Thabo Mbeki - Adekeye Adebajo Ohio Short Histories of Africa

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Pahad – who would become lifelong friends and members of his cabinet (Essop also joined him at Sussex University in 1965). While in Johannesburg, Thabo lived for two years with the urbane ANC secretary-general, Duma Nokwe – the only black advocate at the Johannesburg bar – who became his first political mentor. Nokwe was seen by his critics as something of an elitist, far removed from the masses whose cause he claimed to be championing: a charge that would later be made about Mbeki too.

      It was in Johannesburg that Thabo met Nelson Mandela for the first time in 1961, when the older man invited him for lunch at his Orlando West home. He also became acquainted with the ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu, who had been secretary-general before Nokwe. Mbeki was chosen as the first national secretary of the African Students’ Association, which was a front for the recruitment of young members to the ANC. During this period he began to wear a pin of Vladimir Lenin on his lapel, as his communist intellectual awakening took shape. At the age of 20 Mbeki joined the underground South African Communist Party. He became involved in party cells and study groups, and was tutored by such communist leaders as Bram Fischer (who would defend Govan Mbeki, Nelson Mandela and others at the Rivonia Trial), J.B. Marks and Michael Harmel, from whom he absorbed Leninist ideas of a vanguard party. According to Lenin, the true revolutionary vanguardist forsakes both his family and class in order to join the masses he is called to lead: but though Thabo forsook his family, he certainly did not abandon his class.

      Mbeki’s first political writing appeared in the ANC-aligned newspaper New Age at this time, explaining why the association of African students had been formed and describing himself as part of ‘the intellectual elite of a people [suffering] from subjection by a minority government’.7 He also spent time travelling through South Africa and recruiting students on behalf of the ANC for training in Soviet universities. Thabo attended Britzius College in Johannesburg, passing – with the help of a friend and benefactor, Ann Welsh – his A-level exams in 1961 in economics, British economic history and British constitutional law, before completing a University of London junior degree in economics between 1961 and 1962. After the banning of the ANC in 1960, many of its leading members had gone into exile or had joined the underground military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Thabo was at first reluctant to leave the country, until Govan, then one of MK’s High Command, intervened to tell him that he would be disowned by his family if he refused to go and was arrested while trying to wage ‘armed struggle’. Govan would later imply that he did not feel his son was cut out to be a soldier.

      On his way into exile with a group of students in September 1962, Thabo was arrested and jailed with his colleagues after crossing into white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). They were sent back to Bechuanaland (Botswana), before being transported with the help of the ANC to the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam. This was where, in November 1962, Thabo first met the future ANC president, Oliver Tambo, who had gone into exile in 1960. Tambo would become Mbeki’s most important political mentor. Thabo was tasked by the then deputy president with leading a group of ANC students into exile, and Tambo arranged for him to fly with Kenneth Kaunda to London. The future Zambian president was travelling to the imperial capital to negotiate his country’s independence. Also at the airport was the Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere.8 This early exposure to these two African philosopher-kings would help shape Mbeki’s pan-African commitment.

      In 1962 Mbeki won admission on a scholarship to study economics – rather than the medicine his father had wanted him to pursue – at Sussex University in England, which had opened its doors only the year before. Thabo felt that he deserved to go to Oxford or Cambridge University,9 but had to forgo the ‘dreaming spires’ of Oxbridge for the brick and concrete of Sussex. The new university’s activism suited the young, doctrinaire disciple of Marxist-Leninist thinking. As a student, Thabo was tasked by the ANC with visiting Moscow on missions to meet ANC-supported South African students there. Though one of only a few black students at Sussex at the time (another, Peter Kenyatta, was the son of the Kenyan president), Thabo was elected to the university’s Students’ Union within three months of his arrival. He skilfully used this forum to mobilise town and gown in the seaside resort of Brighton to support the anti-apartheid struggle. While still a student, Mbeki led anti-apartheid political demonstrations across Britain, and testified to a session of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, held in London in 1964, pleading for the South African government to spare the life of his father and those of his fellow Rivonia trialists. Thabo was also active in the international student movement, attending conferences in Algiers, Oslo, Moscow, Khartoum, Sofia and Ulan Bator.

      At Sussex, Mbeki imbibed the ideas of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. He also greatly admired the African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. His master’s thesis focused on industrialisation in West Africa (in particular, on small enterprises in Ghana and Nigeria), and his studies helped develop a pan-African awareness alongside a deepening of interest in the Western intellectual canon. It was at Sussex that Mbeki further engaged his passion for Shakespeare and W.B. Yeats, discovered the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and began a lifelong interest in the African-American poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, led by Langston Hughes. In a less intellectual expression of his pan-Africanism, Mbeki organised a party in Brighton for the West Indies cricket team, led by the legendary Garfield Sobers, in 1966.

      It was also in England that Mbeki developed his urbane, cosmopolitan demeanour among a diverse group of friends. In exile later in Africa, he would complain to companions about being ‘homesick’ for England and longing for a ‘pint of bitter’. Lacking a cultural core, the nomadic Mbeki necessarily improvised a polyglot identity that was neither completely African nor European, but instead borrowed from both worlds. In his later career, this prophet of the African Renaissance would often paradoxically cut the figure of a ‘black Englishman’, with his stiff and formal manner, English dress of sports jacket, designer suit or tweed cloth cap, and his fondness for Bay Rum tobacco as well as Scotch whisky. During his years in England, Mbeki was greatly influenced by British institutions and political culture. Walter Bagehot, the nineteenth-century essayist, had noted that the British political system – lacking a written constitution – represented a form of ‘muddling through’ and improvisation. It was a conservative system that preferred evolutionary to revolutionary change. Once in power as president of South Africa, Thabo’s style came to resemble this political pragmatism, as did his peacemaking efforts across Africa.

      Though he was strongly averse to direct confrontation, Thabo acquired a reputation, among some ANC colleagues, for being arrogant and ambitious. The fact that he had been sent by the ANC to England rather than the Soviet bloc, where most young ANC cadres studied, created particular resentment. A group of ANC students in Moscow, for example, refused to meet him in April 1967, dismissing him as a stooge of the party’s leadership. That Mbeki stayed at the Tambo family home in north London during vacations from Sussex University further reinforced perceptions of special treatment, as the Tambos effectively adopted him as their own son. Though as a student he continued to fantasise about abandoning his studies to return home to join Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), in the end he lobbied strongly to stay on at Sussex to do his master’s in the Economics and Development programme between 1965 and 1966. Two economists at Sussex acted as important academic mentors in England: the Hungarian-born Tibor Barna, and the South African émigré Guy Routh. (Thabo’s alma mater later awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1995.)

      In both Johannesburg and Brighton, Mbeki had intimate relationships with white women. While at Sussex, he moved in with a younger student, Philippa Ingram, a step that South Africa’s Immorality Act of 1950 would have prevented him from taking back home. In Johannesburg he had been romantically involved with the arts student and political activist Ann Nicholson, but the relationship had of necessity been more discreet. Nicholson’s understanding of Mbeki and especially his leadership style is particularly insightful. She saw him as a conservative person who always took the path of least resistance, and did not want to rock the boat. She further noted that he had a deep sense of duty, believing that leaders could not have a personal life, but belonged to the movement.10 This idea of the ‘servant leader’ embodied very much the same sense of selfless devotion often conveyed by the older generation of ANC leaders

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