Thabo Mbeki. Adekeye Adebajo

Thabo had directly or indirectly learned the art of politics. Thabo later remarked about the lessons he had imbibed from his foremost political mentor, Oliver Tambo: ‘He taught me the obligation to understand the tasks of leadership, including the necessity never to tell lies, never to make false and unrealisable promises, never to say anything you do not mean or believe, and never to say anything that might evoke an enthusiastic populist response, but which would ultimately serve to undermine the credibility of our movement and struggle.’¹¹

      It was all of these formative experiences that helped to shape the future politics of Thabo Mbeki.

      3

      The path to power

      After completing his education at Sussex University in 1966, Thabo Mbeki would devote his life fully to the anti-apartheid struggle. His total dedication and commitment were qualities that even his worst enemies had to concede. From 1967 to 1969 he worked in the propaganda section of the ANC office in London – its European headquarters – where he came under the influence of senior leaders like Yusuf Dadoo. His work focused largely on issues such as nuclear disarmament; increases in fees for foreign university students in Britain; and solidarity struggles with the peoples of Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique and Vietnam. Mbeki also campaigned for the re-election of pipe-smoking Labour leader, Harold Wilson, in March 1966. His brother Moeletsi had arrived in London a year earlier, and complained to Adelaide Tambo that Thabo paid more attention to other comrades and did not talk much to him. Similar to the way his father had acted towards him, Thabo explained to the ANC matriarch that he did not intend to give his younger brother any special treatment over other comrades.¹

      During this period, Thabo met Zanele Dlamini, who had grown up in Alexandra township in Johannesburg, and to whom he was introduced in London by Adelaide Tambo. Zanele was Adelaide’s relative through marriage. She had obtained a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of the Witwatersrand, before graduating with a diploma in social policy and administration from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1968. She and Thabo were to marry in 1974. Three years Mbeki’s elder, Zanele would later become the homemaker and main breadwinner of the family in exile.

      In February 1969 the SACP central committee sent Thabo – who had contributed as a member of the editorial board to the party’s journal, the African Communist – to spend nearly two years studying at the Lenin Institute in Moscow, and then undertaking military training in advanced guerrilla warfare. Both of Mbeki’s parents had been members of the Communist Party, and communism of the Soviet variety was thus a longstanding ideological influence. In the Soviet Union Thabo learned to use a gun for the first time in his life, taking courses in managing guerrilla groups, underground organisation, radio communications, explosives, security and intelligence.

      It was in Moscow in June 1970 that the 28-year-old Mbeki joined the South African Communist Party (SACP) central committee, along with Chris Hani, who was to become a major rival. The SACP was the home of many of the South African liberation movement’s intellectual elite, and Mbeki was therefore attracted to it both ideologically and intellectually. The Soviet Union was also the ANC’s largest international funder, and Soviet communism was the orthodoxy of many of its leading members. While at the Lenin Institute Thabo immersed himself in the principles of Leninist vanguardism and ‘democratic centralism’. His subjects at the institute included philosophy, political economy, theory and tactics, Soviet history and social psychology. This broad education in Moscow, added to his studies at Sussex, would provide Mbeki with a well-rounded knowledge of both Western and Eastern political economy, and allowed him to maintain a polyglot intellectual identity. In Moscow, his personal political ambitions seem to have been undimmed: it was reported by some of the Canadian students at the institute that Thabo kept telling them that he would become South Africa’s first post-apartheid black leader.²

      Despite his military training, members of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, would later belittle Mbeki’s lack of military prowess, and regard him as more of a theoretical intellectual than a liberation fighter, someone who was more comfortable with a pen than a pistol. When he was posted to Swaziland in the mid-1970s on a military mission, some of Mbeki’s comrades, like Mac Maharaj, were critical of what they regarded as Thabo’s lack of success in building an underground movement. Matters built up into a public confrontation in which Maharaj complained that on taking over from Mbeki he had been left with an ‘empty folder’ of the latter’s activities in Swaziland. Maharaj later implied that Thabo had been removed from his post in Swaziland because he lacked the ‘personality’ for front-line operational management.³

