Portrait of a president

It is a measure of Mark Gevisser’s skills as a writer and his enthusiasm for his subject that his biography of Thabo Mbeki leaves one thinking more warmly of South Africa’s president.

That was certainly not true of Ronald Suresh Roberts’s grubby little book, The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, published earlier in the year. No one outside the president’s claque was likely to believe an ‘intellectual biography”, which found him infallible and all his critics liars and rogues. It merely fuelled one’s sense of Mbeki’s towering ego and thin skin.

Gevisser’s lively prose has a tendency to sprawl and he sometimes overindulges a taste for symbolic landscapes and rather tenuous psychological speculation. One feels he could have told his story in fewer than 800 pages.

But Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Jonathan Ball) is easily the most serious effort by any of the president’s numerous biographers to get to grips with this elusive figure.

Eight years in the making, it was revised constantly to track Mbeki’s personal and political trajectory. The bibliography runs to 30 pages and includes interviews with more than 200 friends, relatives, colleagues and observers of every stripe, from Jonas Gwanga to Niel Barnard.

It is at once a work of genuine scholarship and of journalism — Gevisser is a former Mail & Guardian writer — which manages to be authoritative without ever becoming portentous or glum.

In his foreword, Gevisser argues that the biographer has a duty of empathy with his subject and discloses that he sometimes found this difficult, particularly over Mbeki’s baffling and self-destructive foray into the science of HIV/Aids. By and large he succeeds in balancing sympathetic engagement with critical distance.

Take Aids. In contrast with Roberts’s ‘denialism of denialism” — which seeks to present treatment activists, the local and foreign media and the scientific mainstream as victims of some mysterious collective delusion — he immediately concedes Mbeki’s dissidence, describing it as the major blot on his presidency.

Indeed, he recounts an interview where Mbeki melded two dissident theories: that immune deficiency is a result of poverty and, among middle-class Africans, of exposure to other sexually transmitted diseases.

Telling Gevisser he deeply regretted withdrawing from the Aids debate under Cabinet pressure, Mbeki also sent him an updated copy of the ‘Castro Hlongwane” document he anonymously wrote six years ago and circulated in the ANC. This describes Aids scientists as latter-day Nazi concentration camp doctors and black people who accept orthodox Aids science as ‘self-repressed” victims of a slave mentality.

‘There is no doubt as to the message Thabo Mbeki was delivering to me along with this document: he was now, as he had been since 1999, an Aids dissident,” Gevisser writes.

But given the author’s strong feelings on the issue, the chapter on the president’s Aids stance is remarkably free of finger-pointing. His aim is clearly to understand Mbeki and what shaped his outlook, rather than judge him.

Central to The Dream Deferred are the two linked themes of Mbeki’s disconnection from his roots and drive, during the eight years of his presidency, to reconnect with Africa. ‘Self-definition” and ‘self-determination” are seen to underpin many of his trademark policies, including those on Aids, Zimbabwe, black empowerment and the African renaissance.

Just as Nelson Mandela remains a Pondo aristocrat in his mental framework, Gevisser argues that Mbeki’s family background, as a descendant of the Eastern Cape’s detribalised Mfengu, born of industrious Christian amagqoboka stock, provides an important key to his psychological make-up.

It is here that he finds the seeds of Mbeki’s bookishness and workaholism. And in the tragedy of the Mfengu — raised to rural prosperity as South Africa’s first British colonial subjects, then thrown ­to the wolves of the mining industry — can be discerned the germ of the attraction-repulsion he evidently feels towards the West.

On one hand, there is his incessant harping on Europe’s racist past and his ‘anti-imperialist” spoiling on Zimbabwe and Burma; on the other, his showy quotations from Shakespeare and Yeats, effusion, on a state visit, about the ‘magnificence” of Paris, and unaccountably warm ties with George W Bush.

This is more than tactical: Mbeki appears to feel a powerful need to prove to Africa’s former overlords that Africans can appreciate and match their attainments. Hence the prestige projects (the 2010 World Cup) and virility symbols (the arms deal) so typical of his presidency, pilloried by the left as a wanton distraction from development.

Mbeki himself uses the term ‘disconnection” of his rural childhood, particularly in relation to the amaqaba (the daubed people), the traditional Xhosa in his native Mbewuleni. ‘Growing up among these amaqaba, we lived with them and all that, but we were not amaqaba,” he told Gevisser. ‘So, in that sense, we were disconnected: you can see it, you live in it, but it is not you.”

In a telling account of his complex emotions at a traditional ceremony in 1999, he describes his bemusement at ‘the liquor which they twirled with a stick until it’s frothing — we had to drink this thing”.

His difficulty in relating to Africa as it is, rather than as an idea, is borne out by his reaction to a stint as the ANC’s representative in Lagos in the late 1970s. ‘A real Africa [Nigeria] may be,” Gevisser writes, ‘but it is certainly not one he would like to bring back to South Africa: dirty, hawker-filled streets, Emir cronyism and intellectual hypocrisy, contradictory government policy, Afrika Shrine anarchy [a reference to Fela Kuti’s musical saturnalias], Abacha madness.”

One suspects that it is precisely the fear of a Nigerian-style dystopia that makes him so determined not to admit Jacob Zuma into the presidential office.

Superimposed on these ‘frontiers” was Mbeki’s tragic disconnection from his family, beginning with the frequent absences of his activist father and collapse of his parents’ marriage and climaxing with his 27-year exile.

Govan Mbeki might have been a brave and dedicated man, but The Dream Deferred makes it clear that he suffered from an incapacity for familial tenderness, which his son returned in spades, not writing him a single letter while he was in jail.

