Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred

I have had the honour of listening to former South African President Thabo Mbeki deliver a couple of lectures. He shuffles and fidgets as he speaks, his beady eyes focused on either his script or on the audience. Looking at him speak, one gets the feeling that the wealth of knowledge and intellect cannot, will not, be hemmed in, and he fidgets and shuffles even more to let them out. His mildly impassioned baritone voice entrances as much as it holds attention – it holds your hand as it takes you on an intellectual high, and in the end one really doesn’t have a choice but be impressed. He exudes quiet but profound confidence that belies his short physical stature. After all, he is a man who caught the attention of the intellectual bigwigs of the African National Congress (ANC) when he was just a teenager.

Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred tells the extraordinary story of an extraordinary man. It is a detailed account of the life of a man who, drawing attention from an early age with his precocity, gave his life to the ANC, through exile during the struggle and in independent South Africa.

A common result of apartheid was the utter destruction of family life, but in the case of Thabo Mbeki, it became something akin to an understated tragedy. The ANC was his family. His father, Govan Mbeki, caught up in the early hints of an anti-apartheid struggle, was hardly around for his children as they grew up, and was then sentenced to life in prison on Robben Island together with Mandela. His marriage to Epainette, Mbeki’s mother, fell apart. Mbeki thus grew up with the imperative that the struggle was more important than family; his comrades were his family. Throughout the struggle, even when faced with the disappearances of his own son Kwanda and his brother Jama, he placed the struggle on a pedestal – all else came secondary.

This is the running theme in this biography by Mark Gevisser. Mbeki has often been described as aloof, cold, unfeeling, but this book dissects his motivations and presents him as someone who couldn’t, given his background, have lived any other way. I was however a little exasperated. I thought Mbeki and his family could have done something regarding his brother, for instance, who disappeared in Botswana, and at least have his remains brought to South Africa for proper burial. But then I caught myself: it is easy to be judgmental when the implications of situations and events aren’t fully apparent, no matter how much you may picture them in your head as you read.

Indeed, Mbeki lived through a time when dedication to the anti-apartheid struggle and movement was expected to be unquestioned. Even to his own father, he was no longer a son but a comrade. To Mbeki, his father Govan was no more than his mentors Duma Nokwe, Oliver Tambo, and finally Nelson Mandela. Thus Gevisser explores the not altogether warm relationship between father and son, tempered by the imperatives of struggle. In fact, Mbeki is shown to have had more of a father-son relationship with Oliver Tambo than with his own father.

An offshoot of this thread is the fact that Mbeki was seen as a favored child of the ANC as soon as he was noticed. We are cautioned however that, while he carried the Mbeki name, it was his precocious intellect that stood him out from the rest. He nevertheless faced some antagonism from fellow comrades of his age, most notably the late South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani, who felt slighted by the perceived favoritism. Indeed, Mbeki was coerced into scholarship in exile (London and Moscow) against his wishes (he wanted to join the struggle immediately after High School), and then made the then ANC President Oliver Tambo’s Political Secretary in Lusaka. Mbeki’s life therefore became a series of mentorships, the most prominent of which was with Tambo. In the latter part of the book Mbeki is shown to have come of age finally, winning the ANC Presidency unopposed on his own (without the loom of Tambo), delivering the highest percentage win of the ANC in national elections, and overcoming a difficult relationship with Nelson Mandela.

Whether as a result of prolonged exile or a natural aversion to violence, Mbeki’s approach to the struggle in the late 1980s and early 1990s favored negotiations above all else, and this antagonized him further with more militant comrades led by Chris Hani.

Gevisser suggests that perhaps Mbeki was caught up in the tensions and confluence of the three main arms of the movement – exile (in which he belonged), prison, and “underground” (those who remained in South Africa but managed to operate without being arrested). Some form of mistrust festered, even among the exiles, some of whom were in the “trenches” in Angola and Mozambique while Mbeki trotted the world defending the movement. He was thus seen as an untested comrade who insisted on talks, even talks about talks, at all costs, and was viewed with suspicion. Further, Mbeki is shown as being disdainful of establishing a home base, as Chris Hani and Jacob Zuma had done with their respective ethnic communities. The perception was therefore reinforced that he was out of touch with the masses and wasn’t a “people’s person”.

Thus we see that Mbeki has always been set apart, or set himself apart, from the rest, a fact that caught up with him in the ANC National Conference in Polokwane in 2007 when he was ousted as the Party’s President. There were no longer the shadows of Govan Mbeki, Duma Nokwe or Oliver Tambo to watch over him. The ANC, his comrades, his family, rejected him after having given over fifty years of his life to the movement.

Mbeki is presented in this biography as someone who has deep confidence in himself and his abilities, and who maybe, as a result, somehow needed to prove it again and again. He has always taken great exception to subtle racism, real or perceived. For instance, he resented what he called the “Mandela exceptionalism”:

“Mbeki called this attitude “Mandela exceptionalism” when he was being polite; the “one good native” syndrome when he was not. The argument went like this: Africa was irredeemable, and Mandela was the only good leader to ever come out of it; once he left office, South Africa would sink like the rest of the continent into the mire of corruption and decay, as Nigeria had. It seemed to Mbeki that Mandela was actually colluding in the world’s impression that he was the “one good native”, the consequence of which was the perception that all other black leaders – Mbeki foremost – were incompetent…”

Mbeki’s prickliness at these “subtle” and “unstated” forms of racism by the West was perhaps what hardened his resolve against anti-retroviral drugs, an unfortunate blight on his distinguished career, or what motivated his decision to defend Robert Mugabe, perhaps rightly so. Perhaps it is because he thought the black man is not really free, that the dream has been deferred, that he saw racism where it could have been implausible. It motivated his African Renaissance philosophy to keep the deferred dream alive.

In summary, this book is an extraordinarily well-written and detailed account of the life of one of the ANC’s foremost fixers – he always got the job done, whether as a diplomat, a charmer, a recruiter, a negotiator, or as President. It is a tribute to Mbeki’s lifelong dedication to the Party, his well-meaning motivations, and his pursuit of the dream deferred.

Picture credit: Goodreads