Opinion

Mbeki: an instrument of the movement

June 06, 2003 Edition -1

By Allister Sparks

So what ails Thabo Mbeki? Why should this highly intelligent and able politician, so secure in his seat of power with a two-thirds majority in parliament and no prospect of anyone challenging him when he runs for a second term in 2003, be prone to these spasms of eccentricity that do himself and his country so much harm?

What explains the failure of Mbeki the president to be Mbeki the genial genius we all knew in the past; the paradox of the great communicator’s failure to communicate, the great charmer’s failure to charm?

There are no shorthand answers to the nuanced complexity of the man. I suspect it is all wrapped up in his past, in his experiences as a child of the struggle who was brought up more by the movement than by his parents, who was educated for a role that he himself was never allowed to choose or define, whose whole life was controlled and directed and dedicated for him with little thought for his own wishes.

He became in every aspect an instrument of the movement, and the person who made him that was his own father.

Govan Mbeki was an icon in Thabo’s life rather than a parent to his son.

There was mutual admiration, but there appeared to be little warmth in the relationship. I caught a glimpse of this when Govan Mbeki and other newly released prisoners flew to Lusaka in 1990 to meet the exiled leaders from whom they had been cut off for more than a quarter of a century.

It was an emotional moment. The exiles, with Oliver Tambo at the head, waited in a formal reception line to greet their old comrades as they filed down the gangway from the Zambian Airways aircraft, but as 78-year-old Walter Sisulu stepped on to the tarmac his son Max broke from the reception line and ran forward to throw his arms around his father and the two men stood there hugging each other and weeping with joy.

But when Govan Mbeki appeared, Thabo, who had not seen his father since leaving for Britain 28 years before, did not break ranks. He waited his turn in the reception line and formally shook his father’s hand.

I asked Govan Mbeki about this when I interviewed him at his home in Port Elizabeth much later. The conversation which followed was illuminating.

Sparks: You greeted each other, but you didn’t embrace with the enthusiasm and warmth one would have expected.

Govan Mbeki: That’s right. I didn’t do it in the way I was expected to.

Sparks: How did you feel at that moment? Didn’t you feel a great rush of warmth towards your son? You hadn’t seen him for so long.

Govan Mbeki: I don’t think I had a special feeling for seeing him after so long a time. I was meeting a group of young men who we understood were following in our footsteps.

Sparks: And your son was just one of them?

Govan Mbeki: He was one of them. That’s the important thing.

Sparks: He wasn’t special to you?

Govan Mbeki: No.

Sparks: Isn’t that unusual for a father? Had you grown distant because of the lapse of time, or was it a matter of discipline?

Govan Mbeki: It might have been both. We were brought up over a long period of time to fight for a certain cause in a certain way. We are not going to be moved easily, and I think that is important. We are not going to show our emotions. I think we have strong feelings about what we are at, about the cause of liberation that we have been fighting for.

Sparks: Are those feelings stronger than the ties of blood?

Govan Mbeki: In a way I think they are.

Later, when I asked Thabo Mbeki about his relationship with his father, he agreed that it had been distant.

This was by design, he said. In the early 50s there was a general expectation that the ANC leadership was going to be arrested and imprisoned for a long time, so both his parents decided the children should become accustomed to growing up without them. They farmed them out to relatives and friends.

“They deliberately wanted to break any close attachment,” Mbeki explained, “because in their absence we would miss them and do wrong things. So we had to learn to live with other people, on our own without our parents. I mean, that’s how we grew up. So it would have been very fake of me to pretend (at Lusaka airport) that we had a relationship other than that. These are parents, but they are also comrades, because that’s what they sought to communicate to us children – that they would disappear into jail and we must continue the struggle and not wait around and mope. That’s how it was.”

Dedication and discipline were obviously the watchwords of Thabo Mbeki’s upbringing.

