Formally, I acknowledge President Thabo Mbeki as my leader. He is the majority party’s duly elected choice of president. As I voted for that party in two general elections, and will no doubt do so in the next, I don’t have much right to complain.
But I feel no personal loyalty to him or respect for his leadership.
This has nothing to do with the fact that he is black. I feel something akin to love for Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. I like and respect Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa and most members of Mbeki’s Cabinet, including Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya and, despite his recent lapse, Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota.
My problem with Mbeki is his exaggerated preoccupation with race. It needlessly alienates whites, including those who support the African National Congress’s project, and addles his political judgement.
His objection, voiced in Parliament last week, that critics are trying to dictate how he thinks and feels holds no water. A president’s feelings — particularly when they shape policy — are not a private matter.
Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon rightly argues that a bitter sense of racial injury permeates and distorts Mbeki’s political vision. Where Leon errs is in refusing to see that a measure of race consciousness in South Africa is both right and inevitable. What happened under apartheid cannot and should not be forgotten.
This was the unique importance of the truth commission — which, ironically, Mbeki did not wholly support. Racial redress is needed in every sphere, and the state must drive it.
But Mandela showed that this can be done without Mbeki’s racial victimology and, sometimes, outright incitement.
One of South Africa’s biggest myths, pervasive among Africanists, is that Mandela’s sentimental ”rainbowism” and pandering to whites hampered racial redress.
Hundreds of anti-racism laws were passed between 1994 and 1999. Employment equity, anti-discrimination law, black economic empowerment, and affirmative recruitment and procurement in the state sector were not Mbeki’s inventions — they were initiated under his predecessor.
What Mandela avoided, however, was racial hype and hysteria. He and most black leaders would not reject the mainstream view of HIV/Aids as implying that black people are promiscuous ”germ-carriers”. They would not argue that the demand for crime statistics arises from a stereotype of black people as innately criminal, as Mbeki did in the same speech.
They would not accuse the media of stereotyping the president as ”an Aids-infected rapist of white women”. Contained in the ANC’s submission to the Human Rights Commission’s media racism inquiry, this infamous charge must have been endorsed by Mbeki as ANC president.
The theme was restated in his recent response to coverage of the arms deal. Complaining that much local reporting was ”inevitably racist”, Mbeki ascribed this to ”intensely negative, highly offensive and deeply entrenched stereotypes of Africans among some in the country”.
Where, in South Africa’s careful media, most of it under black editors, does he find these lethal concentrations of racist poison?
Epitomising Mbeki’s hyper-excitability on race was a speech last August at the funeral of Sarah Baartman. In this, he struck the keynote with a quotation from Baron Georges Cuvier, the French anatomist who dissected the Khoi woman: ”The Negro race … is marked by black complexion, crisped woolly hair … these races with compressed and depressed skulls … are condemned to never-ending inferiority” and so on.
Following this with similar quotations from 18th-century European thinkers, he concluded: ”The legacy of these centuries remains with us, both in the way our society is structured and in the ideas many in our country continue to carry.”
In other words, many white South Africans share Cuvier’s pathological horror of ”Negro” features, and his ideas about a hierarchy of racial types. Where is the evidence for this? And if fringe groups, like Israel Vision, do persist in such views, what influence do they have on mainstream society?
Mbeki’s gravest policy aberrations are largely due to his racial hang-ups. Aids is an example. The upsurge in Zimbabwe has become a liberation struggle, but he apparently persists in the Fanonist conception that it is a racial drama, with the ”authentic” Africans of Zanu-PF ranged against the ”whites in black masks” of the Movement for Democratic Change.
His much-vaunted ”two nations” idea — borrowed from the Victorian politician Benjamin Disraeli — creates a false commonality of interests between the new black elite and the black economic underclass.
Even his stony attitude towards poverty has a racial component. The approach is not so much that ”the smallest he hath a life to live, just as the greatest he that is in the kingdom”. It is that, in the cause of racial dignity, poor black people must be made to stand on their own two feet.
Whatever his achievements, Mbeki could be never be credited with helping to build an inclusive South African identity and allegiance. His occasional gestures in the direction of national and human solidarity — like the often-cited ”I am an African” speech — are detours against the current.
What I miss is a leader who emphasises what binds us together as South Africans, rather than incessantly harping on what sets us apart.
Under Mandela whites of good will had the sense of being welcomed, almost as returning prodigals, into the South African family. This did not, and does not have to mean ignoring the disparities between its members.