A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream
400
A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream
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Overview
A gripping social history of South Africa's past and future and beautifully narrated by one of Africa's most esteemed journalists, From Struggle to Liberation sheds light on the future of the nation under a new regime. With unprecedented access to Thabo Mbeki and the top brass in the African National Congress, Mark Gevisser weaves a nuanced portrait of the black experience under apartheid. Revelations about the current president and the politics that continue to shape South Africa include:
- Thabo Mbeki's difficult relationship with his own political activist and largely absent father Govan Mbeki, who was imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela.
- How the death of his son Kwanda in the diamond mines and the murder of his brother Jama directly affected his leadership and will continue to shape the governance of Africa for years to come.
- The reasons behind Mbeki's puzzling refusal to admit that the HIV virus causes AIDS, which in South Africa claims 800 lives per day, and his support of corrupt governments such as Zimbabwe's.
- Inside rivalry between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, the populist leader destined to take over as president in 2009.
This accessible account of a monumental period in world history is the definitive look at contemporary South Africa.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780230620209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2009 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Mark Gevisser is one of South Africa's leading journalists. He is the Southern Africa correspondent for The Nation, and his work has appeared in many publications in the United States and elsewhere, including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Guardian, and Village Voice. Educated at Yale University, he currently lives in South Africa.
Mark Gevisser is the author of the prizewinning A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa. He is the coeditor of Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, and other publications. He is the writer of the documentary film The Man Who Drove with Mandela, which won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Born in Johannesburg in 1964, he now lives in France.
Read an Excerpt
A Legacy of Liberation
Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream
By Mark Gevisser
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2009 Mark GevisserAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-62020-9
CHAPTER 1
THE MBEKIS
"THE JEWS OF KAFFIRLAND"
The road to Mbewuleni, Thabo Mbeki's birthplace, takes one up from the commerce of the market town of Idutywa into the hills and the mist. Even on a midsummer's day in January, the landscape is a paradox, both verdant and barren, eerily depopulated in contrast with the teeming settlements strung along the national highway below. Here there is a school, here a motley collection of ramshackle buildings gathered into a compound. Suddenly, in the mist, a woman with a cage of chickens at her side will appear, awaiting a ride into town, or an old man in an unthreading suit and perfectly notched tie will tip his hat as he hobbles along.
It is early 1999, just weeks before Mbeki is to become Nelson Mandela's successor. I am driving to Mbewuleni with his 83-year-old mother, Epainette. Six decades prior, in 1940, she and her husband, Govan—young, educated, urbanized middle-class communist pioneers out to make a Brave New World—had moved here to start their family, to set up their cooperative store, to find a way of living independent of government salaries, and to attempt to put their ideologies of rural improvement into practice.
Their own fathers had been among the elite of the Transkei, the former native reserve, or bantustan, that was the home of the Xhosa-speaking people in the Eastern Cape. Both had been archetypal "black Englishmen," one a schoolmaster and the other a colonially appointed headman. Both had built the first schools and churches in their home communities; both had been converted Christians and severe evangelists; both, too, had been prosperous farmers, the very backbone of the rural economy, and among the first African landowners in the Transkei to build four-walled stone houses. These houses still stand, at the extreme southern and northern borders of the Transkei, sentinels of Western civilization, bookending the region's desperate poverty with their ambitions, narrating the tragedy of a century's battle between these ambitions and a system determined to see them thwarted.
Nowhere is this tragedy more evident than in Mbewuleni, and as we drive up into the highlands above Idutywa, Epainette Mbeki surveys the disused terraces and eroded valleys with a quiet anguish. The desolation of this land, like the difficult life she has led—in poverty, without her husband and sons—signals a failure of the aspirations of both her and her parents, even if South Africa is now a democracy and her oldest son about to become its president.
Eleven miles out of Idutywa, we turn off the road and bump down a sodden track, through the stolid zinc-roofed homes of the amagqoboka (Christian converts), past the school, down into a dry riverbed, and up the other side to the Mbeki homestead, which is situated among the conical huts at the entry to the qaba (traditional Xhosa) section of the village. Epainette Mbeki, who moved closer to town in 1974, now leases the property out. Decayed by poverty and the weather, it is in a state of disrepair, with a weed-filled yard and broken windows.
