Gevisser Thabo Mbeki

The Dream Deferred (Updated Edition)
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77619-199-4
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 440 Seiten

Hailed in the Times Literary Supplement as 'probably the finest piece of non-fiction to come out of South Africa since the end of apartheid', The Dream Deferred is back in print and updated with a brilliant new epilogue. The prosperous Mbeki clan lost everything to apartheid. Yet the family saw its favourite son, Thabo, rise to become president of South Africa in 1999. A decade later, Mbeki was ousted by his own party and his legacy is bitterly contested - particularly over his handling of the AIDS epidemic and the crisis in Zimbabwe. Through the story of the Mbeki family, award-wining journalist Mark Gevisser tells the gripping tale of the last tumultuous century of South Africa life, following the family's path to make sense of the liberation struggle and the future that South Africa has inherited. At the centre of the story is Mbeki, a visionary yet tragic figure who led South Africa to freedom but was not able to overcome the difficulties of his own dislocated life. It is 15 years since Mbeki was unceremoniously dumped by the ANC, giving rise to the wasted years under Jacob Zuma. With the benefit of hindsight, and as Mbeki reaches the age of 80, Gevisser examines the legacy of the man who succeeded Mandela. '...essential reading for anyone intrigued by South Africa's complex philosopher-king.' - The Economist

MARK GEVISSER is one of South Africa's foremost writers. He is the author of five works of non-fiction and his journalism has been widely published in South Africa and abroad. Mark has been a Writing Fellow at the University of Pretoria and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). Since 2018, he has been a judge on the Gerald Kraak Award for writing on gender, human rights and sexuality in Africa.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gevisser, Mark

Leseproben

1

THE MBEKIS

THE “BLACK JEWS” OF THE FRONTIER

The road to Mbewuleni, Thabo Mbeki’s birthplace, takes one up from the commerce of the market town of Idutywa into the hills and the mist. Even on a midsummer’s day in January, the landscape is a paradox, both verdant and barren, eerily depopulated in contrast with the teeming settlements strung along the national highway below. Here there is a school, here a motley collection of ramshackle buildings gathered into a compound. Suddenly, in the mist, a woman with a cage of chickens at her side will appear, awaiting a ride into town, or an old man in an unthreading suit and perfectly notched tie will tip his hat as he hobbles along.

It is early 1999, just weeks before Mbeki is to become Nelson Mandela’s successor. I am driving to Mbewuleni with his 83-year-old mother, Epainette. Six decades prior, in 1940, she and her husband, Govan—young, educated, urbanized middle-class communist pioneers out to make a Brave New World—had moved here to start their family, to set up their cooperative store, to find a way of living independent of government salaries, and to attempt to put their ideologies of rural improvement into practice.

Their own fathers had been among the elite of the Transkei, the former native reserve, or bantustan, that was the home of the Xhosa-speaking people in the Eastern Cape. Both had been archetypal “black Englishmen,” one a schoolmaster and the other a colonially appointed headman. Both had built the first schools and churches in their home communities; both had been converted Christians and severe evangelists; both, too, had been prosperous farmers, the very backbone of the rural economy, and among the first African landowners in the Transkei to build four-walled stone houses. These houses still stand, at the extreme southern and northern borders of the Transkei, sentinels of Western civilization, bookending the region’s desperate poverty with their ambitions, narrating the tragedy of a century’s battle between these ambitions and a system determined to see them thwarted.

Nowhere is this tragedy more evident than in Mbewuleni, and as we drive up into the highlands above Idutywa, Epainette Mbeki surveys the disused terraces and eroded valleys with a quiet anguish. The desolation of this land, like the difficult life she has led—in poverty, without her husband and sons—signals a failure of the aspirations of both her and her parents, even if South Africa is now a democracy and her oldest son about to become its president.

Eleven miles out of Idutywa, we turn off the road and bump down a sodden track, through the stolid zinc-roofed homes of the amagqoboka (Christian converts), past the school, down into a dry riverbed, and up the other side to the Mbeki homestead, which is situated among the conical huts at the entry to the qaba (traditional Xhosa) section of the village. Epainette Mbeki, who moved closer to town in 1974, now leases the property out. Decayed by poverty and the weather, it is in a state of disrepair, with a weed-filled yard and broken windows.

But when Thabo was born here, in 1942, the homestead was renowned for its order. “There was nothing here when we arrived,” Epainette tells me. “But that was marvelous, because once we set up, we saw how people came to change from their unproductive habits and how they began trying self-improvements.” In the beginning, “the locals would just throw off their blankets and offload the goods, naked as they were! But then the men started wearing trousers, and the women discarded the red things and would put a German print on. It was, I am sure, taking an example from us.”

