"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Govan Mbeki (part 2)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 766 - 767

At tend minutes past two on the morning of Thursday 30 August 2001, Govan Mbeki died of congestive cardiac failure, at his home in Summerstrand in Port Elizabeth. He was 91 years old. His final request to Dr. Mamisa Chabula – his doctor and companion in the years since his release – had been to be wrapped in his favorite ANC blanket and cap. His last words, Chabula reported to the media, were: ‘Misa, its’ been a long journey.’

Dr Chabula is a prominent Port Elizabeth personality. In her early fifties at the time of Govan Mbeki’s death, she ran the largest private practice in the township of Motherwell, was a senior city health official, had either children who looked upon Govan Mbeki as a father, and had received national recognition for her tireless activism for the reform of Xhosa circumcision rituals. When we met in her somewhat grand suburban home a few months after Mbeki’s death, she talked with the same engaging fluency about the benefits of the Malaysian Tara circumcision clamp as she did about her years with the man she identified, publicly, as ‘more of a parent than a patient to me.’

‘In all the years of dealing with the Old Man,’ she said to me, ‘I never heard him say, “I miss so and so.” But a few days before he died, he said to me, “Misa, I miss Thabo.” It was at that point I knew that he was finally going.’

The timing could not have been worse for Thabo Mbeki. In its ongoing battle with the ANC over macro-economic policy, COSATU had called a national anti-privatisation strike to coincide exactly with the UN World Conference Against Racism, which Mbeki was hosting in Durban. On the day Mbeki received the call to come and say goodbye to his father, he had posted one of his angriest blogs yet, accusing the labour union of using workers as ‘cannon fodder’ against their own liberation movement, and of joining hands with the racist right wing.

Now, as Mbeki flew with Zanele down to Port Elizabeth on 26 August to see his father, he would have read the comments in the Sunday papers, by union leaders accusing him and his government of an assault on popular democracy; of betraying its roots and selling out to a ‘right-wing middle class.’ The GEAR wars had come to a head – in the week in which Govan Mbeki was dying. Never had public acrimony between the governing ANC and its alliance partners to the left been so severe.

The Mbekis landed in Port Elizabeth at lung time; in the most difficult week, yet, of his presidency, Thabo Mbeki spent hours with his father. When I asked him, later, what they spoke about, his answer was ‘practical things’, nothing ‘spectacular’. He then reminded me, unsolicited, that ‘we were not that kind of closeness of an entity that grows up together;, and that the Mbeki children had been raised ‘to be used to being without [our parents]’ because of the dangers of their political activism. ‘But it didn’t mean the relations broke down…So my father, for instance, I can’t remember him asking any questionabout how I was doing in the ANC leadership or the government and so on. It was always assumed that unless I wanted to raise some issue with him, everything is going fine. And both parents would always insist, “Sure he’s our son, but, we surrendered him to the nation a long time ago.”

Still, Mamisa Chabula remembers that Mbeki left the Summerstrand home filled with sadness. He wanted to move his father to Pretoria, to the comforts – and, presumably, final resting-place status – of the Presidency. When the old man demurred, Dr Chabula explained, ‘Old people, when they know it’s their time, they don’t want to go to an unfamiliar environment.’

‘You have everything on earth,’ she heard the president say, talking about himself. ‘You want to help your father…’