Affairs and Tourism in
The Mark Gevisser Profile
Of politics and hairdressing
On the passage wall of Peter Mokaba’s Italianate Sandton villa is a painting of a white baby suckling at a black woman’s breasts. It is shocking for two reasons.
Firstly, because its rawness is so out of place with the anodyne designer feel of the house, as if a jolt of emotion has managed to stick to the home’s slippery Everybuppie surfaces. Apart from a beige and blue wall-hanging representing Chris Hani’s likeness in the living-room, the painting is the only sign of personality — or struggle — in sight.
The second reason why the painting is so startling is because its composition is so uneven: the breasts are naturalistic representations, while the baby is nothing more than an outline coloured not the lifelike pinky-beige hue of Caucasians, but paper- white, as if it were a ghost, a phantom-like representative of the category of generic white babies suckling at the category of generic black breasts. The painting is angry: despite its representation of life’s primary act of nurture, there is nothing gentle or comforting about it.
The fact that Mokaba’s mother — who lives with him — was a domestic worker for much of her life does give the woman’s breasts, and the presence of the painting, a certain wrenching specificity.
But, as I sit with Mokaba way into the early hours of the morning (we were to meet at 6pm, he arrived at 10.30, we started at 11, and I am quite convinced he would have happily kept me chatting till dawn if I hadn’t lunged for the door at 3am), I am struck by the fact that it is as hard to pin traits to his character as it is to pin personality to his home.
He is affable, courteous, intellectual and languidly articulate. He laughs when I observe that there is something schizophrenic about the disjuncture between his public persona and his private self. “How else,” he says, “can you mobilise the youth and keep them entrenched without going into their mode of thinking? Your ability to package a sober policy into their language and get them to understand, is the hardest thing … You have to be good at slogans; you have to capture the imagination of the people …”
He cites, with pride, the slogan he invented for the South African Youth Congress (Sayco), which he founded and led in the late Eighties: “Victory or Death — Freedom is Certain.”
Call it populism if you don’t like the slogan; creative mobilisation if you do. This is Mokaba the ad-man rather than the aggro-man; militancy canned rather than felt. This is Mokaba the wannabe magnate (“I identified, before I became deputy minister, that I really must go into mining — I don’t like the fact that it’s still a white man’s business”); Mokaba the entrepreneur.
Being a politician, he says, is just like owning hair salons (something he has proven exceptionally good at): you need to give people the service they want, you need to be “innovative” and “non- conformist” in your approach; you need to “go for the gaps presented to you”.
Entrepreneurial flair did make Mokaba a brilliant activist: his work as a youth leader in the 1980s was dogged, imaginative and successful. He was, say many, almost single-handedly responsible for organising remote, but populous parts of the country, like the Northern Transvaal and the Eastern Cape, into the 1980s rebellion.
But his charismatic leadership of Sayco drew him into conflict with the United Democratic Front’s leadership, who found its militancy unfocused and unreliable.
For his part, Mokaba took up the cudgels to forge “unity” in the UDF and bring it into line with ANC thinking. This led him into a zealous “anti-cabal” campaign. At the same time, rumours began to circulate that Mokaba was an agent of the state: these were forwarded to the African National Congress in exile, which launched an investigation.
In 1991, the Weekly Mail led with the story that Mokaba had been under inconclusive investigation for over two years, and that he “confessed”, when summoned to Lusaka in 1989, to having worked for the security police.
In a 1994 article in Leadership, journalist and former underground ANC agent Gavin Evans confirmed this, citing Sydney Mafumadi, Jacob Zuma and Joe Nhlanhla as sources.
Many believe that Mokaba was not a willing agent, and that, like many, he was compromised while being violently tortured in detention: his “crime”, if there was one, is that he did not report this immediately to the ANC, of which he had been an underground member.
But Mokaba emphatically denies even this. Pulling out evidence of plots against him and “disinformation” purportedly emanating from the “cabal” of UDF leaders, he tells me that the allegations were part of an elaborate Military Intelligence (MI) plot to get the movement to assassinate him by branding him a traitor.
MI operatives have confessed to him, he says, that they exploited the already-existing tension between himself and the UDF leaders, planting the rumour that he was a spy. The UDF leaders were opposed to him because of his militancy, because of their “urban arrogance”, and because of “the cabal thing of control over the Africans by either the Indians or the whites … they wanted to manipulate the Africans to achieve their own goals. At the time, we protested at being guinea pigs, and said we could run ourselves.”
