Thabo Mbeki has often been accused in post-apartheid South Africa of carrying a racial chip on his shoulder. I once asked one of the only white ANC cadres billeted in Lusaka in the Eighties if he ever encountered anything like this in exile. He responded thoughtfully by comparing Mbeki with Chris Hani. “Chris would go out of his way to make you feel totally comfortable” — precisely because you were white and had made the leap into the liberation movement — “but you couldn’t say the same for Thabo.”
Mbeki “never expressed anything even approaching prejudice or reverse discrimination”, but he seemed to have an “acute sense” of unintentional or residual racism from white comrades — something to which Hani seemed to be impervious or chose to ignore.
The comrade recalls Mbeki once saying to him that “in the mind of a black person, even with comrades, there is a notion that this white person thinks I can’t do the job. And in the mind of the black person then, is the notion that ‘I’m going to show the white person that I can do the job’.”
The story reminded me of an exhange between Mbeki and a Haitian-American academic, Robert Fatton, that took place in the Canadian Journal of African Studies in 1984. Fatton criticised the ANC for its purge of four white Trotskyite comrades, led by Martin Legassick and Linda Ensor, writing that the ANC severed its “links to its most valuable and creative source of self-criticism”.
Mbeki responded with a rage barely concealed by sarcasm: “The rest of us in the ANC are, undoubtedly, a bunch of confused, swinish lackeys of the petty bourgeoisie, unable to appreciate the pearls of wisdom offered by half-a-dozen white intellectuals based in London.”
Clearly, Mbeki was sensitive to the suggestion that black South African revolutionaries were dependent on white leadership and that they had to prove to their white comrades that they were up to the job of liberating their own people. He always bristled when he believed he was being told what to do by people who think they know better than him; all the more so when they are not black Africans.
It was to become the source of so much of his public contention when he became president — who were his former colonial oppressors to tell him how to deal with Robert Mugabe and HIV/Aids? Who were white epidemiologists to make sweeping generalisations about the sexual behaviour of African men?
Again and again in the years after 1990 he upbraided white leftists, white journalists, white captains of industry who presumed to talk for the African or, worse still, to tell him what to do in the cause of liberating his own people.
Certainly Mbeki had lovers (Ann Nicholson), mentors (Michael Harmel) and close comrades (Alec Erwin) from the white left. And the closest he ever came to having an close family was his white left “Sussex Set” in Britain. Among his parents’ closest friends were Ray Alexander and Bettie du Toit.
But “self-determination” was always his lodestar and much of his relationship with the white left — or white intellectuals — was dogged by his perception of the dynamic of paternalism and his impulse to correct it.
Nowhere was this stronger than in his long and difficult relationship with Joe Slovo: Mbeki was convinced that the bad blood between them was because he refused to be the South African Communist Party leader’s acolyte.
This dynamic explains, in part, the attitude Mbeki had to the white left when he returned to South Africa, and is best illustrated by a story Frederick van Zyl Slabbert tells. The two men became close during the Eighties as part of Mbeki’s seduction campaign to get white South Africans to see that they could trust a black man in power.
With Slabbert, as with many others, it worked. But, when Mbeki returned from exile, the two men lost touch. When they bumped into each other in 1993, Mbeki asked Slabbert to come and see him. “If you were in my position,” Mbeki asked, “what would you do?”
“Thabo,” Slabbert responded, in his habitually candid way, “I would appoint five or six expert committees in key areas to tell me every day how stupid I am.”
It was exactly at this time that Mbeki was beginning to develop his own African Renaissance ideology. Perhaps he had just re-read Biko: “So immersed are [whites] in prejudice that they do not believe that blacks can formulate their thoughts without white guidance or trusteeship.” [Perhaps, then, he heard in Slabbert’s suggestion, “this white person thinks I can’t do the job”. Slabbert insists that he did not mean this, but it was too late: he tried, repeatedly, to get another appointment, if only to explain himself, but found himself stonewalled and eventually gave up.
When seduction is used as a political strategy — as Mbeki used it with white South Africans — it often has a bitter “morning after” misunderstanding and betrayal.
Mbeki’s conquests could not, on his return to South Africa, get the access to him they previously enjoyed: in part because he had moved on to new constituencies (such as the black middle class); in part because he had replaced his rhetoric of reconciliation with one that often seemed too acutely aware of the racism that still exists in our society.
Mbeki volunteered to me that his mission might have led him to mislead white South Africans. It was his job, he said, to get white people to feel comfortable with the notion of inevitable black leadership. And the by-product of this was a “particular definition” of national reconciliation: “things stay the same” for whites.
Mandela became the champion of this perspective, but when Mbeki started questioning it, he says, some white people said: “Now this is a departure from the national reconciliation of Mandela. What is this talk about transformation? This is now a different Mbeki. He never said these things to us.” They thus felt betrayed by him.
