Читать книгу Thabo Mbeki - Adekeye Adebajo - Страница 8

The idea of the philosopher-king is derived from Plato’s Republic, in which, as part of a vision of the just city, the best form of government is said to be one in which philosophers rule.¹ The philosopher is the only person who can rule well, since they are intellectually and morally suited for this role, and they are expected to employ their knowledge of goodness and virtue to assist their citizens to achieve these ends. Plato’s mentor, Socrates, famously remarked: ‘Until philosophers rule as kings in their cities, or those who are nowadays called kings and leading men become genuine and adequate philosophers … cities will have no rest from evils.’² For Socrates, the philosopher was a lover of wisdom and a seer committed to a perennial quest for the truth.

The biblical saying that prophets are not honoured in their own land epitomises the fate of two African philosopher-kings: South Africa’s second post-apartheid president, Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008) and Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966). Despite perverse attempts to compare him with men like South African prime minister Jan Smuts,³ Mbeki’s political leadership must in fact be understood within an African context. Mbeki can in some ways be regarded as the present age’s Nkrumah. Both Mbeki and Nkrumah believed in Africa’s ancient glory and sought to build modern states that restored the continent’s past. Both were Renaissance men: visionary and cosmopolitan intellectuals committed to pan-Africanism and to restoring the dignity of black people whether in Harare, Harlem or Haiti.

Both Nkrumah and Mbeki were instrumental in the creation of pan-African organisations: in Nkrumah’s case the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and in Mbeki’s the African Union (AU). While Nkrumah championed the African Personality, Mbeki promoted the African Renaissance, both widely used but nebulous concepts that lacked clear definition or a road-map of how to operationalise them in practice. Both leaders were also peacemakers. Nkrumah sent troops to the Congo in 1960 to assist a United Nations peacekeeping mission and was himself on a peace mission to Vietnam when his government was toppled in a coup d’état in February 1966. For his part, Mbeki strove to make peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Côte d’Ivoire, and sent peacekeeping troops to the Congo, Burundi and Sudan’s Darfur region. Both leaders sought to speak on behalf of Africa in multilateral forums, often to the irritation of other regional leaders. Both were accused of monarchical tendencies, and both in the end were toppled in apparent acts of regicide: Nkrumah by the military, and Mbeki by his own party.

But there were clear differences between the two. Nkrumah was charismatic and, for a while, enjoyed the unparalleled adulation of the Ghanaian people. Mbeki did not inherit the charisma of his predecessor as president, the Nobel Peace laureate Nelson Mandela, and relied on other means, notably a form of technocracy, to rule. Nkrumah was able to mobilise and rally the masses; Mbeki relied on political manoeuvring within the ANC to maintain and exercise power. Nkrumah favoured a more federalist United States of Africa; Mbeki’s vision of regional integration was more gradualist. Nkrumah adopted a personality cult and ‘Nkrumahism’ was developed into an anti-imperial ideology of pan-Africanism; Mbeki avoided a personality cult and no ideology bearing the name ‘Mbeki-ism’ ever came into existence during his rule.

Mbeki’s ANC and Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) were electorally dominant, and both leaders used their parties as elite-driven vanguard organisations, ruling in a top-down fashion and seeing themselves as guardians of the ‘national revolution’. Nkrumah deployed CPP cadres in a bid to transform the colonial civil service; while Mbeki deployed ANC cadres in an attempt to transform the apartheid bureaucracy. Both were masters of political intrigue and manipulation. Both could be indecisive in making difficult decisions, and often left unpleasant tasks to lieutenants, avoiding direct confrontation. Both stressed party discipline and personal loyalty. Both allowed a climate of fear to reign within their parties. The ANC and the CPP came not only to be closely identified with the state, but also fell under the control of their powerful leaders. Their closest supporters, lacking an independent power base, became dependent on their masters, and tended towards sycophancy and subservience. Both leaders doled out patronage through state agencies and managed their parliamentary parties with an iron grip. Both railed against corruption, and were widely perceived as being personally more interested in power than wealth (though seeming to condone some instances of corruption, especially in favour of their parties, while failing to rein in wayward lieutenants). Both also sought to prevent the ascendancy of an organised ‘left’.

