The Thabo Mbeki story: The Family Man
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THE road
to Mbewuleni, Thabo Mbeki's birthplace, takes you away from the
anarchic modernity of the market town of Idutywa, into the hills and the
mist. Even on a midsummer's day, the
paradoxical The monochrome landscape
is grey-green, and, in contrast with the teeming settlements strung along the
N1 down below, it feels strangely depopulated. Next to me, in the car, is a
tiny woman with huge eyes behind glasses. Her name is Epainette Mbeki, known
as "Piny" or "Ma Mofokeng"; she is 82 years old, and she
is taking me back to the village to which she and her husband, Govan - young,
educated, urbanised communist pioneers out to
make a Brave New World - moved in 1940 to set up their co-operative store.
There they planned to find a way of living independently of government
salaries and to attempt to put their ideologies of peasant
upliftment into practice. After 18km,
the road summits the crest of a hill. To the east, a valley
opens out dramatically into a bowl ringed by mountains, and
tumbling down the side of this valley is the settlement of
Mbewuleni, "a place of seed". A bumpy, sodden track leads one
through the homes of the amagqoboka, the "educated ones", the
Christians, down into a valley and up the other side to the Mbeki homestead, situated
on the amaqaba (red-blanketed or illiterate) slope of the village. Epainette Mbeki, whose
only concession to age has been to move closer to town and its amenities, now
leases the property out. Decayed by poverty and the weather, it is in a state
of dilapidation, with a weedy yard and broken windows.
When she and her family lived there, it was renowned for its order and
tidiness. "When we arrived,"
she says, "there was nothing. But that was marvellous, because once we
set up, we saw how people came to change from their unproductive habits, and
[how they began] trying self-improvements. It was, I am sure, taking an
example from us." And there you have the
ethos of the Mbeki family: they are missionaries, they are workers. Now, as we enter the
homestead, a cluster of women approach, diffidently. Epainette
Mbeki interacts with them the way her son Thabo does when he meets
poor, needy people. It is a way that can best be described as pastoral:
empathetic but not sentimental, paternal but not patronising. She is with
them but not of them, removed, somewhat, by her aquamarine twinset and her
education. One woman, a retired
teacher, has none of the shy reserve of the others. "I'm so glad to see
you," she says loudly to Epainette Mbeki and her visitors,
"but where is Thabo? We want to see him. He is our child. He was born and
bred here, and we have things to say to him. We have no telephones, no Eskom,
no water, nothing. We are struggling. We want to say to him that we are
getting impatient." As we get into the car
to leave, Epainette Mbeki shakes her head. "I've told Thabo the
villagers want to see him. But as I have tried to explain to them, this is
the very last village in It is a comment that
says much about Thabo Mbeki; about his stern disavowal of both the
sentimentality of ethnicity and the favour of patronage. He has no
demonstrable attachment to Mbewuleni or, for that
matter, to his family. His modernism does not seem to sit easily with the
conventions of being a member of a clan, or of having a "home
town". His closest
friends in Centuries
away, in the airless glitter of the Sandton Sun one evening in late 1998,
Thabo Mbeki is launching his book of speeches. The room is packed with a
crowd that sweats success. Brian Gilbertson, the The crowd laughs with
identification. Mbeki takes the podium and responds with an anecdote: when he
was studying at On the surface, he was
acknowledging that people have always claimed not to know him. But he was
also identifying with those Unlike Nelson Mandela,
who made a fetish of his biography for South Africans to identify with
("I was in chains, you were in chains; as I was liberated, so were you;
as I can forgive my oppressors, so too can you"), his successor seems to
be saying, "If you want to know me, listen to my message. My policy is
my personality." His resistance to
biography tells us that he is determined to draw a boundary around his
privacy, but it also tells us that he has, very successfully, submerged
personal identity beneath the greater cause, that he has subordinated
sentiment to intellect. Perhaps, too, that he has sought meaning not in
personal relationships but in tireless hard work, in a duty to the struggle.
In all of these, he is very much the son of Govan and Epainette Mbeki - and
of the liberation movement to which he has given his life. If
Thabo Mbeki lacks the noblesse oblige of a chief, of a Mandela, it is because
he is not a chief. He is of the nose-to-the-grindstone middle class. Whereas
the aristocratic Mandela has grace, Mbeki - the bourgeois - deploys charm.