For better or for worse, Thabo Mbeki’s own approach to leadership would be rooted in this ethos: from his determination to bring South Africa to a negotiated settlement in the 1980s to his questioning of AIDS orthodoxies, to the way he behaved in the political drama that would lead to his 2008 downfall. His grandparents were among the very first Christian converts in southern Africa; his parents became missionaries for a different cause, communism; his own politics were forged by the Leninist notion of “vanguardism”—revolution led by the educated few, always a few steps ahead of their people. He was a third-generation prophet in the wilderness; his own lodestar African self-determination.

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As we enter the Mbeki homestead at Mbewuleni, a cluster of women gather diffidently around Epainette Mbeki. There is not a man in sight. Encouraged by her, they have made bread-baking trays out of petrol cans and are looking for a loan to build a bakery. Mrs. Mbeki, who was responsible for sending many of their daughters to school, interacts with them the way her evangelizing parents might have done; the way her son does when he too meets poor, needy people—paternal but not patronizing; schoolmarmish but not disciplinarian. She is with them but not of them, removed, somewhat, by her twinset and her education.

One woman, a retired schoolteacher, has none of the reserve of the others: “Where is that son of yours?” she asks Mrs. Mbeki. “He is our child … we have things to say to him. We have no telephones, no Eskom [electricity supply], no water, nothing. We are struggling. We want to say to Thabo Mbeki that we are getting impatient.”

As we get into the car to leave, Mrs. Mbeki shakes her head: “I’ve told Thabo the villagers want to see him. But he told me that this is the very last village in the whole of South Africa he will ever come to.” It is a comment that says much about Mbeki, about his stern disavowal of the sentimentality of ethnic identity and the favor of familial patronage. It says much, too, about the complexity of his relationship with his roots: 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, of having a “hometown” or roots. There is no apparent nostalgia for the tobacco-and-cow dung–scented hills of the Transkei.

A decade later, by the time he was unseated from the presidency, Thabo Mbeki had still not returned to Mbewuleni. Shortly after my first 1999 visit to the village, however, he did go to the birthplace of his father, about 38 miles to the east, at Nyili along the Tsomo River. He arrived by helicopter, to be welcomed home in a ritual that had him draped in beads, eating the inner armpit of a goat, and being rubbed with the resin of a sacred tree. After a life of exile, of wandering, he was being returned to his clan, the amaZizi.

But this was neither a personal visit nor any pilgrimage into his past. Rather, it was a set-piece performance for the election campaign that would lead to his inauguration as president a month later. Photographs of Mbeki participating in the event sought to project the image of an African identity and a connection with rural roots in one too often accused of having neither. A few months later, sitting in the drafty downstairs nowhereland of Mbeki’s official residence in Pretoria, I asked him what his relationship was to the tradition he now seemed willing to explore. “We grew up at somewhat of a distance from that kind of thing,” he told me. “I’ve never been to my mother’s place, and I only went to my father’s place when I came back from exile So really, we had no connection, it didn’t make any impact on us, we were cut off from it.”

In Mbewuleni, he told me, “we were sort of disconnected from many things in the surroundings. Growing up among these amaqaba [traditional people], we lived with them, but we were not amaqaba. So in that sense, we were disconnected: You can see it, you live in it, but it is not you.” Even though the Mbeki children were baptized, “there was no Christianity in our house,” and so they grew up “disconnected,” too, from the amagqoboka [Christians] across the valley with whom they went to school. The “detachment” he experienced as a child was “exacerbated by the fact that we went into exile” and that he was forced to stay away from home for three decades. Attempting to salvage some value from his history in the way that exiles and other itinerants do, he concluded that “growing up in this rather disconnected way meant that you could see things from the outside.”

Only now, in his late middle age—draped in beads and rubbed with strange resin—did the price of this “disconnection” come flooding over him: “What the old people were saying was that you, as an individual, need to come back. This is where your grandfather was, these are the connections. In a sense, they claim you back.”

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The amaZizi, originally from the mountains to the north, were part of a group of outsiders within the Xhosa kingdom known as the Mfengu, or “Fingoes.” Early converts to Christianity, the Mfengu became British collaborators: soldiers (and buffers) against the Xhosas in the interminable frontier wars of the nineteenth century, and consumers and traders who spread the light of European capitalism into the communalist darkness of Africa. Many, like Thabo Mbeki’s grandfather Skelewu, even earned the vote, which was extended to all citizens of the Cape Colony in 1852, regardless of race, as long as they met property or income requirements. The Mfengu would become known by white traders as “the black Jews,”1 for they were educated, aggressive, and unhampered by the feudal restrictions imposed by traditional hierarchies. They thrived, and soon became an...