In power, Nkrumah and Mbeki became increasingly sensitive to suspected plots and conspiracies, with Nkrumah deeply affected by two assassination attempts. Both were nocturnal workaholics who survived on only a few hours’ sleep, with Mbeki famously surfing the internet late at night. Both were pragmatic politicians who dispensed with ideology if they felt that it impeded the achievement of practical goals. Both regarded themselves as philosopher-kings who sought the company of fellow intellectuals, though many members of the intelligentsia were opposed to their rule. Both indulged literary tastes: Nkrumah had 14 publications to his name, while Mbeki published three books of speeches, many of which he wrote himself. Both seemed to focus disproportionately on foreign policy as they tired of incessant party squabbles. Both tried to run foreign policy from well-staffed presidential units, and both are likely to be remembered in the long term more for their foreign policies than for their domestic achievements.

Despite some histrionic depictions of Mbeki as a dictator, it was Nkrumah’s rule that in fact represented real autocracy: the Ghanaian leader outlawed the opposition, established one-party rule, smashed civil society, banned most labour action, censored the media, and bullied the judiciary. Another aspect of Nkrumah’s rule that Mbeki never replicated was a personality cult. In this regard, perhaps Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe may provide a closer contemporary comparison for Nkrumah’s autocratic rule, and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi for his pan-African federalism.

It is also important when placing Mbeki in an African context of monarchical and prophetic rule to note some of the influences – conscious or unconscious – on his political leadership style derived from his two decades in African exile. Between 1971 and 1990 Mbeki lived in Botswana, Swaziland, Nigeria and Zambia. Two of the African leaders with whom Mbeki worked closest during these years – Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere – were themselves philosopher-kings and political prophets who attempted to provide visionary leadership in their own countries. Their leadership styles would influence Mbeki when he came to power as president of South Africa, though he stuck closely in his own presidency to constitutional rules, never moving towards the one-party autocracy of some of his fellow African leaders.

In placing Mbeki in a historical African context, it is important to assess briefly a few concepts and typologies of leadership style in Africa, in particular the monarchical and prophetic traditions in African politics. I do not wish to present an exaggerated picture of the influence of individual leaders (even powerful ones) in shaping events solely through their own actions, nor do I wish to ignore the fact that other actors, institutions and variables had an effect on events that occurred during their rule. The main purpose of my approach is to contextualise the leadership style, performance and legacy of some important African political leaders of their generation.

The Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui was one of the early pioneers in the study of personal rule and leadership styles in Africa. He remarked that African leaders have attempted to use monarchical forms ‘to strengthen the legitimacy of the regimes with sacred symbols and romantic awe’.⁴ Mazrui further saw monarchical tendencies in African political culture as part of the need of many African leaders to revive a splendid past in order to restore a sense of national dignity that had been damaged by the effects of centuries of slavery and European imperialism. In respect of Kwame Nkrumah, Mazrui noted that the Ghanaian president exhibited a certain flamboyance derived from a sense of racial humiliation and awe of British royalty, which was expressed in terms of a monarchical tendency in his own leadership style. Nkrumah had lived in Britain for two years during his exile. He admired British institutions, was proud of being the first African to be appointed by Queen Elizabeth to her Privy Council, and, when president, employed a British chief of army staff, a British attorney-general, and a British private secretary. As leader, Nkrumah sought simultaneously to ancientise and modernise his country, taking the name of the ancient African empire of Ghana while embarking on an industrialisation project in a bid to replicate the economic success of Western societies.

Like Nkrumah, Thabo Mbeki similarly sought to modernise South Africa and to restore Africa’s past glory through his promotion of an African Renaissance. When in office he concentrated power and decision-making in the Presidency and wielded close control of his party and of parliament, appointing all the provincial premiers as well as the most senior members of the civil service. Although Mbeki may not have used sacred symbols to strengthen his rule, he certainly made use of the power of what Mazrui calls ‘romantic awe’. His references to and invocation of the prose of pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah and Walter Rodney as well as the poetry of Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes and Léopold Senghor served to legitimise his role as the president of the last African country to be liberated from alien rule.

In his most famous essay, written in 1966 shortly after Nkrumah fell from power, Mazrui depicted the Ghanaian leader as a ‘Leninist Czar’, a royalist revolutionary.⁵ The Kenyan scholar argued that Nkrumah had ruled in a monarchical fashion and thus forfeited the organisational effectiveness of a Leninist party structure. The Ghanaian leader had wanted ‘Nkrumahism’ to leave a similar historical and revolutionary mark to that of Leninism. As Mazrui noted, ‘Nkrumah’s tragedy was a tragedy of excess, rather than of contradiction. He tried to be too much of a revolutionary monarch.’ Mazrui concluded that Nkrumah would be celebrated more as a great pan-African than as a great Ghanaian, an insight that has proved to be accurate.