      Such incidents reinforced perceptions of Mbeki as more of a political than a military leader, who had in any case never spent time in the ANC’s military camps. Some military cadres vowed never to be led by him, though many, including Chris Hani, had great respect for his intellect. Other references to him are also revealing of the way in which he was perceived in the exile movement. Consistent with our earlier depiction of Mbeki’s monarchical tendencies, he was nicknamed ‘the Duke of Kabulonga’, after the leafy suburb in Lusaka in which he at one time lived. Some also referred to the dapper dresser as a ‘Gucci revolutionary’.⁴ Despite these animadversions, Mbeki’s work in Swaziland undoubtedly helped to open the path for smuggling South African students out of the country, especially after the Soweto uprising in 1976.

      The other ANC cadre of his generation who matched him in promise and stature was Chris Hani, who had been elected with Thabo to the central committee of the SACP at the same age of 28. Hani and Mbeki had been born 10 days apart and about 100 kilometres from each other in the Eastern Cape in June 1942. Both had studied at Lovedale (though Hani was ahead of Mbeki in class), where they shifted allegiance from other youth groups to the ANC Youth League. Both were Renaissance men who devoured Western literary classics: Hani particularly loved the works of Homer, Sophocles and Euripides. He was also greatly influenced by his rival’s father, Govan Mbeki, who, like him, was an alumnus of Fort Hare University College.

      Unlike Mbeki, Hani was both an intellectual and a soldier: he led the ANC’s Luthuli Detachment into Rhodesia in 1967, and, after evading capture by the Rhodesian army, fled to Botswana, where he was arrested and spent time in a Botswana jail. In the mid-1980s Hani was prominent in leading the MK’s targeted assassination of apartheid collaborators such as black police officers and community councillors. While Mbeki began to champion a negotiated settlement at this time, Hani continued to push for the prosecution of the armed struggle,⁵ though he did attend a meeting with white South African business leaders in Lusaka in 1985. He was, however, distrustful of Mbeki’s leadership of these secret talks.⁶ Unlike the discreet and tactful Mbeki, Hani was outspoken, accusing the ANC leadership of nepotism for sending their sons to universities in Western Europe in preparation for taking over leadership posts in South Africa after the foot soldiers from non-elite families had overthrown the apartheid government. He dismissed the ANC Youth and Students section, which was at one time led by Mbeki, as ‘bogus’, and derided those like Thabo in the ANC headquarters in Lusaka as ‘armchair revolutionaries’.⁷ This rivalry did not stop both men from going together on a ten-day vacation with their wives to the Black Sea resort of Sochi in July 1988.

      Mbeki also famously clashed with the SACP stalwart and key ANC strategist, Joe Slovo, who remained a close ideological soul-mate of Chris Hani. Slovo was sent by the SACP central committee to Moscow to discipline Mbeki while he was at the Lenin Institute over an unspecified incident regarding Thabo’s conduct towards a woman. This episode reportedly damaged their relationship irreparably.⁸ After Slovo criticised Mbeki for an article he had written on China in the African Communist in 1972, Thabo left its editorial board and never wrote for the journal again. Despite these difficulties, both Mbeki and Slovo served on the SACP’s seven-member Politburo, created in 1977. In the 1980s Slovo saw Mbeki as opportunistically using the ANC’s opening to the West to push for the adoption of a centrist social democracy; while Mbeki regarded Slovo’s doctrinaire efforts to declare the ANC a socialist organisation as suicidally unrealistic. Thabo once reportedly told a confidant that Slovo did not like him because he had rejected the older man’s offer of mentorship.⁹ What Mbeki consistently objected to was the patronising arrogance of many white ANC and SACP members