Ndaah, Mr Deputy President. Baremini? I extend my hand to greet Deputy President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa.
Ndaah Ndou, he smiles, and almost suffocates me with a bear hug.
Power corrupts, they say, and this man is quite powerful. He is also potentially the next president, if not of the country in two years, almost certainly of the ANC in six months.
I suddenly become suspicious: is this what they mean by "beware of his charm"? Mhhh, we'll see.
Ramaphosa will be a full-blown 65 when he arrives at the ANC's 54th national conference as one of the two favourites foolishly, ambitiously and hubristic, pumped to stake a claim on the seat, party, movement and country terribly bruised, gatvol and fractured by tragi-dramas whirling about the incumbent.
On this chilly Sunday evening, the fireplace is amber. Blue flames leap and the cream-coloured visitors' lounge, with its old-money curtain drapings, wears a welcoming face.
You feel at home. Although you whisper to yourself: "Hey you. Beware. Never feel too much at home. It's not yours. It's a politician's home."
A politician who is too aware of his image and is primed and prone to performance, like all of us: that impulse to please, especially since you don't know who's gunning for you, or who comes bearing gifts.
Ramaphosa himself offers tea despite being surrounded by two of his long-serving professional lieutenants; "wingmen" in snazzy township parlance, the strategist Steyn Speed and the communicator Ronnie Mamoepa, who, I later learnt from Ramaphosa, had been hospitalised after a stroke.
Anything to drink? the deputy president asks, eyes bright despite the exhausting campaign, or "consultative" work, among constituencies he probably has to work double or triple at attracting and endearing himself. In the process he needs to address their concerns, mainly because his last, main, real and reliable constituency was in the union sector a quarter-century ago.
Thus, as the organisation he is obviously vying to lead seems dangerously spinning on the skid rows of history, his political rebirth is gaining traction. Rooibos tea, please, I say.
You see this art piece (he gives me a personal tour of the house), this I got in Ghana. That one in Limpopo, it tells a narrative about my clan's totems.
Oh, and this one, he points to a life-size ink-on-canvas portrait of an African lass with natural woolly hair, an evocative, if not provocative, piece shrouded in a riot of hues, blends of azure shades, and gestures of scarlet brush strokes, and on and on.
He's aesthetic, if these works he proudly shows off profess any indication. They slouch towards the Bethlehem of African pastoral realism. No abstract existentialism for him. Not that mumbo jumbo.
Despite his perfected pragmatism, his both celebrated and derided mien as a self-avowed "gradualist" and, in his words, "consensus builder", Ramaphosa is also a direct man who speaks in unadorned language.
He is an old-school mineworkers' unionist, political negotiator made good (and bad along the way), a businessman who hit pay dirt in the booming late 1990s and early 2000s and, like a lot of ostentatiously wealthy folks, went on to make a fool of himself, bidding for buffaloes he had no need for, at pretty zapped-up market rates.
As founding general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, Cyril Ramaphosa
formed a strong bond with workers. He is Cosatu’s choice for president
— Working-class hero
This is also a man who woke up to realise that for his supporters and foes to take him with serious regard, in the party and beyond, he had to be visible. Which means he had to speak to them in languages they understood: languages that would never understand the buffalo-purchasing peccadilloes of billionaires.
To stand in front of those supporters, old and newly cultivated then - as he had done earlier that afternoon in Stellenbosch before our meeting - is to be one with them, even if both parties know that you can no longer be one of them.
In other words, to be a politician at this level in this moment of wild gestures, defences and attacks on comrades and opponents alike is also to be called on to present yourself in performance as well as in your complexity, warts and all.
Let's be this clear on this: I hold no brief for any of the candidates, including my interviewee, running for the top ANC job. I couldn't care a crap about him as a candidate, nor am I enamoured of his millions.
But there's a useful caveat here. He intrigues me, in my guise as a biographer.
I'm fascinated by the nexus around which power and ambition, strength and vulnerability dance. The internal space between a public figure and a private self: the line between the real and the performative.
To all I wonder aloud: but what sort of person is this, who left politics because he couldn't get what he felt entitled to, only to be fully rehabilitated into mainstream politics by the man who, like the one preceding him as a president, possibly assumed the rehabilitated was a lame duck? That his loyalty could always be counted on, or threatened to pronounce itself, and worse, easily disposable, and yet - nothing could be further from the truth.
Also, he excites me as the quintessential gentle (on the exterior) cat with nine lives. And for this I stalked him for some time for the conversation here.