Mandela is a chief whom everyone calls "Tata" (grandfather); Mbeki
a commoner whom everyone calls "Chief". Mbeki demonstrates the
peculiarly middle-class ego: the
prove-yourself impulse. The Mbeki family
constitutes a struggle dynasty, but its image is neither that of
salt-of-the-earth goodness like the Sisulus, nor that of compelling (if
dysfunctional) royalty like the Mandelas. For the Mbekis, the ruptures of
dislocation - exile, prison, poverty - have not been sealed;
there is the tension and energy that accompanies pursuit of a
destiny not yet filled, a job not yet done. " Mbekis do not rely
easily on others. They do things for themselves, believing, often with good
reason, that no one could do it as well as they could. They are proud and
private, inquisitive rather than acquisitive, sometimes prickly and contrary,
their intensity covered, in the men at least, by a
supposed social ease and gravel-voiced charm that woos yet gives
away nothing. They are a questing, uncomfortable, fluent people, clear-eyed
and unsentimental. Govan Mbeki's family
were Mfengu people ("Fingos"), early converts to Christianity who
benefited through their alliances with the British in the Epainette's family, the
Moeranes, are Basotho members of the elite Bafokeng clan and come from a
similar background. But in 1962, when a 17-year-old Moeletsi
Mbeki, the second son of Govan and Epainette, went to visit the Moerane farm
at When Epainette was
growing up, her family's destiny as landed gentry seemed secure: her father's
dairy farm, sorghum and wheat fields were so lucrative that he was able to
send all seven of his children for tertiary education. Four decades later, at
the time the young Moeletsi was watching his family heritage crumble, his
father was in detention in The story of the
Moeranes and the Mbekis, from aspirant gentility to near-penury and rebellion,
describes the quiet, but devastating drama of the black SA
rural experience in the 20th century. Africans were needed for labour in the
mines, so the thriving peasant economy that families like the
Mbekis and the Moeranes epitomised was ruthlessly and deliberately eroded. In the history of
Epainette Mbeki's own shop there is a similar constriction. Moeletsi
remembers the Mbewuleni store of his childhood to be "like one of those
general-dealer stores in the Westerns - bustling, rambling". A
far cry from its current dilapidation, or from Epainette Mbeki's new shop,
little more than a spaza, outside Idutywa. By the time he set up
his shop, Govan Mbeki, a teacher by training, had two university degrees and
was one of the most educated young African men in The decision of
two such educated sophisticates to set up shop in an isolated corner of the Yet the Mbekis had all
the hallmarks of the petit bourgeoisie: they sent their children on second-class
tickets to boarding school, they ate cheese, they
"took" the Daily Dispatch. But
they also lived in an area where there was no electricity, no
telecommunications and no water. Govan Mbeki might have had two degrees,
but his wife had to travel several kilometres daily
to collect water from the nearest well. The Mbekis formed part
of a powerful network of educated, Christian families. But because of their
store and their politics, they lived with the red people in a way that
brought a fair amount of opprobrium from their peers, who regarded the
amaqaba as pagans, and beyond the pale. And there was another difference:
Govan Mbeki devoted himself to peasant activism; he had Marx on his
mantelpiece and a photo of Mahatma Gandhi on his wall. The shop was, literally,
a centre of civilisation: a postal agency, it was a
place where you would come for advice if you did not understand the world, a
place where you would have your letters read and written by the literate Mbeki
children. And so Thabo Mbeki, all
of seven or eight, was reading and writing for the adults
in his community, privy to the agony and longing communicated
between migrant labourers in the cities and the people they left back home.
He was by no means the only educated child in rural His father believes it
aged him beyond his years. The
young Thabo was introverted, polite and with his nose
perpetually in a book. "He didn't have many friends of his age,"
his mother recalls. "Let me say he was not very communicative. On the
reserved side." She remembers him
rushing to the wireless whenever he heard the pips of the radio news. If she
asked him what he was listening to, he would reply, "Don't worry, Mommy.
You wouldn't understand." When asked about the
roots of his intellect, he went straight back to Mbewuleni: "You see, we
grew up with books around the home, and whenever we were together with the
parents, discussing, you could say anything. It was allowed." Olive Mpahlwa,
the daughter of Mbewuleni's schoolmaster and the woman who was to
bear Thabo a son, was seduced by
the family's passion for intellectual activity: "Whenever I was there,
you could hear noise and laughter coming from the kitchen. There they would
be, together with their mother, and they'd grab me and say, 'Help us! We're
struggling over how to analyse this sentence!' And they would be disagreeing,
and they would pull me in to take their sides." What
links Thabo Mbeki to his parents and grandparents is not just a missionary
zeal and an impulse to progress, but also the notion that work is a form of
redemption. For the atheist Mbekis, productivity, really, is their religion.
Both in their 80s, Govan and Epainette Mbeki work constantly. She is up at
dawn, feeding her chickens, running her store, being the social worker to her
community. Nelson Mandela has often
chastised Thabo Mbeki for working too hard. "Life wouldn't be life for
them without work," says Olive Mpahlwa of the Mbekis.
