Читать книгу Thabo Mbeki - Adekeye Adebajo - Страница 10

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 who he felt wanted to assume leadership positions rather than remain as ordinary members.

The SACP boss used Thabo’s absence from an SACP Politburo meeting in 1982 to drop him from the party’s highest decision-making structure, before Thabo was reinstated two years later following an outcry from other party members. Mbeki unsuccessfully opposed Slovo’s election to the SACP chair in 1984, noting that a liberated South Africa would not countenance a white president. In a public confrontation, Slovo condemned Mbeki’s views as racist. Mbeki – who was himself consistently sceptical of the ANC’s military abilities to defeat the apartheid state – grew increasingly wary of Slovo’s and Hani’s insurrectionist militancy, correctly reading the international environment in the mid-1980s as having become more conducive to a negotiated settlement. In keeping with his political pragmatism and calculating caution, Thabo remained a member of the SACP until 1990.¹⁰ The ‘man for all seasons’ continued to watch closely which way the political wind was blowing before nailing his colours to the mast and quietly abandoning the SACP on his return to South Africa.

In April 1971 Thabo Mbeki returned to Africa from London for the first time in nearly a decade. He would work for the ANC on the continent for the next two decades until his return home in April 1990, serving at the ANC headquarters in Zambia, as well as in Swaziland, Botswana and Nigeria. It is important to stress that Mbeki’s two-decades-long path to power ran directly through Africa, and not through Europe. In the process, he developed great respect for African solidarity and gratitude for continental support of South Africa’s liberation struggle. It was also during this period that Thabo directly witnessed some of the political and socio-economic challenges of post-colonial Africa which he would have to tackle as president.

In Africa he was joined by his wife. In 1971 Zanele won a scholarship to start a doctorate on social welfare – focused on the status of black women under apartheid – at Brandeis University in Boston, though she would never complete it. She was widely respected within the ANC as an intellectual with independent and radical views, and was elected to ANC Women’s League positions when the couple lived in Lusaka. She returned to Zambia from the United States to set up the family home in 1974, working for the largely Swedish-funded International University Education Fund (IUEF), which sourced scholarships for black South Africans, until its deputy director, Craig Williamson, was exposed as an apartheid spy. A three-bedroom terraced house on Martin Luther King Close in the Lusaka suburb of Kabulonga became the Mbeki family home for the next two decades. The couple were said to be very private. They spent much time apart because of Thabo’s political activism and Zanele’s equally busy schedule.

After returning home from exile in 1990, Zanele decided to set up the Women’s Development Bank – a micro-enterprise project to support poor women – rather than join ANC party structures. Her devotion to her husband was again evidenced when in the mid-1990s she put her doctorate on hold for a second time to support Thabo’s political ambitions. She managed the family’s finances and had the foresight to invest in property in Johannesburg following their return to South Africa. After Mbeki assumed the presidency in 1999, she kept a low profile as ‘first lady’, refusing requests for interviews.¹¹

Returning to Africa from European exile in 1971, Thabo served as the assistant to Moses Mabhida, the secretary of the ANC’s newly established Revolutionary Council, a body whose task was to get MK soldiers back into South Africa. Exile was not an easy place to be: the ANC had been expelled for a time from Tanzania, while their Zambian hosts were ambivalent about their presence, restricting their activities for fear of provoking a military response from the apartheid regime. In Zambia the ANC built up a sizeable infrastructure, and would eventually build up a sizeable army in Angola by 1990. But further problems were created for the ANC when Mozambique signed the US-brokered Nkomati Accord with Pretoria in March 1984, in a further betrayal of the anti-apartheid struggle, as the ANC had to withdraw its military leadership and hundreds of cadres from this strategic country and neighbour of South Africa. In 1989, as part of a superpower-brokered deal to end the Angolan civil war, thousands of ANC fighters were also forced to leave that country for camps in Uganda. While exiles like Mbeki were grateful for African support for their liberation struggle, these actions of the Front Line States must also have rankled and created some resentment.