Unlike Nelson Mandela, his
successor, Thabo Mbeki, does not in all respects rise above history. Temporally,
the apartheid era may have passed, but politically and economically it remains
the formative imprint on the South African psyche, and the president never
forgets it. A conversation with him reveals the extent to which Mr Mandela's
time, with its benign amnesia about the racial divide, was in a sense a heroic
aberration.
In a rare interview he gave to the Guardian last week, Mr Mbeki kept
returning to the prejudices that Mandela-ism transcended. They ran through
everything he said. "Many whites, I wouldn't say all," he said, "have a
particular stereotype of black people. They would deny it, but it's true. They
see black people as lazy, basically dishonest, thieving, corrupt." Most of all,
"they can't really govern any country. Look at what's happened in the rest of
Africa - that would be the argument".
Mr Mbeki, whose state visit to Britain begins three working days after the
general election, is mild in manner, an intellectual, far less charismatic than
his predecessor. He understands the white mind, he says. "One tries very often
to put oneself in the boots of white people." He knows why they expected the
worst in 1994, when the blacks took power. "The whites said, 'Since we treated
the black people so badly, when they have power in their hands, why are they not
hitting back? Why is there no revenge?' "
Big panic
Even though revenge didn't happen, and the transition was by any global
standard amazingly peaceful, seven years later the president believes the
stereotypical expectations still reach into many spheres, and racial prejudice
seeps through most of the mechanisms of society.
He thinks media criticism of him, of which there is plenty, is rooted there.
The slackness and cynicism of journalists obsess him almost as much as they do
Tony Blair. They lead to all kinds of misreporting of the ANC, the hegemonic
party he leads. "People can sit comfortably with the [racial] assumptions," he
said, "because they know these things to be true about blacks, and will report
from that kind of basis."
Images of black inferiority reach also into economic management. Trevor
Manuel is the first black finance minister, and early in his time in office he
said something that the markets took as seriously as they might a few words from
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US federal reserve. Mr Manuel described markets
as "amorphous". This followed some ruminations by the president himself, which
had passed without comment, suggesting that markets were not magical, but
capable of being affected by human decisions.
"Amorphous" was too much for the brokers. "Big panic, lots of trouble, rand
depreciating," Mr Mbeki recalled. "I think they responded like that because
Trevor was the first black finance minister. They thought this confirmed their
view that these people will not be able to manage."
Equally, the racial paradigm explains the need for an all-powerful ANC, he
said. The party's domination is the object of intense criticism from the white
liberals who played their part in bringing down apartheid and still struggle to
uphold pluralistic political values.
The ANC stamps hard on internal debate, and often impugns the motives of
external critics. The only significant opposition party, the Democratic
Alliance, is essentially white and coloured, with no significant African
support.
To Mr Mbeki, such one-party domination seems neither sinister nor
inexplicable. Again, it's a matter of racial history.
"You are unlikely to get much black opposition," he said, "because the issues
that brought black people together under ANC leadership remain. The central
challenge we face is dealing with the legacy of apartheid. The white minority
political domination has gone. But the rest remains. The black people of this
country say the divisions of the past are not yet over, the socio-economic
discrimination against the majority persists.
"Even the middle class, whose income and lifestyle is no different from
similar white people's, will tell you the racism is there. They discriminate
against you because of colour, never mind that you have the same social status.
We therefore have got to combine to deal with this matter."
The ANC, which had a 90-year history of anti-racism, could not be criticised
for assuming unchallenged authority as the vehicle for this, he said. Was he
concerned about the hegemony of one party? "Well," he replied, "people vote for
it." Which is true enough; the ANC majority rose to 66% at the last elections.
An uneasy contradiction, none the less, cuts across this apparent serenity.
Not nearly enough has been done in seven years to reduce the inequalities in
South African life. There are still vast shanty-towns, sparse services, with
real unemployment probably verging on 40%, though the official figures show less
than 30%. This poses simmering problems, as Mr Mbeki rather dolefully admitted.
"Poverty in this country is defined by colour," he said. "What I fear is that
if we go on too long with these disparities not closing, particularly where too
many people remain poor, they would rebel against democracy. Because it hasn't
brought them anything. And particularly because of the racial divide." Another
picture Nelson Mandela might have been reluctant to summon up.