"They know no other life. I don't mean to say that they hide behind it,
but I do see that it's good for them, because it does take them away from
every other problem." Govan Mbeki left
Mbewuleni in 1953 because, the family says, of financial difficulties: a
tornado wrecked the shop. After teaching for 18 months in Ladysmith, he moved
to In an interview in the
early '90s with the filmmaker Bridget Thompson, he said: "I never really
had time for the children. Not that I didn't like them, not that I didn't
love them. But I was doing writing and reading so I didn't have time to be
playing about with them. I pushed them to their mother. I do not know how
they feel today. Probably they feel that I didn't pay sufficient attention to
them as children. I can't blame them if they feel like that." Such apparent coldness
is perhaps less shocking to people who know the Mbekis than to outsiders,
because of the productivity ethos within the family. There is a striking
generational symmetry: Thabo was denied a father when he was a little boy because
Govan, the writer and journalist, was sequestered in his study at the
typewriter; now Govan, living for the past five years in a bungalow next to
Thabo's house on the Groote Schuur estate, in Cape Town, cannot gain access
to a son who is sequestered in his study at his laptop computer. But there is no
demonstrable resentment from either side about this: if the work is the
product of an abstracted love of the people and duty to the people, then it
seems, for the Mbekis, to be an acceptable substitute for familial love. And
"family", in true Marxian spirit, is a political as much as a
biological designation. The movement is the family. When Govan Mbeki went
off, with other members of the internal leadership, in January 1990 to meet
his children in A son is a mere
biological appendage; to be called a comrade, on the other hand, is the
highest honour. Govan Mbeki reiterated
the sentiment to me when I asked him if he was proud of his son. "Of
course I'm proud of him," he snapped back, "but I'd be proud of any
young man who was president of the ANC. They are all my children." For
the Mbekis, pride is not a function of mere biology; it is vested, rather, in
what you do in the world; in how you fulfil your mission. When Thabo Mbeki's
closest friend at Twenty-five years later,
when the old man stepped off the plane in As we shall see, the man
who was both Thabo Mbeki's political mentor and surrogate father in exile was
Oliver Tambo. But despite his closeness to Tambo, Thabo Mbeki disapproved -
after Tambo's stroke in 1989 - of the way the Tambo family was
using the ANC name to seek special medical assistance in the West when most
comrades had to make do with the facilities in the Later, in the '90s,
when Olive Mpahlwa, his son's mother, tried to contact him
about the disappearance of Kwanda (whom she last had contact with in 1980,
when he apparently was on his way into exile), she was disappointed by what
she perceived to be his unwillingness to engage in the search for his own
flesh and blood. Though Thabo Mbeki told
me he had made efforts to follow up rumours that Kwanda had been
variously spotted - in the GDR, in Cuba - he remains convinced that it would
have been inappropriate "to broadcast" his family's personal
tragedies, because this would have given the impression that his approach to
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was motivated by a personal agenda.
"And so we decided, whatever hurt there is in the family, we'll handle
it ourselves." How,
I asked Govan Mbeki, do he and his family deal with the tragic double loss of
the disappearances of Jama (Thabo's younger brother, who appears to have been
murdered in Lesotho in 1983) and of Kwanda? He responded, as Mbekis
often do, through literature, which provides them with their emotional
language. He could not remember the name or the author of the poem or even
the exact lines, but he was clear on the sentiment: "When you go into
war, if your comrade in front of you falls off his horse, you must not stop
and weep. You jump over him into battle. You learn not to weep." Is this martial
stoicism, passed on to Thabo Mbeki by his father, an adequate explanation for
his disavowal of biology? Does this manifest an almost pathological sense of
propriety, and of not wanting to claim any favours because of paternity; to
make it on your own, the way your father did and your grandfathers before
him? Or is it a survival mechanism? How could Govan Mbeki in jail, or
Epainette Mbeki alone and struggling in Mbewuleni, or Thabo
Mbeki, totally adrift from anything familiar in exile, have done without it?
How could any political prisoner or exile do without it? It is the symptom of a
family that sublimated all its emotions into the struggle, into the movement,
which, in turn, became the family. Linda Mbeki (a businesswoman in
Butterworth) is not Thabo Mbeki's sister as much as Nkosazana Zuma is; Essop
and Aziz Pahad are as much his brothers as Moeletsi and Jama Mbeki; Oliver
Tambo is far more his father than Govan Mbeki is; and Govan Mbeki far more
Chris Hani's father than he is Thabo Mbeki's. And this, perhaps, is as true
for Thabo Mbeki as it is for many people who went, young and vulnerable, into
exile. There is a myth
about family, about a shared ethos, that permeates the culture of the ANC in
exile; a culture that formed Thabo Mbeki as much as anything he learnt at
home did. People in his office who
do not come from this exile culture are sometimes frustrated by it, but they
have come to accept it. It explains, perhaps, his intense loyalty to people whom
others sometimes perceive to be weak and inefficient. "They just don't
have our values" is something you will often hear returned exiles say
about others in the ANC who have exhibited ambition or hunger of any kind.
What are these values? In a company or an organisation, the values to which
you are expected to subscribe are empirical and concrete. In a family,
however, they are often mystical, incorporeal, and can thus be
deployed, strategically and hegemonically. "The Family" is a source
of immense strength, but it can also be a means of
control and a receptacle for sublimated emotion. The ANC
is not, its leaders repeatedly point out, a regular political party. It does
not always belong in the world of late 20th-century multiparty democracy. On the one hand, it is
forward-looking, progressive and engaged in the quest for modernity; on the
other, there is something altogether more arcane, more mystical, about it.
Even as Thabo Mbeki has aspirations to make the ANC an efficient, well-oiled
machine of the new millennium, his history dictates that he cannot but view it
as his family, the family that reared him and that he now has to govern as
its new paterfamilias. İMARK GEVISSER 1999 |