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Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki was born in the village of Mbewuleni near Idutywa in the rural Transkei (now the Eastern Cape province) on 18 June 1942.¹ The area – whose landscape is marked by mountains, hills, rivers, hamlets and homesteads – is the home of Xhosa speakers, who were among the earliest indigenous South Africans to convert in large numbers to Christianity, acquire a missionary education and participate in the colonial economy. From this educated, acculturated class came the future leaders of the African nationalist movement in South Africa. Indeed, the Eastern Cape has provided much of the ANC’s leadership from its inception in 1912. (Nelson Mandela was also a member of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Xhosa Nostra’.)

Thabo was the eldest son of Govan and Epainette Mbeki. His parents were middle-class izifundiswa (educated ones) and communists, whose own fathers had been peasant farmers and devout Christians, part of the Westernised elite. Both Govan and Epainette were deeply involved in the struggle for racial justice in South Africa until their deaths in 2001 and 2014 respectively.

Thabo’s father, Govan – affectionately referred to by younger peers as ‘Oom Gov’ – was a teacher and journalist, who attended the same Methodist missionary secondary school as Mandela – Healdtown in Fort Beaufort – where he excelled in Latin. He went on to study politics and psychology at Fort Hare University College, whose famous alumni would include such future ANC leaders as Mandela and Oliver Tambo. This elite black university in the Eastern Cape trained as well many of the first generation of post-independence African leaders such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, and Botswana’s Seretse Khama.

While at Fort Hare, Govan was influenced ideologically by two young white communists – Eddie and Win Roux – who were on a proselytising honeymoon in the Eastern Cape. He became a lifelong communist and would later name his eldest son after his close friend and ideological mentor, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, one of the leading lights in the Communist Party of South Africa. Epainette and Govan met at a secondary school in Durban where both were then teaching and were married in 1940. They then moved to Mbewuleni, where they set up one of the first black-owned general dealer’s stores – and village post office – in rural Transkei to serve the amaqaba: the traditionally minded, largely illiterate peasants of the village. Govan would later sell insurance and become involved in work for the ANC, while Epainette looked after the shop and the family’s four children: Linda (born 1941), Thabo (1942), Moeletsi (1945) and Jama (1948).

Thabo’s mother, Epainette, was, like her husband, a teacher who had graduated from a famous missionary training college and school, Adams College, in Natal. Under the influence of Betty du Toit, an Afrikaner communist, she became only the second black female member of the Communist Party. Epainette is said to have had a greater role in shaping the political views of Thabo and his siblings than their strict father.

Even before he was convicted at the Rivonia Trial in 1964 and sentenced to jail for life, Govan’s marriage to Epainette appears to have broken down amid financial difficulties. He had by then long lived apart from his wife and children, having left home to take up a teaching job in Ladysmith in Natal, from which he was fired for his political activism. Govan then moved in 1953 to Port Elizabeth, where he worked for the ANC and edited the left-wing newspaper New Age (later renamed Spark), which were both banned by the apartheid government.

Govan was an ideologically doctrinaire man who held strongly, even stubbornly, to his views and opinions: characteristics that his eldest son, Thabo, would also display. Because of Govan’s absence, Thabo grew up largely without his father, and Govan’s relationship with his son was always somewhat distant. At home the family patriarch buried himself in his reading and busied himself with his activism, leaving the children largely to the care of their mother. As he later admitted: ‘I never really had time for the children … Probably they felt that I didn’t pay sufficient attention to them … I wouldn’t blame them if they felt like that.’² It is hard to tell exactly what impact this lack of paternal affection had on Thabo, but it seems to have contributed to his introverted and sensitive nature. When asked about the disappearance of his youngest son, Jama, and Thabo’s own son, Kwanda, in exile, Govan unsentimentally remarked: ‘When you go into war, if your comrade in front of you falls on his horse, you must not stop and weep. You jump over him into battle. You learn not to weep.’³

Thabo certainly inherited his father’s sense of dress and his eloquence and articulateness, but also his coldness and emotional reserve as well as his singleminded focus on the liberation struggle. At the first meeting between father and son in Lusaka, Zambia, in January 1990 after nearly three decades of not having seen each other, Govan greeted Thabo by formally shaking hands with him, as he did with other comrades lined up to meet the recently released Rivonia trialists, while other families like the Sisulus broke ranks and exchanged warm and joyous embraces. As Govan noted to a reporter at the time: ‘You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade.’⁴ But both Govan and Thabo did later share moments of private affection.

Thabo was greatly inspired by his father’s example to succeed, and seemed determined to prove himself to Govan by excelling intellectually and politically and carrying on the family’s tradition of noblesse oblige. As Thabo remarked in exile, ‘what I’m doing here, I want to do in the best way I can. I want to excel at it and complete the work of my father.’⁵ The son was also keen to escape his father’s shadow and succeed on his own terms rather than as the scion of a famous struggle family. In the absence of his own father, the ANC would become Thabo’s family for 52 years, and the ANC president Oliver Tambo, with whom Thabo worked closely for 30 years, would become an adopted father and political mentor.

