Thebe Mabanga
Within two hours and about 5km of each other, Tony Leon and Thabo Mbeki sparred with each other in Johannesburg. The contest unfolded without the knowledge of either participant, taking place instead in the mind of the very few who had the opportunity to witness both events.
The fighters never left their fancy cages, far from the madding crowds they want to woo for next week’s poll. In the one corner, at Media Park in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, Leon addressed a forum organised by the Afrikaans daily Beeld on, wait for it, white guilt, which was due to finish at 6pm.
In the other corner, at the Parktonian hotel in Braamfontein, before 8pm, Mbeki took to the podium to address a broad range of Johannesburg’s community workers on the future of the city he left in the late 1960s. Mbeki’s task seemed relatively easy and that is probably why he emerged unscathed. But then again fortune favours the eloquent and cool, and Mbeki was both.
Leon’s attempt to dispense with the task at hand began rather impressively with a foundation laid in Afrikaans, topped with a heavy South African English accent. Leon employed his usual “keep race out of debate unless it is absolutely necessary” framework. He described the African National Congress’s use of the police dog unit video in the Eastern Cape to aggravate psychological wounds as a vote-catching ploy. Finally, he presents a choice with the help of Arthur Koestler between the (DA’s) Christian and humane liberal ethos that values the individual and the (ANC’s) nationalist ethos, which places the collective above the individual. The best, however, comes at question time.
The army of reporters gathered goes at Leon hammer and tongs. First, his stint in the army comes back to haunt him in the form of a Sowetan article by Ronald Suresh Roberts. The piece chronicles Leon’s contribution to the then South African Defence Force’s publication, Paratus. As one of its esteemed writers, Leon praised the formation of Transkei as “magnificent freedom day” and described torture and chemical castration as “strictly regulated and humane”.
When questioned on this, Leon dismisses it as “decontextualised”. When asked if there should be a mass movement by whites to compensate blacks who suffered under apartheid, he points out that as far as he is concerned he has done what he can. When asked how he would counsel the 90% of his white backers about their guilt, he claims as he had throughout that he cannot speak for whites. Well, maybe the talk should have been titled “Tony’s guilt”. His attempt to deal with the questions was flustered and a poor following to his address.
Mbeki, at the other end, found himself having to compensate for men who are turning out to be a liability to the ANC’s campaign such as the Johannesburg mayoral candidate, the charismatically challenged Amos Masondo. The man can send masses to sleep. He punctuates his talk with “ehhs”; he fails to add valuable insight to issues and, at his best, is lacklustre and vapid.
Mbeki opens by making a light convoluted joke, which, colleague Jaspreet Kindra tells me, is the same joke he made in KwaZulu-Natal a week ago. He then redeems himself by zoning in on the question by the National Women’s Council and presenting his vision of a great African city.
He then presents a series of rhetorical questions and takes on each of the questions presented and attempts to fit in his vision attempts, because where the need arises he states: “I do not know …” It is the president at his frank and sincere best.