But when Thabo was born here, in 1942, the homestead was renowned for its order. "There was nothing here when we arrived," Epainette tells me. "But that was marvelous, because once we set up, we saw how people came to change from their unproductive habits and how they began trying self-improvements." In the beginning, "the locals would just throw off their blankets and offload the goods, naked as they were! But then the men started wearing trousers, and the women discarded the red things and would put a German print on. It was, I am sure, taking an example from us."
For better or for worse, Thabo Mbeki's own approach to leadership would be rooted in this ethos: from his determination to bring South Africa to a negotiated settlement in the 1980s to his questioning of AIDS orthodoxies, to the way he behaved in the political drama that would lead to his 2008 downfall. His grandparents were among the very first Christian converts in southern Africa; his parents became missionaries for a different cause, communism; his own politics were forged by the Leninist notion of "vanguardism"—revolution led by the educated few, always a few steps ahead of their people. He was a third-generation prophet in the wilderness; his own lodestar African self-determination.
* * *
As we enter the Mbeki homestead at Mbewuleni, a cluster of women gather diffidently around Epainette Mbeki. There is not a man in sight. Encouraged by her, they have made bread-baking trays out of petrol cans and are looking for a loan to build a bakery. Mrs. Mbeki, who was responsible for sending many of their daughters to school, interacts with them the way her evangelizing parents might have done; the way her son does when he too meets poor, needy people—paternal but not patronizing; schoolmarmish but not disciplinarian. She is with them but not of them, removed, somewhat, by her twinset and her education.
One woman, a retired schoolteacher, has none of the reserve of the others: "Where is that son of yours?" she asks Mrs. Mbeki. "He is our child ... we have things to say to him. We have no telephones, no Eskom [electricity supply], no water, nothing. We are struggling. We want to say to Thabo Mbeki that we are getting impatient."
As we get into the car to leave, Mrs. Mbeki shakes her head: "I've told Thabo the villagers want to see him. But he told me that this is the very last village in the whole of South Africa he will ever come to." It is a comment that says much about Mbeki, about his stern disavowal of the sentimentality of ethnic identity and the favor of familial patronage. It says much, too, about the complexity of his relationship with his roots: He has no demonstrable attachment to Mbewuleni or, for that matter, to his family. His modernism does not seem to sit easily with the conventions of being a member of a clan, of having a "hometown" or roots. There is no apparent nostalgia for the tobacco-and-cow dung–scented hills of the Transkei.
A decade later, by the time he was unseated from the presidency, Thabo Mbeki had still not returned to Mbewuleni. Shortly after my first 1999 visit to the village, however, he did go to the birthplace of his father, about 38 miles to the east, at Nyili along the Tsomo River. He arrived by helicopter, to be welcomed home in a ritual that had him draped in beads, eating the inner armpit of a goat, and being rubbed with the resin of a sacred tree. After a life of exile, of wandering, he was being returned to his clan, the amaZizi.
But this was neither a personal visit nor any pilgrimage into his past. Rather, it was a set-piece performance for the election campaign that would lead to his inauguration as president a month later. Photographs of Mbeki participating in the event sought to project the image of an African identity and a connection with rural roots in one too often accused of having neither. A few months later, sitting in the drafty downstairs nowhereland of Mbeki's official residence in Pretoria, I asked him what his relationship was to the tradition he now seemed willing to explore. "We grew up at somewhat of a distance from that kind of thing," he told me. "I've never been to my mother's place, and I only went to my father's place when I came back from exile.... So really, we had no connection, it didn't make any impact on us, we were cut off from it."
In Mbewuleni, he told me, "we were sort of disconnected from many things in the surroundings. Growing up among these amaqaba [traditional people], we lived with them, but we were not amaqaba. So in that sense, we were disconnected: You can see it, you live in it, but it is not you." Even though the Mbeki children were baptized, "there was no Christianity in our house," and so they grew up "disconnected," too, from theamagqoboka [Christians] across the valley with whom they went to school. The "detachment" he experienced as a child was "exacerbated by the fact that we went into exile" and that he was forced to stay away from home for three decades. Attempting to salvage some value from his history in the way that exiles and other itinerants do, he concluded that "growing up in this rather disconnected way meant that you could see things from the outside."
