His job was never going to be easy. Asked how it felt to step into Mandela’s shoes, Mbeki joked that the old man “has much bigger feet than me” and his “shoes are very ugly.” It was a telling joke. Mbeki had grown impatient with the sunny rhetoric of Mandela’s Rainbow Nation and anxious that the benefits of democracy could be jeopardized if South Africa failed to create a genuinely nonracial society. “When the poor rise, they will rise against us all,” he warned. That acid message and a preoccupation with issues of race have done little to win supporters in the media. Mbeki disdains sound bites, appears aloof in a crowd and operates best behind closed doors. And he is a maverick. Contemporaries from Britain’s Sussex University, where he studied economics in the early 1960s, recall that while girls were discovering miniskirts, Mbeki favored tweed suits, smoked a pipe and developed a lifelong habit of quoting Shakespeare. He wanted to study at Oxford, but fretted that an English education was a distraction from “the struggle” at home.
The end of that struggle opened a door to cynicism in the developed world. Robbed of its unique place in the canon of liberal fantasy, South Africa confronted a more brutal and racially charged realpolitik. Seven years into democracy, it is portrayed in most of the British media as a beautiful country in peril. It has become synonymous with AIDS, crime and racial invective. The crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe, where marauding squatters have maimed and killed white farmers, has simply reinforced the pessimism. “Zimbabwe today, South Africa tomorrow,” editors brood.
Mbeki’s lieutenants rightly recoil at the comparison. The dynamism of the young democracy is worlds apart from Zimbabwe–and, indeed, any other country. But Mbeki’s ill-judged comments on AIDS, and the friendly greetings that framed his encounters with Mugabe, have confused even sympathetic observers. And that was before he upstaged Mandela’s celebrity appearance at a free concert in Trafalgar Square last month with news that three potential rivals faced investigation for allegedly conspiring against him.
Mbeki has defended his stances, but his case is undermined by the ease with which his actions fit into the old African caricatures of creeping autocracy and paranoia. Most of what is written or broadcast about his country betrays an underlying suspicion that the young democracy is locked on a path of inevitable decline. When, for example, South African teachers denounced as “racist” a 1986 novel by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, embarrassed ministers insisted they apologize. But the story ran in London’s Sunday Times under the headline: SO NOW THEY’VE COME FOR YOU, NADINE.
This bleak narrative ignores very real accomplishments. Next to his role in negotiating an end to apartheid, Mbeki’s greatest achievement has been to impose a modern economic policy on a ruling party wedded to the collectivist faiths of its history. In a continent scarred by the failures of multilateral institutions to prescribe economic reform, South Africa is a rare example of successful structural adjustment. For the first time in two decades, manufactured exports and per capita incomes are rising. Similar policies underpin the Millennium Africa Recovery Plan, a Pan-African initiative Mbeki touted to British ministers. He wants commitments on debt relief and trade before African leaders meet next month to ratify the creation of a new African Union, a revamped regional grouping to replace the Organization of African Unity.
Mbeki’s bid for a strategic role in global policymaking has borne fruit. After meeting at Downing Street, British Prime MinisterTony Blair called the skewed trade regime that blocks African exports to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries “a scandal.” During a tour of Africa last month, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell assured Mbeki that Washington would take its cue from Pretoria before intervening in African affairs. Asked recently to reveal his biggest worry, Mbeki offered a diagnosis of the uprisings in the Middle East. And last week he arrived in London ready to advise on race relations in Britain.
Mbeki did not say much in London that he has not said before, but he did say it better. Before he stepped into the queen’s horsedrawn carriage on the Mall, selected British journalists were granted private interviews in Pretoria. “The president has never spoken for so long or in such detail about his views on AIDS,” said a spokesman. Mbeki’s argument that–next to HIV–factors such as malnutrition, sanitation and chronic poverty have contributed to Africa’s AIDS epidemic seemed to convince even the habitually skeptical Times, which judged him “intimidatingly well briefed.”
And so Mbeki soldiers on alone. His vision of an open, democratic Africa rising to the challenge of global capitalism remains elusive and possibly utopian. If Africa is going anywhere, he conceded last week, “it may even be going backwards.” Three days in Britain did not change that, but they did confirm Mbeki as being much more sophisticated than his battered reputation allows.