Like Govan, the young Thabo was – and remains – a voracious reader, consuming the books in the family home: English poetry, Marxist literature (including the Communist Manifesto), James Aggrey, Dostoyevsky, A.C. Jordan’s famous Xhosa novel Ingqumbo yemiNyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors) and even his father’s own volume of critical essays, Transkei in the Making (1939). Govan and Epainette adopted a Socratic method in educating their children, and did not try to indoctrinate them. As Thabo later noted, ‘Our parents never initiated any political discussions at home. It was always up to us to raise matters with them, then they would talk about it.’⁶ From an early age Govan’s eldest son wrote and read letters for illiterate villagers in his community to and from their migrant family members working on the mines and in domestic service across South Africa. Along with his siblings, they were exposed at an early age to the poverty of South Africa’s black majority and the awful conditions of black mineworkers who came back to the village to die of lung disease. As a young boy Thabo attended the local primary school. Though a good student, he did not like maths and played truant to avoid classes until Epainette discovered the problem, and gave him private lessons at home.

From the age of eight, Thabo was sent away to live with various relatives across the country, as both Govan and Epainette believed it was best that their children should live apart from their politically active parents, who constantly faced the threat of arrest. This nomadic existence created a sense of dislocation even before Thabo left South Africa to go into political exile. Practically orphaned and without a stable family and friends, he became somewhat of an introverted loner. Thabo attended a Moravian school in Queenstown, before going to the famous Scottish Presbyterian missionary secondary school of Lovedale College – the ‘Eton of Africa’ – in 1955. Lovedale was located in Alice on the banks of the Tyhume River in the Eastern Cape. Here, at an institution modelled on British public schools, where the pupils wore blazers, Mbeki became acquainted with the works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, as well as the Xhosa poetry of S.E.K. Mqhayi, the great ‘poet of the nation’. For more than a century, black students from across southern Africa and latterly from further north, as far as Uganda, had attended the school and been prepared for leadership roles in their own communities and countries. Thabo was thus simultaneously exposed at Lovedale to a pan-African identity and to British traditions, both of which he would later come to embody.

Thabo entered Lovedale soon after the National Party (NP) came to power in 1948 and started implementing the racist policies of apartheid. In reaction, most students at Lovedale developed a heightened political consciousness. The year he entered, 1955, was the one in which the apartheid government ordered the forced removal of black residents from Sophiatown in Johannesburg. While at Lovedale Mbeki joined the ANC Youth League at the age of 14, learning to sing struggle songs in honour of the ANC president, Albert Luthuli, and the Congolese liberation hero, Patrice Lumumba. With students paid by the security police to spy on each other, the roots of Thabo’s later suspicious nature and obsessive secrecy can perhaps be traced to his early political activism. His education at Lovedale was cut short after his involvement in a student strike – against poor food and the spying on, and expulsion of, students – in 1959. Thabo was expelled from the school and forced to return to his home at Mbewuleni. He took his matriculation exams in Umtata that October, and obtained a disappointing second-class pass, a setback that strengthened his determination in future to achieve academic excellence.

At the age of 17, Mbeki became father to a son, Kwanda, born out of wedlock with Olive Nokwanda Mpahlwa. Thabo was thereafter banished from the Mpahlwa home, and denied access to his son. The boy was later reclaimed by Epainette, who looked after him and sent him away to boarding school. Kwanda was denied the paternal love that Thabo himself had missed while growing up. He later disappeared in 1981 under mysterious circumstances in an apparent elusive quest to join his father in Swaziland, and was never seen again.

Mbeki left the Eastern Cape for the first time at 17, arriving in Johannesburg in 1960, the annus mirabilis of independence for many African countries, but also the annus horribilis of the banning of the ANC and the Sharpeville massacre of 69 black protesters against the pass laws. Even at this young age, the precocious Thabo was regarded as clever and confident beyond his years. He became active in political organising for the underground ANC, and met two Indian South African brothers – Essop and Aziz 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 like his father Govan Mbeki, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, from whom Thabo had directly or indirectly learned the art of politics. Thabo later remarked about the lessons he had imbibed from his foremost political mentor, Oliver Tambo: ‘He taught me the obligation to understand the tasks of leadership, including the necessity never to tell lies, never to make false and unrealisable promises, never to say anything you do not mean or believe, and never to say anything that might evoke an enthusiastic populist response, but which would ultimately serve to undermine the credibility of our movement and struggle.’¹¹

It was all of these formative experiences that helped to shape the future politics of Thabo Mbeki.