Join a Discussion on Africa in Transition
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
APE TOWN -- As Winnie Madikizela-Mandela shouted recently to a cheering crowd in a black township: "I'm sick and tired of white-controlled
media who say they don't know Thabo Mbeki. Who cares?"
President Nelson Mandela's ex-wife, whose speeches usually have vaguely threatening undertones, was unsubtly pointing out that when Mbeki takes over as president on June 16, he will govern with a huge mandate whether
whites or anyone else know him or not.
Not that that means they need be afraid. Given the sorry history of democracy in Africa, South Africans may someday count themselves lucky that their second post-apartheid president is someone who has no military background,
is an able administrator and repeatedly pledges himself to democracy and to fighting corruption even in his own party.
His government, Mbeki said in his victory speech Thursday, will "approach the exercise of power without any arrogance, with humility."
If Nelson Mandela is the George Washington of this new democracy, the kind of giant among men who turns down offers to be king, then Mbeki is its John Adams. Like Adams, he is small, sharply intelligent, visionary, reflective,
sometimes tart-tongued, and an adept back-room fighter.
He is also, on any occasion, the man most likely to turn up too formally dressed.
Playing on their difference in raiment, the dapper Mbeki, 56, has mused publicly on his resentment of people who constantly ask whether he can fill Mandela's shoes.
"Why should I wear those big, ugly things?" he said. "Or," he added with a shudder, "those shirts" -- meaning the bold "Madiba shirts" that Mandela adopted after a trip to Indonesia.
Mbeki intends to fit his own smaller but more meticulously polished footwear.
Born on June 18, 1942, Thabo Mbeki grew up in poverty in Mbewuleni village in the Idutywa area of the Transkei -- the historic land of the Xhosa.
Though he grew up on the side of the valley with the rural peasantry who wore blankets and painted their faces with red clay, Mbeki was the son of radical party intellectuals who ran a small store and taught school to survive.
He was in the liberation struggle virtually from the age of 10, when he and a cousin sold Coke bottles to raise money to pay their African National Congress membership fees. The struggle eventually cost him a son, a brother
and, two biographers say, any real relationship with his father, who was one of its heroes.
The father, Govan Mbeki, spent much of his life in jail and sent his children to relatives very young so they couldn't come to depend on parents who expected to be arrested. The elder Mbeki, whose wife still lives
in Idutywa, now lives in a bungalow on the grounds of his son's official mansion, but "seems sad, lonely and regretful," with "little familial warmth either in the relationship or even in Thabo's
achievements," according to a new biography, "The Life and Times of Thabo Mbeki" (Adrian Hadland & Jovial Rantao, Zebra Press, April 1999).
Mbeki dislikes revealing too much about himself. His pre-campaign book "Africa, the Time Has Come," is just a collection of speeches, with a dry 22-page biographical sketch.
But even the speeches reveal a great deal. His 1964 statement to a U.N. committee in London, delivered when he was a 21-year-old student asking it to prevent the Pretoria government from hanging his father, is an ennobling
portrait of the elder Mbeki, touching in its combination of humility and righteousness.
His 1978 speech "The Historical Injustice" shows a piercing intellectualism as he subjects the history of South Africa to Marxian analysis, skewering the British imperialists and the Boer pioneers for corrupting
even the capitalism and Calvinism they preached, regressing into feudalism, a racist version of Lutheranism and simple murder and theft because it was easier and more profitable than adopting the liberalizing trends
of Europe.
For sheer poetic power, his "I Am an African" speech, celebrating the new Constitution in 1996, surpasses even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which it somewhat resembles
-- although King was a more riveting speaker.
He is becoming better known because biographers are probing his past; the fact that he fathered a child at 16 who disappeared 17 years later, probably at the hands of the police, has humanized him a bit. So have photos
of him as a young man leaning affectionately against friends or smiling at his 1974 London wedding to Zanele Dlamini, who was studying social work and now heads a bank for rural women.
Mbeki is now seen as a politician, but he is really a lifelong intellectual guerrilla, rather than an armed one. At Lovedale Institution, a South African boarding school, he excelled at Latin, mathematics and science, but
was expelled in his senior year for leading a student strike. A white teacher who spotted his erudition arranged for a scholarship to the University of Sussex in England; but he began school late because he had been
arrested by the Rhodesian government while trying to slip out to Britain without a passport.
After getting a degree in economics and backing causes from nuclear disarmament to getting the United States out of Vietnam, he was sent by Oliver Tambo, the London-based president of the African National Congress, to set
up offices in Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland and Mozambique, making the white South African government feel surrounded.
He became one of the public faces of the dissident group, meeting reporters and accompanying Tambo on diplomatic trips to Moscow, Washington and other capitals. In the 1980s, when white executives and prominent Afrikaners
defied their government to meet the African National Congress in exile, Mbeki was always there.
In 1990, after the ANC was legalized, he returned home for the first time in 28 years. While the spotlight briefly lingered on Cyril Ramaphosa, a union leader who negotiated the new Constitution, Mbeki returned to his role
as heir apparent with his election as ANC chairman in 1993.
The fear of him, particularly asserted among whites, is that he prefers back-room victories to open debate and puts "Africanism" above equality. Those fears got new fuel this week when Business Day, a financial
paper, reported that he had intervened to stop Judge Edwin Cameron, one of the country's best legal minds, from being named to the highest court.
Quoting "judges and lawyers close to the process," the paper said he persuaded Mandela to choose an "able and solid" black candidate because there are only three nonwhites on the 11-seat Constitutional
Court. Mbeki's legal adviser denied that he did more than consult, but that was regarded with skepticism.
But in a recent interview with the newspaper The Sowetan, Mbeki made no bones about his "Africanist" perspective.
"If you are talking about poverty alleviation and eradication, then necessarily you will focus on people who are poorest," he said. "If that is what is mean by Africanist, you cannot avoid it."
