"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Govan Mbeki (part 1)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 71-72

You have been a father to all our people, but you have never been a father to me.’ This was what Nelson Mandela’s eldest daughter, Maki, said to him upon his release from prison in 1990. Her words echo Moeletsi Mbeki’s : ‘My father was busy educating the nation. We had our mother.’

But, unlike Govan Mbeki, Mandela has publicly castigated himself for not having been a better parent and husband. His biographer Anthony Sampson write that he ‘blames himself’ for the fact that he had ‘sacrificed’ his family ‘for his political purpose’, and that he underwent some kind of redemptive process while in jail: ‘He learned about sensitivities and how to handle the fears and insecurities of others, including his Afrikaner warders. He was sensitized by his own sense of guilt about the family and friends he had used during his political career.’ It was this sensitization, says Sampson, that led to Mandela’s extraordinary capacity for reconciliation upon his release.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela: the latter’s life project of personal reconciliation is unique, and Govan Mbeki was far more typical of his class and his generation in not going through a similar process of remorse – and thus self-knowledge – about his relationship with his family. Unlike Mandela, who after his release talked either with sadness or with love about his family, Govan Mbeki carried, to his death, deep and unresolved emotions on the subject, emotions he found hard to articulate.

As ideological and intellectual as Mandela was intuitive and emotional, Govan Mbeki found impenetrable refuge in the struggle, with its Marxist understanding of affective family relationships as sentimental, bourgeois, and ultimately distracting from the revolutionary matter at hand; of ‘the family’, then, as a political rather than a biological unit. When I asked him, for example, how he coped with the fact that his youngest son, Jama, and his grandson, Kwanda (Thabo’s son), disappeared without a trace while supposedly in exile in the 1980s, he responded once more with literature. 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 his into battle. You learn not to weep.’

Likewise, when Govan Mbeki went off with other members of the internal leadership in January 1999 to meet the ANC-in-exile in Lusaka, he was asked by a reporter at Jan Smuts airport how he felt about seeing his son Thabo. ‘Not much finer than seeing the others,’ he retorted. ‘You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade!’ A son is mere biological appendage; to be called a comrade, on the other hand, is the highest honour.