Yet when I asked Mr Mbeki if he was worried about keeping his constituency of
millions happy, he was strangely sanguine. Armageddon, if it ever comes, is
evidently a long way off. "I don't sense a feeling of impatience," he said. "The
poor understand very well that it's going to take time. We've built a million
houses since 1996. Millions of people now have access to clean piped water. They
can see progress. Even those people who have not yet been touched by progress
can see it is coming." The people who were impatient, he said, were the black
middle class. "Somebody who drives a Volkswagen Beetle, if he doesn't have
access to a Mercedes Benz in six months' time, says there's no progress."
He's not at all against the Mercs. Not for nothing was this president once
called a free market Leninist: a ruthless disciplinarian at the head of the
vanguard party, none the less conducting a macro-economic policy to delight any
globalised investor.
An economist by training, Mr Mbeki takes liberalism, in this respect, as far
as any Greenspan or Gordon Brown.
Though South Africa hasn't been rewarded with the level of foreign investment
it would like, he made no complaint about that in our interview. He was
philosophical, also, about the conspicuous failure of expatriate South Africans,
many of them vastly rich, to behave like the overseas Chinese and invest in the
homeland.
"Their brains, in terms of what they do with their money, might be somewhere
else," he said. "But I don't think they lose the sense of being South African.
It's probably a matter of time."
Globalisation, he seemed to think, had to be accepted. Not even the media
were exempt. The Mail & Guardian, the famous liberal weekly published in
Johannesburg, is the fiercest thorn in the president's side. It's owned by the
Guardian here. When I asked if an absentee white owner compromised the role the
paper could play in black South Africa, Mr Mbeki immediately said "no".
Criticism grows
So his own racial sensitivities, while deep, are subtle. He is himself a
realist, not a racist, and not now given to making proclamations. A similar
reticence informs his view of his role in Africa. He's extremely worried about
Zimbabwe, aware of how a catastrophe there, prompted by Robert Mugabe's malign
incompetence, could spill into South Africa. But, while once a theorist for
something called an African renaissance, he now eschews a pan-African role.
"Some say you have a duty to take such a role," I suggested.
"The problem," he replied, "is that that generates expectations that are
unrealisable. The burden is too big to carry. It's big enough here, without
having to take on the rest of the continent."
He lives with ever-mounting criticism. Not long ago the Mail & Guardian
ran an editorial asking "Is This Man Fit to Rule?", and left the answer
decidedly ambiguous. The charge-sheet against him rests heavily on his notorious
scepticism about the HIV/Aids link - which reaches through the ANC faithful,
with disastrous effects on serious efforts to address Africa's most destructive
crisis. He has been back-pedalling from that, but too late. He told me he had
just been "asking questions".
In the fervid world of an evolving South Africa, where liberals, black as
well as white, fear an all-mighty authoritarian regime developing the bad habits
of the racial criminals it supplanted, the question of whether Thabo Mbeki is a
true defender of the rules of good governance is a live one.
An outsider coming in hears this, and sees the signs of it. He also meets a
leader who, after Mr Mandela's abrupt departure, can't help returning to the
basic question. The Mbeki who will ride the royal carriage up the Mall next
month is beleaguered, politically defensive, and probably less sure of his
future direction than, like all leaders, he likes to seem in public.
His distinctive trait, though, is to have taken South Africa back down to
earth, where white and black never coexisted as equals, and still don't.
From exile to high office
June 18 1942 Born in Idutywa, Transkei. Son of Govan Mbeki, an ANC
leader. Educated at Lovedale College, Eastern Cape
1959 Son with Olive Mpahlwa born. He disappeared, presumed killed in
1981.
1961-62 Appointed ANC youth organiser (Johannesburg) and leader of
African Students' Organisation
1962 Detained for six weeks
1962-66 University of Sussex (MA Economics)
1967-70 Worked in ANC London office
1970 Military training in USSR
1971-72 Assistant secretary of ANC revolutionary council
1974 Married Zanele Dlamini. No children
1975-78 ANC representative in Swaziland, then Nigeria. Also worked as
political adviser to Oliver Tambo in Lusaka, Zambia
1979-90 Twice elected to South African communist party politburo
1984-93 ANC information director, then head of international affairs
department
1990 Returns to South Africa. Negotiates with National party
government.
1993 Becomes ANC chairman
1994 Becomes deputy president of South Africa
1998 Becomes ANC president
1999 Elected president of South Africa
