President Thabo Mbeki has shared the writings of Deng Xiaoping with his spy service, intoned Duke Ellington to oil executives, astounded astronomers with Shakespeare and preached the Bible to lawmakers.
Presidential spokesperson Murphy Morobe puts it mildly: ”He is extremely well read.”
Such high-flown phrasing from a politician not known for his people skills, though, may be lost on the ordinary South African adult — 12% of whom can’t read or write.
Mbeki, like Nelson Mandela before him, is merely continuing a long tradition, born of a missionary education, of using literary references ”to display knowledge and learning”, said Kelwyn Sole, a humanities professor at the University of Cape Town.
”But it’s way out of reach of the average person. At best it’s talking to fellow intellectuals,” Sole said of some of Mbeki’s speeches.
Mbeki, regarded as somewhat aloof and academic, commands widespread respect in South Africa for improving standards of living. But the more relaxed anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela enjoys universal adoration and Mbeki’s populist rival and former deputy, Jacob Zuma, inspired a popular song celebrating him despite the rape and corruption trials he faces.
There are South Africans who share Mbeki’s passions. Mandela and other former Robben Island political prisoners regarded Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in particular, as a textbook for revolution against tyranny and oppression.
Mbeki sought inspiration from the Bard — a passage from King Lear about two love birds — when he made the official toast at Mandela’s 80th birthday party and his wedding to former Mozambican first lady Graca Machel in 1998.
He also shared Hamlet — at length — to an audience of 1 000 scientists and diplomats gathered on a wind-swept desert hillside for last November’s inauguration of the southern hemisphere’s largest single optical telescope.
”O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!” Mbeki proclaimed. His point, he said, was that the exploration of distant asteroids and comets made possible by the telescope would ”take us far beyond a world that presents itself as an unweeded garden that grows to seed, populated by things rank and gross in nature”.
Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller has been known to regale reporters with Heidegger and French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is a published poet. But few world leaders have woven as much fine writing into their public utterances as Mbeki.
At the March 7 opening of the new Origins Centre museum, intended to highlight humanity’s roots in Africa, Mbeki treated the audience to a passage from the poem Time by Gibran Khalil Gibran. He said he wanted to illustrate that the new museum was ”part of a repository of the measureless and immeasurable”.
In a December speech on South Africa’s day of national reconciliation, Mbeki drew from William Wordsworth’s 1805 poem, the Prelude, with its theme of overcoming divisions. And at a ceremony for South African intelligence services, he used a 1986 speech by former Chinese President Deng on the need to crack down on corruption and respect the rule of law.
Mbeki surprised businessmen at a petroleum congress last year by drawing from both the Irish poet WB Yeats and jazz great Duke Ellington, inserting what seemed like all of Mood Indigo into his speech to evoke the mood of depression and uncertainty in the oil industry caused by the threat of terrorism and other global turmoil.
”’I could lay me down and die,”’ he declared.
Like most public figures, Mbeki, who has been president since 1999, relies heavily on the services of speech writers. But he provides most of the quotations he uses, according to Morobe.
Both Mbeki’s parents were teachers. He grew up surrounded by books that he devoured from an early age and during the long periods he spent studying and working abroad, away from his anti-apartheid activist mother and father — who was imprisoned with Mandela.
Mbeki’s address at the opening of Parliament in early March was a classic. In addition to Macbeth’s Tomorrow soliloquy, Mbeki quoted four times — in English and Xhosa — from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah: ”For you shall go out with joy, and be led out in peace.”
He urged lawmakers to work so that the mountains and hills should ”erupt in song” and the ”trees of the field clap their hands”. The performance earned a standing ovation from ANC lawmakers, but provided ammunition for political satirists and the opposition party.
Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said that although Isaiah had much to say about hope, he also had plenty to say about corruption — which has dogged the ANC.
”Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: Every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards.” – Sapa-AP