"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and OR Tambo

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 415

Mbeki had been Tambo’s unofficial wordsmith since the early 1970s; now that he was political secretary, the position was formalized. Mbeki’s ghostwriting career began, we will recall, when he was a little boy writing letters for illiterate peasants. Now, through speech-writing, he found in adult life the perfect vehicle for his particular combination of diffidence and intellect; his desire to put his thoughts, but not his personality, into the world. Mbeki understood-as did Tambo-that the job was particularly difficult; it required, as Barbara Masekela put it to me, ‘a new public diplomacy’ to be minted for the liberation movement.

As befitted a teacher of mathematics and a choirmaster, Tambo was notoriously precise, and believed that this was a revolutionary imperative. ‘Once he uttered a particular word, it had to communicate what he meant it to communicate,’ Mbeki told Tambo’s biographer Luli Callinicos. So perilous was the ANC’s position – so much at stake – that ‘we couldn’t allow for a situation in which it would be read differently from what he intended to say; because we had to be very precise about what you had to convey.’

The tales of such obsessive perfectionism are the stuff of ANC legend; they have an almost novelistic texture to them. To prepare for an address, Tambo would get several comrades to draft speeches for him, keeping them up all night for days on end, sending an entire draft back to be retyped because of a split infinitive or a superfluous comma. No matter how many different people were set to a drafting task, Josiah Jele told me, ‘whatever came in had to be finalized by Thabo Mbeki’ even before Tambo got to look at it. If presented with more than one final draft, the ANC leader would invariable choose Mbeki’s (although Pallo Jordan sometimes got a look-in, as did Jack Simons), and this position became a source of enviable power.

Nhlanhla told me about the first time he encountered this process, in the early 1970s, working on an address to commemorate the ANC’s 60th birthday: ‘We worked for two weeks on it. Coming from Moscow, we thought we had all the ideas. We had all the training. But here was this chap from the West!...Thabo was amazing. At the end of the day you found yourself collecting rather than drafting, and feeding into the mainstream that was Thabo.’

Once Henry Makgothi, the ANC’s education secretary, stormed out of a meeting saying, ‘It’s impossible to satisfy OR! The only one who can satisfy him is Comrade Thabo!’ Recounting this adecdote, Sipho Makana smiled when I suggested that Tambo’s protégé had taken on his mentor’s obsessive attention to detail; his perpetual air of dissatisfaction. Perhaps, Makan suggested delicately, ‘Thabo hasn’t found his own “Thabo” yet?’ It was an implication I heard again and again: there is nobody, in Mbeki’s inner circle, on whom he can rely as completely as Tambo relied on him.

‘You find this among a number of exiles,’ Frene Ginwala once said. ‘…We come out of this tradition where, our whole lives, we just work, work, work, work.’ This ethos is fetished, most of all, in the workaholism of Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki, passed on from political father to son as a gene of leadership rather than simply a character train. Listen, for example, to Sanki Mthembi-Mahanyele on Mbeki; ‘He can work throughout the day, and through the night without any problem, and the same was the case with OR. Call it culture, call it a habit if you want, of those who had to lead and direct the struggle…’

What is fascinating is how different this self-perception is from the way exiled leaders were often perceived from the MK camps – as living the easy, lazy life of aeroplanes, conference and hotels. Unlike, say Samora Machel or Robert Mugabe, Tambo spent more time lobbying the world’s capitals rather than in the bush with his soldiers, and his own family was safely ensconced in north London. And so Tambo, like Mbeki, was vulnerable to the slur; perhaps, then, the workaholism legend around both men developed as a defense against such allegations.

Which is not to say that there isn’t truth to it. Tambo’s own Swedish neurologist believes that the debilitating stroke he suffered in August 1989 was a consequence, in part, of overwork. A decade into the democracy for which Tambo martyred himself, members of the ANC exile community often expressed a concern for Mbeki by referring back to this: ‘In exile,’ Sipho Makana said to me shortly before his own death in 2003, ‘people would complain, “We get into bed, OR is burning the midnight oil; we wake up early the next morning, OR hasn’t even been to bed yet. That’s why he got his stroke,” We have the same feeling with Thabo today. He does all the drafts himself.’ The comparison was made to me so many times – from Nelson Mandela himself down to cleaning staff and drivers – that I because convinced it carried a subtext: an annoyance that Mbeki’s own obsessive perfectionism was an expression of his dissatisfaction with their work, and an anxiety that they would never live up to his expectations.