said that apartheid-era ANC president Oliver Tambo inspired his public posture:While Tambo was a great thinker, he was very simple. There is nothing he did not do... When people came to him he attended to them. He would even attend to somebody who comes to raise the issue of the shoe that doesn’t have shoelaces, he would ensure that the shoelaces were found... I am not a great man. I am a man of the people. I believe in people and I think that the people are everything. Once there is disconnection with the people you have problems.His connection to the "grassroots" is partly due to his embrace of his rural background, ethnic heritage, and lack of formal education. These aspects of his persona are frequently contrasted with the perceived intellectualism and Pan-Africanism of the ANC under Mbeki. Especially in combination with his penchant for struggle songs and the toyi-toyi, Zuma's acceptance of his background has been described as tapping into "popular understandings, memories, and meanings of racial oppression, racialised dispossession, and struggles of freedom" during apartheid and thereafter. On the ethnic front, he often presents himself as a Zulu traditionalist, and has been associated with social conservatism. He is a polygamist, in line with Zulu tradition, and at a 2006 rally in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, he publicly spoke against same-sex marriage. He was frequently photographed wearing traditional Zulu attire at cultural events, and he appears less comfortable speaking in English than in his native Zulu, in which he is known for his "linguistic flair". Some commentators have claimed that his broad appeal arises from "the populist's trait of sometimes saying what his audiences want to hear", and he has frequently been called a political "chameleon," with little known about what political principles and ideologies he subscribes to personally. This characterisation was made as early as 2007, when, ahead of the ANC's Polokwane conference, the Financial Mail ran the first of two stories on Zuma, famously published under the headline "Be Afraid". The articles criticised Zuma as an "opportunist" and concluded, in the paraphrase of New York Times journalist Barry Bearak, that he was "far more interested in holding power than in making policy, long on charm if short on intellect". During his post-presidency legal battles, when Zuma publicly claimed that he was being vilified under a conspiracy, William Gumede and others criticised what they called his "narcissism". Controversies Alleged