It highlights the poignant contrast between the joyful reunion of the Sisulus in Lusaka in 1990 and Thabo and Govan’s formal handshake. Govan told the media later he felt ‘not much finer than seeing the others. You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade!”

Gevisser argues that Mbeki’s sense of personal loss prompted his adoption of the ANC as a surrogate family and ANC president Oliver Tambo as a surrogate father and that, like Govan, he typically subordinates the personal to the political.

The inversion of ordinary human priorities is strongly evoked by the tale of his youngest brother, Jama, apparently murdered in 1982 by agents of Leabua Jonathan. As president, Gevisser suggests, Mbeki had not pursued the matter with the Lesotho government because he did not want to ‘rock the boat” in that chronically unstable country.

But Gevisser’s apologia goes well beyond his sympathetic account of Mbeki’s fractured and lonely youth. The Dream Deferred drives home the debt of gratitude we all owe him for his spearhead role in South Africa’s peaceful settlement.

Mbeki is shown as among the first leaders to grasp that the apartheid state could not be toppled by force, that the ANC had to be sold to the ‘imperialist” West despite the knee-jerk suspicions of Umkhonto weSizwe and the communist party and that Soviet-style command economics were not for South Africa.

So began his long struggle with the militant left — personalised in his recurrent clashes with Joe Slovo, Chris Hani and Mac Maharaj — which came to see him as a Byzantine back-stabber and suit-and-tie elitist who enjoyed hobnobbing with the enemy.

Gevisser provides a fascinating insight into the fractious politics of exile and the deepening rifts in the movement as Mbeki tightened his grip on the ANC’s diplomatic and propaganda efforts.

He observes that ‘as the Eighties developed, word began to spread that Mbeki was ‘the darling of social democracy’ and was ‘pursuing a negotiated settlement; that he doesn’t want to fight’.”

His portrayal of the militants is not particularly friendly. He acknowledges the racial undercurrent in Mbeki’s challenge to Slovo and the latter’s opinion that the relationship soured after he disciplined his younger colleague for an (unspecified) lapse in Moscow.

But he also records the exile consensus that the doctrinaire Slovo ‘set aside personal loyalties in a way that was extreme even within the ANC — was ruthlessly single-minded and had to be in charge”. The SACP leader is shown as really buying the politics of compromise only after the Boipatong massacre.

Mbeki’s prescience and tactical flexibility are underscored in his wooing of the Afrikaner establishment and, post-1990, his ploy of gradually spiking the Inkatha Freedom Party’s guns while appearing to pander to it.

A Leninist intriguer by instinct, he acted less out of respect for ethnic diversity than the understanding that the ANC must lay its hands on the state by moving as quickly as possible to the ballot box. Hence his contempt for hard-line grandstanding during the orchestrated anti-settlement violence of the early 1990s.

‘Comrade Mac [Maharaj] has spoken of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions [against the FW de Klerk government],” he sneered at an ANC national executive committee meeting. ‘We would advance an absurd position [if we did this].”

But Gevisser does not skirt Mbeki’s less savoury side. In a scintillating chapter on the ‘seduction” of liberal Afrikaners and Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and their ‘morning after” remorse, he highlights Mbeki’s greatest political failing and potential downfall — his singular gift for turning comrades and admirers into enemies.

‘What on earth happened to the charming, smiling, generous, warm, straightforward Thabo Mbeki we got to know in Dakar?” asks Max du Preez of the 1987 Idasa encounter. ‘The man who is today the president of South Africa does not possess one of the above attributes.”

A sense of betrayal, of being led by the nose, has been a widespread reaction to Mbeki’s presidential term. Is it a case of ‘people don’t change, they merely stand more revealed”, to use Robert Lowell’s formulation, or has this lover of poetry and jazz been twisted out of shape by the cares of office?

Drawn from a bad Langston Hughes poem Mbeki loves quoting, Gevisser’s title, ‘a dream deferred”, refers to the dangers of unfulfilled black expectations.

Mbeki evidently thinks continuing white racism is the obstacle. But many would say his own leadership has contributed to the stagnation of the ‘dream”.

It is not just a question of his policy disaster on Zimbabwe, the snail’s pace of poverty relief and the wasted years on HIV/Aids. It is not even about his political failures — that his own movement is now split from top to bottom and that he faces formidable internal opposition, a ‘coalition of the wounded”, to use Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya’s ringing phrase.

The problem is that his methods have left so many people feeling disempowered and excluded from the national project — particularly sympathetic whites, organised workers and the youth. Mbeki leads by hectoring, sidelining and stifling, rather than by inspiring. This is the meaning of the service protest upsurge and of the Jacob Zuma phenomenon.

Surprisingly for someone so interested in literature, Gevisser hardly analyses the president’s literary tastes. Why, for example, is he so enamoured of the Irish poet, Yeats, a proto-fascist and friend of Mussolini’s propagandist, Ezra Pound?

The answer might lie in Yeats’s aspirations for human society, expressed in his book A Vision — ‘an aristocratic civilisation in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical, every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men’s hands, all dependent upon a few —”

Of course, Mbeki is not a fascist, nor does he believe mass poverty is desirable. But the rigid hierarchy Yeats extols would have resonated with him.

He believes, at base, that leaders should lead and followers follow, in ‘top-down reform with a vengeance”, as the economist Stephen Gelb described Gear.

He believes in politics as the domain of the few, to be conducted in corridors and behind closed doors, with the many weighing in every few years by crossing a ballot paper. He believes, as Gevisser puts it, that power is won and lost through conspiracy.

It is a style of politics which, because of the rise of mass participatory democracy in the 1980s, cannot work in South Africa. Mbeki’s inability to understand the country’s distinctive political culture, forged in his absence, is perhaps his most fatal ‘disconnection”.