent of the mindset of the architects of apartheid and forced removals', according to activists opposed to the deal.

Despite his non-politically-correct resume, Mr Prinsloo's services were accepted by Mr Zuma, and apologies and damages of sorts were duly extracted from at least one of the newspapers which had covered Mr Zuma's testimony in court, especially the bit about taking a shower to prevent HIV infection.

What favours Mr Zuma may have done for Afrikaners nevertheless remained obscure until July, when he appeared at a public gathering calling attention to the plight of the white poor, a constituency that once upon a time was South Africa's most avowedly racist - and entirely Afrikaans. The occasion was hosted by Solidarity, an (unofficially) whites-only trade union, and the speeches were held in a white squatter camp called Bethlehem on the western side of Pretoria.

In Bethlehem, Mr Zuma expressed sympathy for the poor Afrikaner whites, a protected community in the days of apartheid because of its race and one that now feels persecuted because of it. 'I am shocked and surprised by what I have seen here,' Mr Zuma told Agence France-Presse after visiting Bethlehem.

'The vast ... black poverty does not mean that we must ignore white poverty, which is increasingly becoming an embarrassment to talk about.'

Flip Buys, the secretary general of Solidarity and the closest thing to a white leader that Afrikaners have nowadays, went on the record to endorse Mr Zuma for 'the strong stance that Zuma had already taken on issues of violent crime, unemployment and other matters'.

'We know that the difference between a struggling country and a successful state lies in sufficient skilled workers who are committed to the country and its people,' he said. In other words, Mr Buys was saying, poor Afrikaners and the left wing of the African National Congress (ANC) had common ground.

This rapprochement, impossible only a few years ago, does not mean that Afrikaners rescued Mr Zuma. Though most poor whites may be Afrikaners, by no means are all Afrikaners poor. Instead, this alliance suggests like nothing else before it just how profoundly South Africa's political constituencies have changed and become realigned in the latter years of Thabo Mbeki's presidency. Made enemies by race and history, Mr Zuma's constituency (of which many Zulus are most definitely not members) and poor Afrikaners have at least this much in common - a feeling of exclusion from the elite that emerged under Mr Mbeki.

His friends' funding must have been generous. After he was fired as deputy president by Mr Mbeki, Mr Zuma lost his R850,000-a-year (HK$811,000) salary - his only declared source of income - but was nevertheless able to pay lobola (or a dowry) for a few more wives - he now has eight, with whom he has at least 18 children - and hire private jets for foreign travel. He also threw a 'lavish 65th birthday bash' at Durban's biggest convention centre, according to a local paper, the Daily News, with 1,000 guests and a cake that cost R15,000.

When asked by the South African Press Association, Don Mkhwanazi, the businessman who acts as the trust's chairman, said only that 'the trust's mandate is to gather funds and not organise the party. The family is organising it.'

Clearly, Mr Zuma's friends are in high places, and his allies in the ANC's National Executive Committee are fairly well known to the media. But not all that much is known about the trust.

The trust names only a handful of its most senior members but, three years after it was established, its full membership has yet to be disclosed, as has its funding. It solicits donations from the public - you can donate by texting the word 'Zuma' to a caller-pays phone number - but to fund Mr Zuma's long-running, multimillion-rand legal battles, his benefactors must be far wealthier than Joe Public paying R5 for each text message to the trust.

Questions about the fund's largesse, and possible abuse of taxation rules, have been raised by the opposition Democratic Alliance, but the matter has never gone beyond parliament.

For decades, the ANC, a trilateral alliance of communists, trade unionists and African nationalists, was united in its opposition to apartheid. Mr Zuma, who joined the ANC through the union ranks, has always been a leader of the left - the union and communists. Mr Mbeki is part of the ANC's aristocracy, the son of Govan Mbeki, one of the ANC's stalwarts before it entered its alliance with the other two factions. But the appearance of unity has not always withstood close scrutiny, particularly in recent years.

Despite all the talk about Mr Zuma and Mr Mbeki being friends, some of those who have been members of the ANC since the 1970s now recall that Govan Mbeki warned his son that Mr Zuma, the ANC's chief of intelligence at the time, wanted to incarcerate and interrogate Mr Mbeki under suspicion of being an apartheid spy, and urged him to go abroad.

The new alliances that now shape South African politics will become more apparent, especially if Kgalema Motlanthe's presidency turns out to be more than merely an interim one. Mr Motlanthe is well respected across South Africa, and untainted by the smears that have lessened the stature of both Mr Zuma and Mr Mbeki.

If he governs South Africa ably until the election, due next April, it will be difficult to see him handing over power to a man as compromised as Mr Zuma. It may well turn out that Mr Zuma's career has indeed been brought to an end, not by naivety and intrigue, but by the patience of a far more cunning man.

The man to watch, the bellwether over the next few months, will be Trevor Manuel, the reappointed finance minister. Reassuring noises were made from the Zuma camp during the rebellion against Mr Mbeki that whoever fell with the president, Mr Manuel need not be one of them.

He has now agreed to serve in Mr Motlanthe's cabinet, which in effect casts him in the same role as Derek Keys, who was finance minister under both the last apartheid government and Nelson Mandela's first democratic government.

By keeping his job in the transition from apartheid, Mr Keys, a former head of the mining house Gencor, reassured flighty foreign investors and the like that the revolutionary change in South Africa's government in 1994 did not necessarily mean that lunatics had taken over the asylum.

Mr Keys did not last long, leaving after barely a year in office, but he was replaced by Chris Liebenberg, a former head of Nedbank, one of South Africa's largest banks, who held the post until he was replaced by Mr Manuel in 1996.

If Mr Manuel does not last as long as Mr Liebenberg did, it will not necessarily be because he is an enemy to the Zuma camp. Mr Manuel has served ably as South Africa's finance minister for 12 years, and has long been tipped for the presidency of the World Bank, on whose board of governors he now sits. When that job becomes available, it may well be the time that Mr Manuel, along with the newly reconstituted ANC and the rest of South Africa, move on.