With the ANC’s 50th national conference fast approaching, supporters will be out in force to signal the changing of the guard from Mandela to Mbeki
Govan Mbeki fills in a few pieces of the puzzle which constitutes his son, and South Africa’s next president, to David Beresford
Govan Mbeki’s voice offers a hint of a chuckle when asked where the African National Congress offices are to be found in Port Elizabeth. “At 344 Govan Mbeki Avenue,” he answers. “Main Street,” says the taxi driver disconsolately, muttering on about the pretensions of the new gang at the city hall.
The deification, or at least municipalisation, of living politicians is frowned upon by the ANC in the new South Africa; the name of Nelson Mandela is striking for its absence from street signs. But if anyone is to be subject to such honour in his lifetime it might as well be Mbeki. After all, he can claim to be part of the legendary trio – Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki – which “liberated” South Africa.
That characterisation of him is likely to be eclipsed in the near future, however. For 55 years Thabo Mbeki has been “Govan’s son”. But next week Govan Mbeki may have to start getting used to the label “Thabo’s father” as his succession to the leadership of the ANC brings him one step closer to the South African presidency.
But if the son is about to eclipse the father in fame, he is a long way from being “better known”. As he has moved ever closer to the supreme prize in South African politics, Thabo Mbeki has seemed to become increasingly reclusive – ironically so, in view of his championship of the government communications service.
The truth is that South Africa is about to be ruled by a man whom the country simply does not know.
Is he a father? One of the standard works of political biography says he is not. Another gives him two children. He is the son of one of the country’s best-known communists, but just about all that is known about his ideological stance is contained in the speech he made on the adoption of the new Constitution: “I am an African.”
Fathers are, of course, not the most reliable sources for objective information on a son and Govan Mbeki – whose life as an anti-apartheid activist, including his years in prison did not allow for a close paternal relationship – is probably less informed than most. But he does fill in some of the early gaps in the jigsaw puzzle which is the life of the man who would be king.
Royalty does not seem to be in Thabo Mbeki’s blood-stream, as it is in Mandela’s case, but he can claim at least a degree of pride in his ancestry. His grandfather was a tribal headman from the Ciskei, a convert to Christianity whose people were moved in the 19th century from the Ciskei to Mpukane location, on the edge of the Kei River, to act as a buffer between British colonists and the warring Xhosa chiefs.
Govan Mbeki was the youngest of five children by a second marriage. He himself had four children by Epainette, of whom Thabo was the second oldest.
Govan Mbeki is uncertain about the circumstances of the death of his younger son, Jama. The young man studied law at Roma University in Lesotho and took an LlB at Leeds. He then moved to Botswana, married and had three children.
At some point in the 1980s – Govan Mbeki is unsure of the date – Jama Mbeki went to visit an old friend from his student days. Jama Mbeki did not realise his friend had changed sides: when he arrived in Lesotho the security forces were tipped off that the son of Govan Mbeki was in town and he was killed.
“We have not been able to trace where they buried him,” says Govan Mbeki simply. He was not to be the last of the Mbeki clan to vanish mysteriously.
Govan Mbeki’s main recollection of Thabo Mbeki’s boyhood is that he was a voracious reader. “My wife used to complain that Thabo did not like manual work. He used to spend all his time at books.” Govan Mbeki’s library was not large, but it was worthy – with works on Marxism-Leninism, his own early writings and his set-work books from Fort Hare where he took a BA degree and a diploma in education. He also recalls that Thabo played the piano and the flute, but says he has long since given them up.
Attending a Presbyterian-Methodist primary school, Thabo Mbeki went on to Lovedale College in Alice. The ANC’s biography says he completed his studies at home after “his schooling at Lovedale was interrupted by a strike in 1959”.
Govan Mbeki says bluntly that he was expelled, but – with the fine disdain of a revolutionary who has spent his life thumbing his nose at authority – confesses that he does not know the details other than that it was “student politics”. He is equally vague as to when his son joined the ANC and South African Communist Party, observing that the boy “grew up in them”. It is recorded elsewhere that he joined the ANC Youth League at the age of 14.
Thabo Mbeki went on to do his “A” levels at a private Johannesburg college when he was elected to his first recorded post as an official – secretary of the African Students’ Association, the short-lived student wing of the ANC.
It was around this time that he fathered a son, Monwabisi – his only child. The boy vanished mysteriously 21 years later.
According to his mother, Nokwanda Mpahlwa, the young man set out for Durban in 1981 in search of other members of his family and was never seen again. She appealed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission last year for help in finding what happened to him, but Govan Mbeki says they have made no progress.
Thabo Mbeki did well enough at his “A” levels to win a place at Sussex University. He left South Africa without papers in 1962 and was the subject of a diplomatic incident when he was picked up in Southern Rhodesia. He was to have been deported back to South Africa, but – after six weeks in prison and intervention by the British government – was allowed to go to Tanganyika where he was granted political asylum.
Moving on to Sussex he took a Master’s degree in economics, with a thesis on small businesses in Ghana and Nigeria.
In 1970, Thabo Mbeki’s mother got intimations that her son was on the move when their house was placed under intense surveillance. He had vanished from London and the South African security forces assumed he had gone home, underground. In fact he had gone east, to Russia, for military training and a grounding in communism at the Lenin Institute.
Thabo Mbeki’s relationship with the communist party is a confusing one. None of the official biographies acknowledges his membership of the SACP, but he is believed to have been a staunch member – being elected to the politburo in 1979 and again in the mid-1980s – until his return to South Africa in 1990.
Govan Mbeki offers no more detail, but attributes his son’s resignation from the party to “pragmatism” in anticipation that he would be assuming a leadership position.
Does he believe his son is still a Marxist? “He imbibed so much of it he can’t expel it from his mind,” the veteran communist observes.
Certainly pragmatism would seem to mark Thabo Mbeki’s rise to the leadership of the ANC; first as political secretary to Oliver Tambo, then as head of the departments of Information and Foreign Affairs and finally as deputy president.
Pragmatism might be an explanation for the way he has blown hot and cold over Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and for the friendships he is said to have enjoyed with the likes of Sol Kerzner.
If Mandela is to be taken literally in his avowals that Thabo Mbeki has been effectively running the country for some time, perhaps he can even be credited with the realpolitik which has recently replaced the diplomacy of morality in South Africa’s foreign policy. In fact, the only departure from pragmatism which stands out where Thabo Mbeki is concerned is his vision of the “African renaissance”.
Does this make an “Africanist”? “Labels don’t help us,” reproaches Govan Mbeki, pointing out that Africanist was the term used to describe those who formed the Pan Africanist Congress. “I don’t think Thabo is anywhere near what the PAC was when it broke away from the ANC in 1959. But he is an African.”
What sort of a president will he make? “Thabo grew up in the ANC and the policies of the ANC have been consistent, even before 1912, in regarding South Africa as one country and the people of South Africa as one people,” Govan declares in the ringing tone of a party loyalist.
Pausing, he adds: “He’s a highly intelligent young man who, I believe, will not do anything stupid.” It was as much a declaration of hope as a statement of experience – from a father who, in common with much of the rest of South Africa, does not really know his son.