It must have been a loveless childhood. There seemed to be little affection, either, between Govan Mbeki and his wife, Epainette. Both were members of the Communist Party and deeply involved in politics.

For most of their long marriage they led separate lives.

Even after his release from prison in 1987 Govan did not rejoin his wife. He returned to Port Elizabeth and lived alone there with his nurse until his death in 2001 at the age of 91.

The relationship between father and son was further strained by a history of political conflict between Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela, who clashed frequently while they were together on Robben Island.

Govan Mbeki had a reputation as a didactic and difficult man and by his own admission he and Mandela were “both men of strong views which we express openly and unashamedly to each other”.

Fellow prisoners described the relationship as “very bad”. This meant that when Thabo Mbeki returned to South Africa realising that his political future lay in Mandela’s hands, he distanced himself from his father and saw little of him. Nor did Thabo see his mother or sister Lindiwe for two years after he became deputy president.

Then he paid a flying half-hour visit to Mbewuleni in a military helicopter.

It was in Mbewuleni that Thabo Mbeki was born on June 18 1942. He had two brothers, Jama, a lawyer, who went missing – believed killed by the South African security forces in 1980 – and Moeletsi, who is now a media consultant and deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, and his sister Lindiwe.

Both his parents were teachers, and Govan had a university degree and had written several books and political articles for left-wing journals, which meant Thabo was part of an intellectual and economic elite who lived a considerable social distance apart from the poor and almost wholly uneducated peasants of the village who traded their meagre produce and bought goods at the family store.

He grew up surrounded by books, which he read avidly and omnivorously, from novels to the Communist Manifesto, and from when he was very small he was exposed to intense political debates with his parents and the many activist colleagues who visited the home.

Yet for all the distance between himself and the amaqaba of the village – the tribal folk who painted their faces with red, white and yellow ochre – he became aware at an early age of the painful hardships that afflicted their lives.

The Mbeki store also served as the local post office, and as young Thabo became literate he had to help with reading letters that came to the illiterate families from fathers and sons who had left as migrant workers for the mines of the Witwatersrand and Welkom, and with writing the dictated replies.

It was a searing exposure at an impressionable age to the bitter realities of their lives that left him with a depth of anger at the degradation inflicted on his people by colonialism and apartheid that lies just beneath the surface of his controlled charm and occasionally reveals itself in brief flashes of intemperate rancour.

There was a history of personal injustice and bitterness in the family, too.

Govan Mbeki’s father had been part of a small landed elite, but a Land and Trust Act in 1936 declared the area “white” and the family was dispossessed.

It was this which drew Govan Mbeki into protest politics when he was at high school, and it still rankled more than 60 years later when he told me with bitter sarcasm that the prime minister responsible for this and other legislation stripping blacks of their limited voting rights and restricting their movements, James Barry Hertzog, founder of the National Party, was “the real founder of the ANC”.

But it was the control over Thabo Mbeki’s life that I think shaped the young man most profoundly. Almost from the beginning his future was mapped out for him.

There was the decision that he should learn to live without his parents and grow up to be a strong comrade. When he was only nine his parents sent him to live with an uncle in the Eastern Cape town of Queenstown, where he attended primary school.

Later he transferred to another primary school in the Transkei town of Butterworth.

From there he went to Lovedale Institute, the most prestigious black high school in the country founded by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries. There he was placed in an “academic” stream and required to immerse himself in Shakespeare and the Latin texts of Julius Caesar, Livy and Catullus.

When he was 15 he joined the ANC Youth League, was elected to the executive, and in his final year at Lovedale was expelled from the school for his part in organising a protest strike.

Govan Mbeki, by then a leading figure in the South African Communist Party, next dispatched his son to Johannesburg to live with the then general secretary of the ANC, Duma Nokwe.

Govan Mbeki also asked a leading white communist, Michael Harmel, to take the young man under his wing. This was the beginning of Thabo Mbeki’s managed political education and preparation to become a future ANC leader.