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(HERALD) Unravelling Thabo Mbeki

Unravelling Thabo Mbeki

Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki; by Ronald Suresh Roberts, STE Publishers, Johannesburg, 2007, 296 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-919855-89-9 (hardback)

FOR some, former South African president Thabo Mbeki was a blundering man who loved his whisky and would not mind spending close to a week holed up in the 17th floor of a five-star Harare hotel where negotiations that gave life to Zimbabwe’s current inclusive Government were held.

For some in the know, the former top South African head of state had a very tight schedule and had millions of expectant Zimbabweans clawing for him to breathe life into the seemingly endless dialogue.

However, for Ronald Suresh Roberts, with his vast knowledge of history, politics, literature and debates, these may not have been true depictions of the perspective of the former African National Congress supremo on a plethora of issues ranging from apartheid, neo-colonialism, HIV/ and Aids and Zimbabwe.

Roberts, in Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, uses his access to the former president to come up with an accurate sketch of the man who many thought was only there in the South African government as payment for his father’s contribution towards the final repulsion of apartheid as a political system in that country.

Fit To Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki comprises 11 aptly titled chapters and three annexures. It is dedicated to Eric Eustace Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and a historian of note, especially on the subject of the slave trade.

While Williams was leading his people in their fight against British domination, one Millins, who visited Trinidad and Tobago in 1946, had this to say about apartheid in South Africa:

"I have pain over the pro-Nazism of our present government, but I will not be dominated by a continent of cruel, diseased savages." (p292) Apartheid and slavery remain some of the worst violations of human rights that man has inflicted on fellow humanity.

The book has been described as an illuminating examination of South Africa’s second democratic leader Mbeki and provides unprecedented access to the man and his ideas. The Financial Mail finds it " an intriguing read".

However, the author’s own version is that: "Instead of soul-searching, enigma-breaking or ‘biography’, call this book a displacement of certain fictions --- an engagement with many of the myths and insidious discourses that have piled themselves high around Mbeki."

The book, therefore, seeks parade to Mbeki’s ideas.

In the same way that Williams questions British historians who suggest that the abolition of the slave trade was a result of British moral philanthropism by citing falling profits as an important factor, Roberts also sees the fall of apartheid not as a result of white liberalism.

Many observers have condemned Mbeki for his perceived attitude towards HIV and Aids. After reading through Roberts’ book one emerges with a better understanding of Mbeki’s stance on the pandemic. The thrust of his widely criticised address in the South African parliament gets apparently corrected when one realises that Mbeki was basically saying Western mitigation efforts against HIV and Aids must not be forced onto Africa.

". . . a simple superimposition of Western experience on African reality would be absurd and illogical".

Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki seeks to right the misconceptions held on Mbeki and the South African’s perspective towards the Aids pandemic.

Just as Mbeki writes to world leaders on April 3, 2000, "I am convinced that our urgent task is to respond to the specific threat that faces us as Africans. We will not eschew this obligation in favour of the comfort of the recitation of a catechism that may very well be a correct response to the specific manifestation of Aids in the West."

In the same letter, Mbeki stresses that the South African leadership would not "condemn its own people to death by giving up the search for specific and targeted responses to the specifically African incidence of HIV and Aids".

Therefore, the Mbeki portrayed in Roberts’ book is one who has been able to see the distinction between the incidence and impact of HIV and Aids on Western communities, on the one hand, and African societies, on the other.

Mbeki’s logic is also highlighted in the way he deals with the general problem of neo-colonialism in Africa. Roberts’ standpoint seems to have been informed by a number of other scholars before him and this makes the book even richer in its probing of the former leader of Africa’s largest economy.

The writer quotes George Orwell in challenging liberal ideology, which at some point views the "liberation movement sweeping through Africa as the ominous development of pan-African imperialism. Faced with the real threat to white domination and vested interests, the ‘true liberal turns out to be a supporter of perhaps the most illiberal regime in the world". (p103)

True, white liberals in South Africa, viewed against the background of apartheid, could not sanitise themselves unless they defined their role as "organic representatives of British colonialism".

Premised on Frantz Fanon’s reference to "the violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native" (p107), Roberts’ understanding of Mbeki cannot be questioned.

The former ANC leader is an individual who has personally wrestled European imperial tactics which institutionalised racial discrimination and, thus, gave apartheid its lifeblood.

The 1994 ascendancy of Nelson Mandela to the helm of South Africa’s political set-up signalled the end of apartheid as a system and, therefore, the accompanying policy of reconciliation was supposed to propel the country forward as a multi-racial nation.

It is this quandary that political leaders like Mbeki seek to challenge as representatives of the majority of the people and are, therefore, presumably democratic. The concept of a nation, particularly one that can still see racial discrimination in its midst, is also probed in Roberts’ account. Hermann Giliomee, an Afrikaner separatist historian’s definition of nation as quoted by the author is "a group that is believed to be a community of people sharing the same descent or blood".

South Africa, on the ground, is not like that and hence the heterogeneous nature of the population should be understood by all those with a keen interest in the politics of the southern African state.

Obviously, such notions are diametrically opposed to the thrust towards unity that the political leaders of the "Rainbow Nation" seek to foster. Inherent in Giliomee’s definition is the fact that South Africans are not one people. Giliomee is an example of those who thought South Africa would slide into racial and ethnic disarray at the end of apartheid.

Roberts quotes Mbeki’s reference to the perceived "black mayhem" that was on the minds of reactionary forces. Transforming South African society was one of Mbeki’s thrusts.

Last but not least, Mbeki, the champion of quiet diplomacy on Zimbabwe, is portrayed as a master craftsperson whose role in creating the inclusive Government in Zimbabwe is the envy of many.

Somehow, by reading through Roberts’ book, one would be re-experiencing the protracted and arduous journey through the inter-party dialogue that led to the signing of the inter-party accord called the Global Political Agreement in Zimbabwe.

Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki thus remains a must-have for any respectable bookshelf.

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Labels: BOOKS, FRANTZ FANON, HIV/AIDS, NEOCOLONIALISM, THABO MBEKI

posted by MrK @ 9:09 PM