"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 3)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 707-708

When I asked Mbeki about his differences with Mandela while in office, he conceded only one real problem: conflicting approaches to racial reconciliation. Mbeki felt that the way Mandela dealt with the issue negatively affected his own acceptability as his successor, and thus his ability to effect real transformation. South Africa just could not 'sustain a view of national reconciliation of the kind of which the media approved' and with which 'Madiba co-operated', he told me. I have seldom seen Mbeki as exercised, or as impassionated, as when he spoke about this:'You just couldn't do it! It was wrong! Just wrong!'

It all came to a head jsut a few weeks after the Saro-Wiwa affair in February 1996, when the rand crashed on the back of unfouded rumour that Mandela was dying. A Sunday Times editorial drew attention to the vulnerability of the South African economy and its dependance on Mandela's wellbeing: the collapse of the rand was 'a reminder that his extra-ordinary stature as a peacemaker and conciliator remains the pivot of international confidence in our future'. And given that 'we carry on our backs the burden of Africa's failure', Thabo Mbeki was just not up to the job of maintaining Mandela's legacy: 'He simply does not inspire confidence...Where Mr Mandela projects warmth of spirit and generosity, Mr Mbeki appears manipulative and calculating...Where Mr Mandela inspires affection, even love, Mr Mbeki evokes uncertainty and fear.'

...

For Mbeki, the Sunday Times editorial was the sharpest example yet of the 'one good native' syndrome. Referring to it a few years later in his online newsletter, he wrote about how 'the cynics and the sceptics...tried to scare the people about their future...pretending that President Mandela, with his 'magic', was the only person capable of guaranteeing the better future for our country...' Now in office, Mbeki seemed to fix his political psyche on two things; first, that, despite national reconciliation, whites were still racist in that they did not believe that blacks were equal to the task of running the country; second that he would prove them wrong.