Anthony Holiday Plato held that what people love makes them what they are. Politicians, with rare exceptions, love power and are often driven by the fear of losing it and of the form that loss may take. Thus what a politician fears most provides a crucial clue to what he is and why he acts as he does. Last week, in a pair of unusually intimate and extensive interviews, President Thabo Mbeki revealed something of his own fearfulness which should make everybody with a stake in this country’s future sit up and take notice. In an interview with British commentator Hugo Young, published by this newspaper, in the context of expressing his concern about deeply entrenched racial disparities and the way in which the poverty divide is defined by colour, Mbeki said: “What I fear is that, if we go on too long with these disparities, particularly when you have too many people who remain poor, I think they would rebel against democracy. Because it hasn’t brought them anything. And particularly because of this racial divide. It’s critically important that we close that gap. So that you narrow the level of inequality and therefore the potential for conflict which would be racial because of these divisions.” Mbeki spoke in the same vein to a friend of his student days, Marcus Linklater, in an interview carried by the Sunday Independent. Were he woken from a deep sleep and asked what thing worried him most, said the president, he would reply “failure to create a non-racial society, because if you don’t, that would threaten everything else”. These are telling admissions. They are also worrying ones. For surely Mbeki realises that anything approaching the obliteration of the South African socio-economic racial cleavage is not something his generation or the generation following it will live to see. Surely he recognises that the levels of racism we experience are not the product merely of less than 50 years of apartheid, but of more than 300 years of slavery and colonial oppression. Does our First Citizen truly believe that he a mere politician after all, no matter that he is a powerful one can do anything that is more than incremental to decrease this historical burden? Does he need to be reminded that after a civil war and after the bitter struggles for black civil rights, there is still racism in the United States; that racism endures in Britain, France and Germany, and that all these countries possess economic resources which could be used in the fight against racial disparities far greater than this nation commands or is ever likely to command? Let me not be misunderstood. No concerned South African, let alone the president, can afford to be anything other than deeply troubled by the levels of racism which have survived the demise of legalised apartheid. The yawning gulf between white affluence and black poverty cries out to be addressed. And the danger that this gulf could generate civil unrest is a real and present one. But to be soberly concerned is one thing. To be terrorised by the object of one’s concern is quite another. Mbeki’s admirably frank admissions in these two interviews suggest that he verges on being in the latter state. If that reading is not too far off the mark, then it goes a long way towards explaining how the series of blunders which have plagued our president’s first two years in office came about. It would explain, for instance, why Mbeki permitted (if he did not positively instigate) the Human Rights Commission’s absurd investigation into “subliminal” racism in the news media an episode which not only soured relations between the presidency and the press, but alarmed and annoyed influential persons in the world of finance, such as the media baron Sir Anthony O’Reilly, and the billionaire financier George Soros. It would explain Mbeki’s reluctance to put pressure on Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who tried to present illegal land grabbing, designed in reality to shore up the latter’s crumbling power base, as an exercise in enriching poor black peasants at the expense of rich white farmers. It would account for Mbeki’s otherwise unaccountable clinging to his “holistic” theory of the cause of Aids and stubborn refusal to accept what the vast majority of medical scientists believe, namely, that the disease is caused by the HIV virus which is most usually transmitted from host to host through blood and/or semen. Since, on the supposition that the virus is the direct cause of the malady, the most obvious explanation of why South Africa is currently the epicentre of the Aids pandemic is that African men are reluctant to practice safe sex, Mbeki feels compelled to question the HIV hypothesis, lest he be accused of a Eurocentric disrespect for African custom.
Finally, Mbeki’s obsession with the dangers of racism and the mass revolt he fears it will engender goes a long way towards explaining what some observers have been so unkind as to term his paranoia, his tendency to scent conspiracy at every turn and to pay so much attention to rumours of dark plots aimed at his person. For if he fears that an explosion of popular fury, generated by his inability to do the impossible and put a sudden end to racism, will bring down the democratic state he heads, then what he fears most is the people he leads and his anxieties become understandable, although not excusable. Unless Mbeki wants it said that his harping on white racism is a ploy to disguise his lack of confidence in his own policies particularly his economic policies and that he is seeking a scapegoat in anticipation of their failure, he must find some way to slay his demon. South Africa, after all, has not been engulfed in a racial war, as was predicted by so many Jeremiahs at home and abroad. Although much must yet be done to conquer racism, much has, in fact, been done. In the fight against this great evil, the South Africans it has harmed most have shown equally great courage, perseverance and wise patience. The president should trust them more than he seems to do. Dr Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government and at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris