To follow Thabo Mbeki’s path to the presidency is to relive the miracle of South African change. While Nelson Mandela–along with Thabo’s father, Govan–was jailed for life, Thabo left the country, going first as a student to Sussex University and then working full time for the banned ANC. Those were difficult years for the ANC; the entire leadership had been exiled or jailed. All that remained was a small band of faithful members, led by Oliver Tambo, who roamed from one African country to the next, trying to find support. It wasn’t easy; between 1964 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, not a single ANC shot was fired either in anger or in defense inside South Africa. And yet in those years, Thabo Mbeki and his generation learned how to operate in the global arena and to live in a world of realpolitik. While Mandela’s formative political experiences were the public-defiance campaigns of the 1950s, Mbeki was schooled in the secrecy and diplomacy of an underground organization reliant on the hospitality of other countries.
This difference can show itself in interesting ways. Both Mandela and Mbeki are Xhosa, and both were born in the rural Transkei. But while Mandela maintains strong emotional ties to his birthplace and returns to it frequently, Thabo Mbeki’s first family visit to his birthplace in Mbewuleni was only in 1998–a good eight years after his return to the country. Mandela’s attitude is infused by a sense of community, family and belonging that is rooted in the countryside. Mbeki’s disinterest in his background is much more representative of the entrepreneurial, urban spirit of the new black middle classes.
And despite their common origins, the differences between the two are as much geographic as generational. If Mbeki’s formative years were spent outside South Africa, Nelson Mandela rarely traveled beyond its borders, at least not until his release from prison. Mandela, wily as he is, is an old-fashioned politician motivated by his own personal convictions. Mbeki has been influenced by political events abroad, and is far more at ease using progressive Labour-style slogans, like the “Afri- can renaissance,” to frame his ideas.
One of Thabo Mbeki’s problems has been that, charming as he is, he lacks the famous Mandela warmth. In fact, the image that dogged him during his first few years as deputy president was of a pipe-smoking theorist who shunned contact with the public. Not any longer. These days, Mbeki is out there shaking hands, kissing babies and listening to what people have to say. The turnaround is remarkable: this man once pilloried by the press for promoting censorship has a public image that grows more radiant by the day.
Perhaps Mbeki’s star is rising precisely because Mandela’s time is coming to an end. Mandela was the great peacemaker; Mbeki is much more abrasive. While Mandela’s byword has been reconciliation, Mbeki has gone on record with statements like: “We should be angry about our history of the enslavement of our people, about colonization,” and “the memory of apartheid is fading and perhaps there is too much forgiveness.” While Mandela welcomed the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with open arms, Mbeki chose to criticize the Commission’s stance on the ANC.
But Mbeki’s rhetoric resonates deeply with the public. Among the vast majority of the population, the talk these days is not so much about the joys of liberation as of the imperatives of change. In some township circles, Mandela has been demoted from a saint into an ineffective uncle figure–increasingly regarded as too lenient on whites and on crime. The hope is that the tough-talking Thabo Mbeki will reverse all that.
Nelson Mandela’s great achievement as president was to show that the rule of law would be respected from the top. Mandela himself is the image of probity and his tolerance is legendary, at odds with Mbeki’s sometimes abrasive tongue and his tendency to banish dissent and disagreement. Now with the succession assured, Mbeki is more secure than he used to be. The challenge that awaits him is not so much to appoint his political allies as to fortify a shift in economic power that might include more of his country’s population while at the same time guarding against his own tendency to authoritarian solutions that have such a long history in South Africa.
The needs of the country have changed dramatically since Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994. In the run-up to South Africa’s first democratic election, the prospect of an armed backlash by the far right was foremost in everybody’s mind. Now, nobody takes the prospect of armed insurrection seriously. Instead, the threat to South Africa stems from the poverty of its people, which is as racially biased as ever. President-in-waiting Thabo Mbeki might lack Mandela’s charisma, but then, the conciliation that Mandela so perfectly supplied is no longer so important. When Mbeki uses stronger language than Mandela, when he talks of redistribution, affirmative action and an African renaissance, he is reflecting that change. Perhaps more than anything, this is what South Africa needs.