Only now, in his late middle age—draped in beads and rubbed with strange resin—did the price of this "disconnection" come flooding over him: "What the old people were saying was that you, as an individual, need to come back. This is where your grandfather was, these are the connections. In a sense, they claim you back."
* * *
The amaZizi, originally from the mountains to the north, were part of a group of outsiders within the Xhosa kingdom known as the Mfengu, or "Fingoes." Early converts to Christianity, the Mfengu became British collaborators: soldiers (and buffers) against the Xhosas in the interminable frontier wars of the nineteenth century, and consumers and traders who spread the light of European capitalism into the communalist darkness of Africa. Many, like Thabo Mbeki's grandfather Skelewu, even earned the vote, which was extended to all citizens of the Cape Colony in 1852, regardless of race, as long as they met property or income requirements. The Mfengu would become known by white traders as "the Jews of Kaffirland," for they were educated, aggressive, and unhampered by the feudal restrictions imposed by traditional hierarchies. They thrived, and soon became an elite: the first Africans to ride horses, to farm commercially, to build four-walled houses. Their children, educated and Christianized, became the region's first African teachers and journalists, preachers, and clerks.
But the story of the Mbeki family, from aspiring gentility to near penury and rebellion, describes the quiet but devastating drama of the black South African rural experience in the twentieth century: the ruthless destruction of the South African peasant economy by the state and the mining industry. The colonial powers might have built up a prosperous peasant class of people like the Mbekis to be their agents and buffers, but as long as Africans could live off the land it would be impossible to gather migrant labor, and so this successful peasant economy was deliberately eroded.
The effects of such policies are evident at the Mbeki farm in Nyili, originally given to Skelewu by the British after the defeat of the Xhosa in 1866. It was once a thriving commercial enterprise, but when I went to visit it in 1999, the fields looked like they had not been worked for a generation, and the handsome old farmhouse was surrounded by the mess of rural poverty: a random accretion of ragged outhouses and rusty old cars and plows. The house had been the very first four-walled one owned by a black man in the entire Nqamakwe district, and was an analogy of the man who built it: its back to the civilization of the Cape Colony, it stares almost defiantly up to the mountains of the Transkei; a beachhead of order and reason, a beacon of civilization, but also a watchtower and a buffer for those behind it.
Govan Mbeki had conjured the bounty and solidity of his childhood, for me, with a description of his father's fine-beveled oak dining table: "If you opened it up it could seat 16 people around it comfortably. Comfortably!" Even if Mbeki was a lifelong communist, this table exemplified, for him, his family's upward mobility. And even if he was a lifelong revolutionary, it seemed to hold, for him, the nostalgia of familial comfort. On entering the house in 1999, I saw the table, and insisted on opening it up. It was dull, unpolished, and warped. No matter: It was glorious, its elegantly turned legs in perfect proportion, even if they no longer all touched the floor. It conjured up clean tablecloths, women in calico prints, a Victorian paterfamilias reading to his sons from the family Bible, and it transformed the dowdy room into nothing less than a parlor.
In the years when Govan's father, Skelewu Mbeki, built his farm and homestead, huge changes took place in South African society: With the discovery of diamonds and gold, and with the transition of the Cape Colony into a capitalist economy, it was felt that natives were too comfortable on the land and had to be coerced into becoming the labor force now needed to support the mining industry. The Cape Franchise, which had given men like Skelewu not only their rights but their sense of belonging, began to be eroded, and new legislation restricted the amount of land a black man could own to only ten acres. In 1910, the year both Govan Mbeki and the modern South African state were born, there were only 6,663 African voters in the Cape, compared to over 120,000 white ones. Nonetheless, they were considered threatening, and so, as part of the treaty between Boers and British, black people lost what little power they had. The 1913 Native Land Act gave blacks ownership rights to only 7 percent of the land, and only in native reserves; it abolished individual tenure for black farmers, and forced most black people into migrant labor. "It created overnight," the novelist Bessie Head would write later in the century, "a floating landless proletariat whose labour could be used and manipulated at will, and ensured that the ownership of the land had finally and securely passed into the hands of the ruling white race."