Mokaba asserts his bona fides by saying he was — unlike the UDF — directly accountable to the ANC in exile as Sayco leader: the ANC was behind him all the way, and, in fact, he was just following orders when he led Sayco into an “anti-factionalist” (read: cabal-baiting) stance.
Enter the muddied, turbulent waters of 1980s liberation politics at your peril: it is almost impossible for an outsider to make sense of the arcane politics of the time. If you disliked a rival in the movement, it was almost too easy to brand him an “informer” or a “cabalist”.
And so, the only thing of lasting significance about these allegations is that, while they have never been conclusively denied by the ANC, they have not even slightly dented Mokaba’s ambitions.
Perhaps because of his smartness, perhaps because of his ability to deliver a key constituency and his astuteness as a political operator, Mokaba’s political stature continues to grow — despite his alliance with people like Winnie Mandela and Bantu Holomisa, now both in the cold; despite the perpetual controversies over his incendiary rhetoric; despite the quagmire of controversy into which his National Tourism Forum (NTF) collapsed; and despite his poor performance as a parliamentarian.
Is, then, his current appointment — replacement to his disgraced friend — a sop to the man who perhaps did more than any other individual to crown Thabo Mbeki as Crown Prince? Mbeki came back to the country with great expectations, but with no grassroots constituency. Mokaba, as president of the Youth League, delivered him one, by steering the league into proposing him as deputy-president of the ANC.
Ask Mokaba about Mbeki, and he’ll wax eloquent; the main reason for sponsoring him, he says, is because “he never aligns himself with a particular faction. His is an attempt to unify the movement at all times, which is what I like. So we as the youth said, although he may not be the kind of radical that we seem to be, he’s a man under whom we’ll all survive.”
Shortly thereafter, the youth leader found himself appointed chairman of the NTF — a way into a new career paved, insiders say, by Mbeki.
His political schizophrenia continued. As a public figure, he was still wont to make rabble-rousing statements, like asking Tembisa youth, just before the 1994 election, to stop wasting their bullets by firing them into the air and rather to train them on FW de Klerk.
In private, he was gently rebuked for these statements, but never publicly refuted or disciplined: like Winnie Mandela and Holomisa, he was too valuable as a mobiliser of the militant youth. Unlike them, though, he was disciplined enough to never actually criticise the ANC itself.
As the NTF collapsed owing to mismanagement, Mokaba registered as a master’s student in public administration at the Wits Business School. He speaks of his new career with the fervour of a graduate student who has just discovered an already- accepted axiom for himself: the environment, he says, is about “sustainable development” rather than “nature conservation”. He has concentrated on his degree because “there is a gap between power and knowledge that needs to be filled”.
He insists that he has been able to be a full-time student and a parliamentarian by managing his time carefully. his colleagues in parliament couldn’t disagree more.
He has, in fact, been the subject of internal disciplinary proceedings because of his non- attendance at parliament, and his committee has all but collapsed. “When he is there,” says one member, “he is terrific; awe-inspiring. He has this huge ability to get his mind around complex issues, and he is an excellent chair. This made his repeated absence even more infuriating.”
Another ANC MP sees his lax attitude as “a sign of his incredible arrogance and immaturity. He is so talented, but if he wants to make a difference, he must settle down and roll up his sleeves. He runs the risk of dissipation.”
An old comrade of Mokaba’s feels that “part of the problem is that Peter doesn’t really know what he wants to do. In the 1980s, he applied himself body and soul to youth mobilisation — and he was brilliant. Now he seems distracted. He hasn’t really made the shift.”
It seems as if while Mokaba proved himself adept at mobilising the masses, he doesn’t quite have the management skills to motivate a team: perhaps his training at the Wits Business School will rectify this.
He justifies being a businessman by saying: “I’ll always be a politician, but what I don’t want to be is a poor politician, and therefore dependent on others. I also don’t want to become a dictator who has politics as my only source of power, so that when people want to vote me out of power I change the rules so that they can’t.” There is a presumption to these words that betrays its speaker’s ambitions.
Beyond ambition, it remains difficult to pin Mokaba down — physically as well as ideologically. He is a bit too artless to even be called a chameleon: rather than changing his colours to suit his environment, he seems to have that astonishing political gene of being able to change the environment to suit his colours.
And so back to his living-room. Everything in it is colour-co-ordinated to match the beige and blue wall-hanging of Hani. There is something quite appropriate about the way that the people’s hero is reduced, in Mokaba’s space, to an interior decorator’s colour-code.