Like Nkrumah, Thabo Mbeki similarly sought to modernise South Africa and to restore Africa’s past glory through his promotion of an African Renaissance. When in office he concentrated power and decision-making in the Presidency and wielded close control of his party and of parliament, appointing all the provincial premiers as well as the most senior members of the civil service. Although Mbeki may not have used sacred symbols to strengthen his rule, he certainly made use of the power of what Mazrui calls ‘romantic awe’. His references to and invocation of the prose of pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah and Walter Rodney as well as the poetry of Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes and Léopold Senghor served to legitimise his role as the president of the last African country to be liberated from alien rule.
In his most famous essay, written in 1966 shortly after Nkrumah fell from power, Mazrui depicted the Ghanaian leader as a ‘Leninist Czar’, a royalist revolutionary.5 The Kenyan scholar argued that Nkrumah had ruled in a monarchical fashion and thus forfeited the organisational effectiveness of a Leninist party structure. The Ghanaian leader had wanted ‘Nkrumahism’ to leave a similar historical and revolutionary mark to that of Leninism. As Mazrui noted, ‘Nkrumah’s tragedy was a tragedy of excess, rather than of contradiction. He tried to be too much of a revolutionary monarch.’ Mazrui concluded that Nkrumah would be celebrated more as a great pan-African than as a great Ghanaian, an insight that has proved to be accurate.
The second typology of African leadership that is helpful in understanding Mbeki is that of the prophetic ruler. As Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg, in their innovative study Personal Rule in Black Africa, noted: ‘The prophet, political or religious, is a revolutionary – that is, one who prophesies a better future, whose attainment requires the radical transformation of the present.’6 Two key characteristics are associated with prophetic rulers.
Firstly, these leaders are charismatic: they have charm and mystique, and their personality is often closely tied to their prophetic rule. This charisma draws people to them, and in turn they feed their followers with their oratorical brilliance and magnetic presence. Prophets express the hopes, resentments and fears of their people, and they are the living embodiment of popular aspirations for a better future.
African prophetic leaders like Nkrumah have set out to develop personality cults in which they are deified and worshipped unquestioningly. Like European monarchs of old, prophetic rulers in Africa have sought to embody the state: it is in them that sovereignty resides. The royal European expression L’état, c’est moi (I am the state) has found resonance in contemporary Africa. Though lacking the charisma and mobilising skills of Nkrumah, Mbeki showed signs of prophetic rule in his lyrical oratory and vision of an African Renaissance which prophesied that Africa would own the twenty-first century. He thus sought, as a prophetic leader, to chart a glorious future for the continent’s socio-economic renewal.
The second main feature of prophetic rule is its religious dimension. This rule often becomes singleminded in achieving its goals, as sacrifice and the suspension of immediate political and economic desires are urged on followers in order to bring about the ‘revolution’. As in the religious sphere, the rewards of the people await them in heaven, and they are therefore urged to forgo the possession of ‘earthly’ material things until the paradise arrives, though it must be said that African political prophets have sometimes built their own mansions on earth. At the present stage of Africa’s socio-economic development, miracles have proved difficult to perform, as the stuff of which miracles are made has been in short supply. Economic development is, after all, a painstaking, gradual process which requires decades of careful planning, adequate capital and competent technocrats to achieve. The vision of paradise which overwhelmed religious disciples and guaranteed their adherence to the true faith is simply not within the African prophet’s capacity to bring about rapidly, as the cases of Nkrumah and Mbeki proved. It is this failure to fortify the faith of the people through healing and other signs of divine approbation – rapid socio-economic development, the elimination of poverty, and the transformation of society – that cost both Nkrumah and Mbeki their political lives.
Finally, Nkrumah and Mbeki can also be seen as tragic figures in African Shakespearian dramas. Whereas Nkrumah might be viewed as a Julius Caesar, Coriolanus best mirrors Mbeki’s fate. Nkrumah’s biographer Bankole Timothy observes that the Ghanaian leader was accused of trying to build ‘a great African Empire with himself as Caesar’.7 As Shakespeare’s play recounts, the Roman Senate made Caesar perpetual dictator of Rome, just as the Ghanaian parliament effectively made Nkrumah Ghana’s dictator. Both Caesar and Nkrumah fell from power after suspicions arose that they would turn their republics into monarchies, and both were betrayed by close associates and lieutenants. Four decades after the military had toppled Nkrumah in a coup, Mbeki paid a melancholy tribute to Nkrumah’s tragic fate when he reflected: ‘We were mere schoolboys when we saw the black star rise on our firmament, as the colonial Gold Coast crowned itself with the ancient African name of Ghana. We knew then that the promise we had inherited would be honoured. The African giant was awakening! But it came to pass that the march of African time snatched away that promise. Very little seemed to remain along its path except the footprints of despair.’8
As Mbeki’s finest biographer, Mark Gevisser, reminds us, during his student days in Moscow Mbeki’s favourite play had been Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. This was the tragedy of a heroic Roman soldier whose demise was brought about by his obduracy and pride. Like Julius Caesar, it is a play about politics and betrayal. Coriolanus becomes a war hero, is banished from Rome, defects to the Volscians, and is subsequently killed. But rather than the conventional perception of Coriolanus as a ‘vainglorious proto-fascist’ and a ‘tyrant driven by hubris’, Mbeki instead regarded the Roman soldier as the model for a twentieth-century revolutionary, noting that Coriolanus was full of ‘truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice, absence of self-seeking, brotherliness, heroism, optimism’. Mbeki admired Coriolanus for being prepared to go to war against his own people, whom he described as ‘rabble … an unthinking mob, with its cowardice, its lying, its ordinary people-ness’.9 The similarity of the fates of Coriolanus and Mbeki is eerie: both were seen as aloof and arrogant; both refused to kowtow to popular perceptions of how a leader should behave; and both were ultimately brought down by character flaws of obduracy and arrogance.
2
Coming of age
Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki was born in the village of Mbewuleni near Idutywa in the rural Transkei (now the Eastern Cape province) on 18 June 1942.1 The area – whose landscape is marked by mountains, hills, rivers, hamlets and homesteads – is the home of Xhosa speakers, who were among the earliest indigenous South Africans to convert in large numbers to Christianity, acquire a missionary education and participate in the colonial economy. From this educated, acculturated class came the future leaders of the African nationalist movement in South Africa. Indeed, the Eastern Cape has provided much of the ANC’s leadership from its inception in 1912. (Nelson Mandela was also a member of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Xhosa Nostra’.)
Thabo was the eldest son of Govan and Epainette Mbeki. His parents were middle-class izifundiswa (educated ones) and communists, whose own fathers had been peasant farmers and devout Christians, part of the Westernised elite. Both Govan and Epainette were deeply involved in the struggle for racial justice in South Africa until their deaths in 2001 and 2014 respectively.
Thabo’s father, Govan – affectionately referred to by younger peers as ‘Oom Gov’ – was a teacher and journalist, who attended the same Methodist missionary secondary school as Mandela – Healdtown in Fort Beaufort – where he excelled in Latin. He went on to study politics and psychology at Fort Hare University College, whose famous alumni would include such future ANC leaders as Mandela and Oliver Tambo. This elite black university in the Eastern Cape trained as well many of the first generation of post-independence African leaders such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, and Botswana’s Seretse Khama.
While at Fort Hare, Govan was influenced ideologically by two young white communists – Eddie and Win Roux – who were on a proselytising honeymoon in the Eastern