The second typology of African leadership that is helpful in understanding Mbeki is that of the prophetic ruler. As Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg, in their innovative study Personal Rule in Black Africa, noted: ‘The prophet, political or religious, is a revolutionary – that is, one who prophesies a better future, whose attainment requires the radical transformation of the present.’⁶ Two key characteristics are associated with prophetic rulers.

Firstly, these leaders are charismatic: they have charm and mystique, and their personality is often closely tied to their prophetic rule. This charisma draws people to them, and in turn they feed their followers with their oratorical brilliance and magnetic presence. Prophets express the hopes, resentments and fears of their people, and they are the living embodiment of popular aspirations for a better future.

African prophetic leaders like Nkrumah have set out to develop personality cults in which they are deified and worshipped unquestioningly. Like European monarchs of old, prophetic rulers in Africa have sought to embody the state: it is in them that sovereignty resides. The royal European expression L’état, c’est moi (I am the state) has found resonance in contemporary Africa. Though lacking the charisma and mobilising skills of Nkrumah, Mbeki showed signs of prophetic rule in his lyrical oratory and vision of an African Renaissance which prophesied that Africa would own the twenty-first century. He thus sought, as a prophetic leader, to chart a glorious future for the continent’s socio-economic renewal.

The second main feature of prophetic rule is its religious dimension. This rule often becomes singleminded in achieving its goals, as sacrifice and the suspension of immediate political and economic desires are urged on followers in order to bring about the ‘revolution’. As in the religious sphere, the rewards of the people await them in heaven, and they are therefore urged to forgo the possession of ‘earthly’ material things until the paradise arrives, though it must be said that African political prophets have sometimes built their own mansions on earth. At the present stage of Africa’s socio-economic development, miracles have proved difficult to perform, as the stuff of which miracles are made has been in short supply. Economic development is, after all, a painstaking, gradual process which requires decades of careful planning, adequate capital and competent technocrats to achieve. The vision of paradise which overwhelmed religious disciples and guaranteed their adherence to the true faith is simply not within the African prophet’s capacity to bring about rapidly, as the cases of Nkrumah and Mbeki proved. It is this failure to fortify the faith of the people through healing and other signs of divine approbation – rapid socio-economic development, the elimination of poverty, and the transformation of society – that cost both Nkrumah and Mbeki their political lives.

Finally, Nkrumah and Mbeki can also be seen as tragic figures in African Shakespearian dramas. Whereas Nkrumah might be viewed as a Julius Caesar, Coriolanus best mirrors Mbeki’s fate. Nkrumah’s biographer Bankole Timothy observes that the Ghanaian leader was accused of trying to build ‘a great African Empire with himself as Caesar’.⁷ As Shakespeare’s play recounts, the Roman Senate made Caesar perpetual dictator of Rome, just as the Ghanaian parliament effectively made Nkrumah Ghana’s dictator. Both Caesar and Nkrumah fell from power after suspicions arose that they would turn their republics into monarchies, and both were betrayed by close associates and lieutenants. Four decades after the military had toppled Nkrumah in a coup, Mbeki paid a melancholy tribute to Nkrumah’s tragic fate when he reflected: ‘We were mere schoolboys when we saw the black star rise on our firmament, as the colonial Gold Coast crowned itself with the ancient African name of Ghana. We knew then that the promise we had inherited would be honoured. The African giant was awakening! But it came to pass that the march of African time snatched away that promise. Very little seemed to remain along its path except the footprints of despair.’⁸

As Mbeki’s finest biographer, Mark Gevisser, reminds us, during his student days in Moscow Mbeki’s favourite play had been Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. This was the tragedy of a heroic Roman soldier whose demise was brought about by his obduracy and pride. Like Julius Caesar, it is a play about politics and betrayal. Coriolanus becomes a war hero, is banished from Rome, defects to the Volscians, and is subsequently killed. But rather than the conventional perception of Coriolanus as a ‘vainglorious proto-fascist’ and a ‘tyrant driven by hubris’, Mbeki instead regarded the Roman soldier as the model for a twentieth-century revolutionary, noting that Coriolanus was full of ‘truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice, absence of self-seeking, brotherliness, heroism, optimism’. Mbeki admired Coriolanus for being prepared to go to war against his own people, whom he described as ‘rabble … an unthinking mob, with its cowardice, its lying, its ordinary people-ness’.⁹ The similarity of the fates of Coriolanus and Mbeki is eerie: both were seen as aloof and arrogant; both refused to kowtow to popular perceptions of how a leader should behave; and both were ultimately brought down by character flaws of obduracy and arrogance.