Ronald Suresh Roberts’s ode to Mbeki

Stubborn, contradictory, a lame duck and surly. These are just some of the words used to describe Thabo Mbeki. But writer Ronald Suresh Roberts takes a different view.

Roberts has mounted the first systematic defence of Mbeki’s controversial presidency in a persuasive analysis of the historical and global traditions behind many of Mbeki’s decisions.

His book, Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, will infuriate a long list of journalists, commentators and members of civil society whom Roberts censures.

They include Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya (a ‘colonial creature”), Business Day writers Karima Brown and Vukani Mde and editor Peter Bruce, political commentator Xolela Mangcu, journalism professor Anton Harber, former Progressive Party MP Helen Suzman (a ‘South African illiberal”), author and journalist William Mervin Gumede and Wits academic Achille Mbembe.

In the book, a copy of which was forwarded to the Mail & Guardian, Roberts places Mbeki’s leadership at the centre of a careful blend of political philosophy (the writing of, among others, David Hume, Frantz Fanon and Nicolo Machiavelli), historical theories on race (the imperialist tradition versus the resistance tradition), Mbeki’s own writing and the coverage of the South African media.

The book suggests that Mbeki’s presidency has been crudely misunderstood, particularly by the media. He is likely to come under fire for his justification of many of Mbeki’s controversial policy stances, which have alienated him from many ordinary South Africans and a large segment of his own party.

Writes Roberts: ‘I want to examine what Mbeki meant when, following a gathering of African intellectuals in Dakar, Senegal, he quoted Ngugi wa Thiong’o on the imperative to ‘reject the coloniser’s interpretation of reality—’.”

Fit to Govern attempts to identify and critique what Mbeki calls the ‘imperialist tradition” from within what he calls the ‘resistance tradition”.

Roberts says the Mbeki ‘enigma” has been generated by ‘an old and largely unreconstructed media oligarchy bereft of electoral influence” with an inability to contextualise Mbeki’s transformation agenda beyond embedded stereotypes about the ‘native”.

He cites as an example of the ‘colonial South African discourse” an M&G article in 1996 headlined: ‘Is Thabo Mbeki fit to rule?”

‘The ideologically loaded notion of native ‘fitness’, previously taken as obvious by the anti-apartheid forces, had become a consensual agenda,” writes Roberts.

The inability of the media, some business leaders, elements of civil society, leaders of the union movement and opposition political parties to free themselves from the ‘settler consciousness in post-1994 South Africa [that] has swung wildly between romanticising and demonising the native” means that Mbeki’s leadership on, among other issues, HIV/Aids and Zimbabwe have been ‘treated as mere invective without historical grounding or relevance”.

Roberts begins his chapter on Zimbabwe: ‘The word ‘Zimbabwe’ is the Pavlovian Bell of the white South African mind. Once the word rings out, all remnants of liberal good sense retreat, replaced by salivation and loud barking.”

He builds his case on statements and interventions by Mbeki on the Zimbabwe crisis, saying the media and commentators have conveniently ignored these because Mbeki’s methods are at odds with the preferred Western ‘doctrine of democratisation by gun-barrel”, of which Iraq is the latest example.

‘Citing Ruth First’s classic critique of military coups, The Barrel of A Gun, Mbeki stressed the pointlessness not only of force-fed democracy, but of arbitrarily defined milestones, ‘democratic musts’, that schematically measure supposed progress towards democracy, often at the expense of realities on the ground.”

On HIV/Aids he argues that Mbeki has been faulted ‘less for denying than for asking questions” about internationally accepted HIV/Aids treatment.

He builds a convincing argument for how Mbeki’s stance on HIV/Aids has been misunderstood and in turn capitalised on by powerful individuals such as Supreme Court of Appeal Judge Edwin Cameron.

‘In the end, because of Mbeki’s courageous flak-taking, black South Africans, who have their way in general elections, but not yet in the apartheid media, received a far more cautious and sensible antiretroviral roll-out, compared with the frenzied drugs campaign that had been advocated by [Zackie] Achmat and [Edwin] Cameron at their most enraptured,” wrote Roberts.

Roberts is likely to hit heavy flak from Aids activists over his defence of Mbeki’s philosophical foot-dragging.

But Roberts predicted criticism. In the acknowledgements, he quotes the president: ‘As you know the representatives of the colonial ‘mother’ will be waiting to do everything possible to discredit the book  [I hope] that such notoriety as it may gain because of the vituperative assessments — would encourage some people to want to find out for themselves why your book is an object of what will surely be the most negative criticism.”