In 1911, a year after Govan Mbeki's birth, Skelewu Mbeki died in shame, dismissed as headman because he had been caught illegally selling oxen over the Kei River. We know from this that he was under considerable financial duress at the time: "I was being pressed for money which I owed," he told the magistrate; the rinderpest epidemic that wiped out 90 percent of the cattle of the Transkei in the first decade of the twentieth century must have affected him severely.
But Govan Mbeki's memories are nonetheless of bounty and solidity. When Skelewu Mbeki died in 1918, he left large separate savings accounts for both his sons, ages 14 and 8, to pay for their educations. Even if the process of the dispossession of South Africa's emerging small commercial farmers was well under way by the time he was born, enough surplus had been farmed, and enough money earned, to ensure the family's continued status as rural middleclass elite well into the twentieth century.
Govan Mbeki told me how, during the Great Depression, destitute Afrikaner farmers would seek shelter in his family home. The memory of assisting landless whites was important to him because it asserted, in contrast, the landedness of his own family. Certainly, all Africans can say that the land belonged to them before it was colonized, but the Mbekis can say that, according even to Western notions of individual tenure, they have owned property for far longer than most white South Africans. With this comes not only a tremendous sense of belonging and entitlement, but also an intense sense of loss.
And so it is no coincidence that Thabo Mbeki first started talking about an "African Renaissance" publicly around the time he first visited Nyili and was "called back home" by the elders of his clan. He could speak of "rebirth" because of his strong sense—from his own family's history—of something having been lost. Mbeki's African Renaissance ideology and all it spawned—Black Economic Empowerment, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), his approaches to AIDS and Zimbabwe—stemmed from a personal project of reconnection, just as the policy of "national reconciliation" that preceded it was both an official ideology and a personal project for Nelson Mandela.
If, then, there was a sense of grievance to the politics of Mbeki—what was often described as "a chip on his shoulder"—it derived from his sense that something profound had been taken away from the legacy of his people, not just their dignity but their material worth, too; that it was incumbent on him to win it back; and that so many of the difficulties he faced during his presidency stood in the way of his doing so.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Legacy of Liberation by Mark Gevisser. Copyright © 2009 Mark Gevisser. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note on the Text, ix,Acknowledgments, xi,
Introduction Thabo Mbeki and the South African Dream Deferred, 1,
1 The Mbekis: "The Jews of Kaffirland", 12,
2 The Moeranes: Chekhov in the Transkei, 19,
3 The New Africans, 25,
4 Mbewuleni: "A Place of Seed", 33,
5 Family, 40,
6 Queenstown: The African Springtime Orchestra, 47,
7 Lovedale: "Africa's Best and Brightest", 50,
8 Fatherhood, 58,
9 Johannesburg: Fringe Country, 66,
10 Becoming a Communist: "An Honour Bestowed upon Me", 74,
11 Into Exile, 78,
12 Sussex Man, 85,
13 Favorite Son, 96,
14 Swinging London: Old Left, New Left, 106,
15 Moscow Man, 116,
16 "Not Quite Home": Lusaka and Marriage, 124,
17 Swaziland: Front Line, 133,
18 Govan and Epainette, 141,
19 The Disappearance of Jama Mbeki, 150,
20 Nigeria: "The Real Africa", 157,
21 The National Interferer, 165,
22 Party Man, 174,
23 The Diplomat, 181,
24 The Seducer, 189,
25 Parallel Paths to Power, 199,
26 Reunions, 208,
27 Coming Home, 214,
28 Sidelining, 225,
29 Into Power, 234,
30 Transition: The Battle Over the Economy, 246,
31 The Arms Deal: South Africa's Poisoned Well, 256,
32 Mandela and Mbeki: "One Good Native", 261,
33 Mbeki and AIDS: "Yes, We Are Diseased!", 276,
34 Mbeki and Zimbabwe: "Red-Telephone Diplomacy", 297,
35 Home, 305,
Epilogue Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, and the Future of the South African Dream, 320,
Notes, 346,
Bibliographical Notes, 366,
Index, 369,