Mbeki felt betrayed too: largely by the way the white constituency he so assiduously cultivated seemed to take sides in the rivalry between himself and Cyril Ramaphosa. As Saki Macozoma put it to me: “[Now that] Thabo appeared to be an ordinary member with a low profile, people [in the business community] hitched their wagon to Cyril’s star. Thabo was dropped — seen as not important any more.”
By the time the whites in the business community realised they had backed the wrong horse, it was too late to make amends. The new deputy president, notoriously brittle, felt burned and abandoned, and his previously celebrated door to the business world slammed shut.
Throughout the rest of the decade this relationship would deterioriate — and with it, Mbeki believes, his relationship with the media.
Ever since 1991 Mbeki’s inner circle suspected the promotion of Ramaphosa was a plot hatched by white-left intellectuals and internal activists who feared Mbeki’s Africanist-exile bent.
The prime suspect in this plot was, fascinatingly, not so much the establishment “Anglo” press, a slice of which Ramaphosa would one day come to own, but the small and highly influential independent press that once was the liberation movement’s greatest supporter.
I know because I worked for the Mail & Guardian at the time, and we were subjected to sustained diatribes about our betrayal of the cause. Mbeki and the people around him came to loathe the newspaper with a passion bordering on obsession.
There was no question that Ramphosa was adored by the white left. This was partly because the politics of race played out differently in the internal movement than it did in exile. Non-Africans were allowed into leadership of the ANC only from 1985; the United Democratic Front, on the other hand, made non-racialism an article of faith from the start.
Within the ANC-in-exile, white comrades had to prove their absolute commitment to the struggle and be prepared to die for it; the UDF, on the other hand, allowed whites to be part of the movement even if they did not renounce their lives of privilege.
Black and white South Africans often worked side by side professionally in the internal movement, as unionists, lawyers, journalists, clerics and so on.
Finally it came down to scale: while there was a minuscule number of whites actively involved in the ANC in exile, one of the victories of the UDF was the way it attracted comparatively large numbers of whites into its activities.
It is true also that, in Mbeki’s first years of office, the — then — “white left” M&G took a characteristically robust approach to what it perceived to be his weaknesses.
“Is this Man Fit to Rule?”, the paper asked in 1996. But that was later. Mbeki came to power in 1994 with the paper’s goodwill: he was a “suave and experienced diplomat”, the paper’s editor, Anton Harber, wrote, a “moderator and conciliator” who would “spread the message of unity and reconciliation”.
Mbeki believes the opprobrium heaped on him after 1994 was because he did not play this role as expected.
One of the unmistakable effects of the Mbeki years on the ANC is that there are fewer members of the “white left” active in the party, or in senior government and political positions.
There is an intense bitterness about this among many people who gave their lives to the struggle, and then to public service, and who feel shut out of an increasingly racialised power-elite and official ideology.
Did Mbeki institute a “purge” of the white left, and, if so, was it because of an over-sensitivity to being patronised? Was it, rather, the inevitable consequence of affirmative action, and the right-sizing that comes with representivity? Or was it, perhaps, a symptom of the ideological shift in the Mbeki-led ANC, away from positions that were the preserve of the white left? Was Derek Hanekom dropped from Thabo Mbeki’s first Cabinet in 1999 because he was white, or because he espoused an approach to rural poverty-alleviation at odds with the Mbeki mantra of creating a new black middle class?
One of Mbeki’s inner circle told me, a few years ago, what he thought the problem with the white left and its “house organ”, the Mail & Guardian, was. Middle-class whites and Indians, he told me, used to have inordinate influence in the struggle, “because we needed their resources” — their cars, their houses, their libraries. Now, however, there was a black middle class that provided these resources itself: “And so they [the white left] have lost their influence. That’s why they are angry.”
I was struck by the way my interlocutor used “us” and “them”; it signalled, to me, a racialisation of struggle completely at odds with the ANC’s own “non-racial” ideology. Certainly, Thabo Mbeki was correct to insist that there could be “no reconciliation without transformation”, and that blacks and whites alike had to look the country’s racist past squarely in the eye. Certainly, too, there is more than enough racism about in this country for Mbeki — or any black person — to find grounds for grievous offence.
But could there have been another way of communicating such concerns? One of the most profound — and winning — insights of the ANC’s liberation struggle was its unique understanding of the place of non-indigenous South Africans on African soil. Not just for moral reasons, but for practical ones too, it is an understanding that has to be maintained, balanced against the legitimate need to reckon with the way racism and inequality still stand in the way of social progress.
Mbeki shares this insight, as is evident by the work he did while in exile and, more recently, by his extraordinary 1996 “I am an African” speech. But the way he puts it into practice has often been coloured by his personal experience of how race works, particularly within the struggle, and by his perception of a dynamic of paternalism that compromises self-determination.