Hugo Young describes his interview with President Thabo Mbeki
Unlike Nelson Mandela, his successor Thabo Mbeki does not in all respects rise
above history. Temporally, the apartheid era may have passed, but it remains the
formative imprint on the South African psyche and the president never forgets
it. A conversation with him reveals the extent to which Mandela’s time, with its
benign amnesia about the racial divide, was in a sense a heroic aberration.
In a rare interview with The Guardian last week, Mbeki kept returning to the
prejudices that Mandela-ism transcended. They ran through everything he said.
“Many whites, I wouldn’t say all,” he said, “have a particular stereotype of
black people. They would deny it, but it’s true. They see black people as lazy,
basically dishonest, thieving, corrupt.”
Mbeki is mild in manner, an intellectual, far less charismatic than his predecessor. He understands the white mind, he says. “One tries very often to
put oneself in the boots of white people.” He knows why they expected the worst
in 1994, when the blacks took power. “The whites said: ‘Since we treated the
black people so badly, when they have power in their hands, why are they not
hitting back? Why is there no revenge?'”
Even though revenge didn’t happen, and the transition was by any global standard
amazingly peaceful, seven years later the president believes racial prejudice
seeps through most of the mechanisms of society. He thinks media criticism of
him, of which there is plenty, is rooted there. The slackness and cynicism of
journalists obsess him almost as much as British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “People can sit comfortably with the [racial] assumptions,” he said, “because
they know these things to be true about blacks, and will report from that kind
of basis.”
Equally, the racial paradigm explains the need for an all-powerful African National Congress, he said. The party’s domination is the object of intense criticism, from the white liberals who played their part in bringing down apartheid and still struggle to uphold pluralistic political values. The ANC
stamps hard on internal debate, and often impugns the motives of external critics. The only significant opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is essentially white and coloured, with no significant African support.
To Mbeki, such one-party domination seems neither sinister nor inexplicable.
Again it’s a matter of racial history. “You are unlikely to get much black opposition,” he said, “because the issues that brought black people together
under ANC leadership remain. The central challenge we face is dealing with the
legacy of apartheid. The white minority political domination has gone. But the
rest remains. The black people of this country say the divisions of the past are
not yet over, the socio-economic discrimination against the majority persists.
“Even the middle class … will tell you the racism is there. They discriminate
against you because of colour, never mind that you have the same social status.
We therefore have got to combine to deal with this matter.”
An uneasy contradiction, nonetheless, cuts across this apparent serenity. There
are still vast shack towns, sparse services, with real unemployment probably
verging on 40%. This poses simmering problems, as Mbeki rather dolefully admitted.
Though South Africa hasn’t been rewarded with the level of foreign investment it would like, he made no complaint about that in our interview. Globalisation, he
seemed to think, has to be accepted. Not even the media were exempt. The Mail & Guardian is the fiercest thorn in the president’s side. It’s owned by The Guardian. When I asked if an absentee white owner compromised the role the paper
could play in black South Africa, Mbeki immediately said: “No.”
So his own racial sensitivities, while deep, are subtle. He is himself a realist, not a racist, and not now given to making proclamations.