Lost in many of the postmortems of former president Robert Mugabe's top-down destruction of Zimbabwe has been a close examination of any of his key willing accomplices still on centre stage in South African politics. In fact only one remains, and she has a huge bearing - December willing - on the fate and fortunes of this country and the region, including Zimbabwe.
Step forward, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who was consistent in one respect at least.
Last weekend she dismissed journalist Carien du Plessis's question on the Zimbabwe crisis, saying: "I have a strong opinion but am not interested in telling you." Nice and transparent for an aspiring president.
But the paper trail is damning.For example, when Mugabe's bloody tale of death and intimidation was at its zenith in December 2002, it fell to then foreign minister Dlamini-Zuma to welcome Emmerson Mnangagwa to the ANC's 51st national conference at Stellenbosch. They embraced and she warned the world: "You will never hear one word of condemnation of Zimbabwe as long as this government is in power."
Of course, back then he was known as the sinister mastermind of the Matabeleland massacre and as Mugabe's diamond baron in the Democratic Republic of Congo. On Friday, he was installed as interim president.
For Zimbabweans it is an open question, now that the whip hand has changed, whether the lash will remain the same.
But for Dlamini-Zuma her involvement with our northern autocrat neighbour has not simply been a question of having a "strong opinion" but of having connived in and lengthened, by decades, Mugabe's rule of error and terror.At decisive moments since Mugabe first lost a popular referendum in 2000, Dlamini-Zuma as foreign minister at best simply turned a blind eye to his degradation of democracy and immiseration of its people. Worse, she assisted then-president Thabo Mbeki in resisting local and international opinion to use South Africa's huge clout to make a stand for democracy and sane economics.
The lack of empathy for ordinary Zimbabweans' plight was on full display when she addressed a lecture at the London School of Economics in October 2006. She was loudly heckled by Zimbabweans in exile who were, in the words of the media report, "infuriated that Dr Zuma refused to respond to any questions put to her, or express even a word of sympathy for the plight of her fellow Africans".
But sympathy aplenty the good Doctor had for Comrade Bob. This was displayed in June 2008 when Dlamini-Zuma, at the UN, snubbed a US effort to present a unified front in condemning the Zimbabwean government for fomenting pre-election violence (in a poll which Mugabe actually lost).
She refused US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's invitation to attend the debate on Zimbabwe. The New York Times said: "Western diplomats here have been repeatedly frustrated by South Africa's using its two-year seat on the Security Council to deflect and dilute attempts to criticise Zimbabwe, even wrestling to keep the issue off the agenda."
And when two of our Constitutional Court justices, Dikgang Moseneke and Sisi Khampepe, wrote a damning report on that election, Dlamini-Zuma and company spent six years burying it from public view...