A large police contingent watched as around 3,000 Zuma supporters sang and danced under clear skies outside the High Court in Pietermaritzburg, the capital of KwaZulu-Natal province, the heartland of Zuma's ethnic Zulu base.
Zuma's lawyers were due to oppose a prosecution move to delay until next year the trial over a multi-billion-dollar 1999 government arms deal in which he was accused of taking money from a local subsidiary of French arms firm Thales.
Sacked
Once considered the frontrunner to succeed President Thabo Mbeki, the popular Zulu politician Zuma was sacked last year after he was linked to a graft scandal involving a former aide and a French arms company.
National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Makhosini Nkosi said outside court that the State's request for a postponement was "not a matter of dilly-dallying, or a matter of dragging our feet".
"It's a matter of being unable to proceed for reasons that are going to be spoken to in court," he told SABC radio news.
The case has thrown up apparent divisions in the now-ruling African
National Congress, the continent's oldest liberation movement, with Zuma alleging he is the victim of a conspiracy to bar him from succeeding Mbeki in 2009.
Zuma was once considered an obvious candidate for the presidency when Mbeki's second and final term expires.
Rape trial
But his fortunes plummetted with the graft charges, which were then followed by a sensational rape accusation by an HIV-positive woman.
Although Zuma was in May acquitted of raping the young AIDS activist - the daughter of a comrade in the apartheid struggle - his image took a beating when he admitted to having consensual unprotected sex with her.
His statement that he took a shower to minimise the risk of contracting AIDS raised a furore in a country with one of the world's heaviest caseloads of the disease.