The Sunday News
Thabo Mbeki was not born a philosopher of the African Renaissance or was he born a spirited Pan-Africanist that he still is today. It is important for those interested in the past and the future of Africa to observe the historical and political conditions and experiences that formed Thabo Mbeki into a vigorous Afrocentrist like Kwame Nkrumah before him and such other thinkers as Joshua Nkomo, Eduardo Mondlane and the like, writes Cetshwayo Mabhena.
Something is strikingly strange about someone who is obviously African announcing loudly and in a Parliament that “I am an African.”
There should be something unique about that person or the Africa that is being claimed. Since the 8th of May 1996 when Thabo Mbeki delivered his now famous “I am an African” speech, debate rages in the media and the academy based on what exactly Thabo Mbeki’s idea of Africa and of Africans is. Sadly, most of us have been swept out of our senses by the pulsating poetry and rhetorical stamina of the speech that stands verse for verse with Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech of 28 August in 1963.
Largely we miss the point behind the poetry. Further, most of us have been arrested by Thabo Mbeki’s declarations about Africa and being African and ignored how as a political thinker Mbeki arrived at such a compelling vision of Africa.
In that speech whose poetic rigour deserves an article of its own, Thabo Mbeki fought many wars and challenged many stereotypes and lazy assumptions about Africa.
Africans, against South African exceptionalism
Since its foundations earlier and its intensification in 1948, apartheid did not only divide South Africans of different languages into tribal homelands in the pretext of separated development, but it also fostered toxic divide and rule politics.
Added to tribalism and divide and rule politics, apartheid sought to instill a false notion among South Africans that they were not Africans, and that South Africa itself was a piece of Europe in the middle of Africa.
This dangerous sense of South African essentialism and exceptionalism has for decades filtered into the mentality of some South Africans, including the so called born frees who have developed a xenophobic and racist propensity against Africans from other countries and this has degenerated into spectacles of disgusting black on black and poor on poor violence.
As a leading South African, in his speech Thabo Mbeki did not only declare that he is an African, he also exclaimed that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.” Much emphatically, Thabo Mbeki exhorted South Africans, black and white, to resist the “temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity” but to remember that they are part of the larger human family.
Behind the beautiful rhythm and rhyme of that artisanal speech, Thabo Mbeki threw monumental blows at racism, xenophobia and the deadly syndrome of poisonous South African essentialism. Part of the political problems that Thabo Mbeki had in South Africa and some that led to his recalling as president of the country was that he paid significantly much attention to Africa at the expense of South Africa as a nation state. Black critics with white mindsets like the intellectual Xolela Mangcu actually publicly accused Thabo Mbeki of pretending to be a president of Africa by spending more political energy and effort on African affairs. What such clever but limited critics missed was that Thabo Mbeki was no nativist or xenophobe but a brooding philosopher of the African Renaissance.
The intellectual and Philosophical formation of Thabo Mbeki
Thabo Mbeki was not born a philosopher of the African Renaissance or was he born the spirited Pan-Africanist that he still is today. It is important for those interested in the past and the future of Africa to observe the historical and political conditions and experiences that formed Thabo Mbeki into a vigorous Afrocentrist like Kwame Nkrumah before him and such other thinkers as Joshua Nkomo, Eduardo Mondlane and the like.
Born in 1942 in the village of Idutywa in the Eastern Cape, Thabo Mbeki, because of the intellectual and political activism of his father Govan Mbeki could read and write at the tender age of seven.
Besides devouring his father’s library that was full of Africanist and communist literature, Thabo Mbeki became important in the village of the poor and dispossessed Xhosa people.
His importance was based on that he became a letter reader and writer on behalf of the illiterate multitudes in rural Transkei. The toddler Thabo Mbeki had to read and write adult stories, letters from mine workers and farm workers to their wives and the replies passed through his young mind in what should have been a corrupting and also traumatising experience.
This letter reading and letter writing and delving in adult lives and stories also became a politicising moment for Thabo Mbeki who witnessed the pains of apartheid as transmitted in the letters and the replies. Thabo Mbeki’s social and political innocence was stolen from him as he was jettisoned into the traumatic universe of apartheid victimhood.
The Educations of Thabo Mbeki
After his deep rural socialisation and his painful entrance into the adult universe at a tender age, Thabo Mbeki was admitted at Lovedale College in 1955. Colonial and Christian missionary education was administered to him, to turn him into an obedient native and colonial subject.
Having been politicised already and hardened Thabo Mbeki was a rebel and eventually he was expelled in 1959. He finished his secondary school by correspondence in Johannesburg where he devoured more libraries and had political discussions and debates with many communists and other intellectuals, young and old.
In 1962 he was dispatched to exile in England where he graduated from Sussex University with a Master of Economics. Besides economics that was founded on the economic ethics of Adam Smith, Thabo Mbeki explored European classic literature and Negritude poetry.
In 1969, at the command of Oliver Reginald Tambo, Thabo Mbeki was flown to Moscow in the Soviet Union to study Communism at the Lenin Institute. After that he was trained as a military commander and an expert in the uses of weapons such as rifles, bombs and missiles.
Those who have closely followed the history of the African National Congress never miss the comic paradox everytime Jacob Zuma sings “Bisa Umshini Wami,” a song that has built an image of Msholozi as a man of military action.
Between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, the man of the machine gun is Mbeki who had a terrible time in Swaziland in 1975 teaching Jacob Zuma how to fire a gun. Jacob Zuma the intelligence man was clinically uncomfortable with guns.
Thabo Mbeki became a planetary thinker, socialised in Africa, trained in capitalist economics in England and refined in communist economics and ideology in the Soviet Union where he was polished as a military man. It is a question to be asked exactly how much of an Africa remained in Thabo Mbeki who had become an ideological, cultural and spiritual exile from his land of birth. After Moscow Mbeki lived and worked for the ANC in many African countries that include Nigeria, Swaziland and Zambia. Because of his social experiences, education, training, travel and exile Thabo Mbeki developed a philosophy of all blacks as Africans in a racist and hostile world. The African Renaissance and African unity are to him not an option but a necessity.
Similar to Edward Said who declared that his passionate philosophical love for Palestine developed from his stay in America and understanding that other parts of the world were after all nothing like home, Thabo Mbeki lusted after Africa from foreign lands. His African Renaissance as a philosophy became what Amilcar Cabral famously described as a “return to the source.”
The stubborn question before us is exactly how Africa can socially, educationally and otherwise produce more of such African thinkers and leaders as exemplified in the legacy of Thabo Mbeki.
The most frantic amongst Thabo Mbeki’s critics and detractors site what they call his “Aids denialism” followed by “racism and race essentialism” and a “propensity for tyrannical behaviour.”
A multiplicity of moralistic judgements of Thabo Mbeki have heavily clouded our view of his deep political and philosophical commitment to Africa and the Africans in a world that is still hostile to Africanity and blackness.
- Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in Pretoria: [email protected]
