"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 1)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 699-700

The overriding legacy of the Mandela presidency - of the years 1994 to 199 - is a country where the rule of law was entrenched in an unassailable Bill of Rights, and where the predictions of racial and ethnic conflict did not come true. These feats, alone, guarantee Mandela his sanctity. But he was a far better liberator and nation-builder than he was a governor. In contrast, Mbeki marketed himself as the technocrat, truth-telling antidote to the madness and the magic - the scattershot celebrity - of the Mandela era.

Mbeki saw his mission as effecting real transformation - the flip side to the coin of reconciliation, as he repeatedly - even it this meant disrupting the comfort of the white South African population Mandela had gone to such lengths to reassure. Mandela will go down in history as the man who, like Martin Luther King before him, gave the world a dream, while Mbeki's legacy is both more complex and more substantive: on his watch, South Africa found itself strung between deferring the dream and redeeming it.

A key difference between the two was Mbeki's eschewal of a kind of African paternalism that prevailed in the ANC despite its progressive political traditions. 'OR was a daddy,' a prominent member of the ANC said to me. 'It's like that with Madiba too. He makes it his business to know the names of your wife and children and to ask after them, even if he has never met them. Thabo doesn't do that. And so, among some comrades, there might be complaints that he doesn't invite people to sit and talk, "under the tree", like the old African patriarch'.

An intelligence operative who has worked closely with Mbeki for many years used strikingly similar language:'If people dislike Mbeki, it's because he is the anti-patriarch. He doesn't have a family. He's not a "who's your daddy?" kind of guy. He doesn't want to be anyone's daddy. He wants to engage with you as an equal, and you're useless, he'll tell you. He's not going to protect you or soften things for you because you're his child and he should thus feel an obligation to nurture you.'

People obeyed Mandela because they loved him, because he was their benevolent father: Mbeki could never command allegiance from such a wellspring , and so he needed to earn it elsewhere - people had to respect him, even fear him. If Mandela, the patriarch, loved us despite our many flaws. Mbeki required us to prove ourselves to him. If Mandela was a passionate player, Mbeki would have to be a skeptical and rather aloof observer.