leadership from its inception in 1912. (Nelson Mandela was also a member of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Xhosa Nostra’.)
Thabo was the eldest son of Govan and Epainette Mbeki. His parents were middle-class izifundiswa (educated ones) and communists, whose own fathers had been peasant farmers and devout Christians, part of the Westernised elite. Both Govan and Epainette were deeply involved in the struggle for racial justice in South Africa until their deaths in 2001 and 2014 respectively.
Thabo’s father, Govan – affectionately referred to by younger peers as ‘Oom Gov’ – was a teacher and journalist, who attended the same Methodist missionary secondary school as Mandela – Healdtown in Fort Beaufort – where he excelled in Latin. He went on to study politics and psychology at Fort Hare University College, whose famous alumni would include such future ANC leaders as Mandela and Oliver Tambo. This elite black university in the Eastern Cape trained as well many of the first generation of post-independence African leaders such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, and Botswana’s Seretse Khama.
While at Fort Hare, Govan was influenced ideologically by two young white communists – Eddie and Win Roux – who were on a proselytising honeymoon in the Eastern Cape. He became a lifelong communist and would later name his eldest son after his close friend and ideological mentor, Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, one of the leading lights in the Communist Party of South Africa. Epainette and Govan met at a secondary school in Durban where both were then teaching and were married in 1940. They then moved to Mbewuleni, where they set up one of the first black-owned general dealer’s stores – and village post office – in rural Transkei to serve the amaqaba: the traditionally minded, largely illiterate peasants of the village. Govan would later sell insurance and become involved in work for the ANC, while Epainette looked after the shop and the family’s four children: Linda (born 1941), Thabo (1942), Moeletsi (1945) and Jama (1948).
Thabo’s mother, Epainette, was, like her husband, a teacher who had graduated from a famous missionary training college and school, Adams College, in Natal. Under the influence of Betty du Toit, an Afrikaner communist, she became only the second black female member of the Communist Party. Epainette is said to have had a greater role in shaping the political views of Thabo and his siblings than their strict father.
Even before he was convicted at the Rivonia Trial in 1964 and sentenced to jail for life, Govan’s marriage to Epainette appears to have broken down amid financial difficulties. He had by then long lived apart from his wife and children, having left home to take up a teaching job in Ladysmith in Natal, from which he was fired for his political activism. Govan then moved in 1953 to Port Elizabeth, where he worked for the ANC and edited the left-wing newspaper New Age (later renamed Spark), which were both banned by the apartheid government.
Govan was an ideologically doctrinaire man who held strongly, even stubbornly, to his views and opinions: characteristics that his eldest son, Thabo, would also display. Because of Govan’s absence, Thabo grew up largely without his father, and Govan’s relationship with his son was always somewhat distant. At home the family patriarch buried himself in his reading and busied himself with his activism, leaving the children largely to the care of their mother. As he later admitted: ‘I never really had time for the children … Probably they felt that I didn’t pay sufficient attention to them … I wouldn’t blame them if they felt like that.’2 It is hard to tell exactly what impact this lack of paternal affection had on Thabo, but it seems to have contributed to his introverted and sensitive nature. When asked about the disappearance of his youngest son, Jama, and Thabo’s own son, Kwanda, in exile, Govan unsentimentally remarked: ‘When you go into war, if your comrade in front of you falls on his horse, you must not stop and weep. You jump over him into battle. You learn not to weep.’3
Thabo certainly inherited his father’s sense of dress and his eloquence and articulateness, but also his coldness and emotional reserve as well as his singleminded focus on the liberation struggle. At the first meeting between father and son in Lusaka, Zambia, in January 1990 after nearly three decades of not having seen each other, Govan greeted Thabo by formally shaking hands with him, as he did with other comrades lined up to meet the recently released Rivonia trialists, while other families like the Sisulus broke ranks and exchanged warm and joyous embraces. As Govan noted to a reporter at the time: ‘You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade.’4 But both Govan and Thabo did later share moments of private affection.
Thabo was greatly inspired by his father’s example to succeed, and seemed determined to prove himself to Govan by excelling intellectually and politically and carrying on the family’s tradition of noblesse oblige. As Thabo remarked in exile, ‘what I’m doing here, I want to do in the best way I can. I want to excel at it and complete the work of my father.’5 The son was also keen to escape his father’s shadow and succeed on his own terms rather than as the scion of a famous struggle family. In the absence of his own father, the ANC would become Thabo’s family for 52 years, and the ANC president Oliver Tambo, with whom Thabo worked closely for 30 years, would become an adopted father and political mentor.
Like Govan, the young Thabo was – and remains – a voracious reader, consuming the books in the family home: English poetry, Marxist literature (including the Communist Manifesto), James Aggrey, Dostoyevsky, A.C. Jordan’s famous Xhosa novel Ingqumbo yemiNyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors) and even his father’s own volume of critical essays, Transkei in the Making (1939). Govan and Epainette adopted a Socratic method in educating their children, and did not try to indoctrinate them. As Thabo later noted, ‘Our parents never initiated any political discussions at home. It was always up to us to raise matters with them, then they would talk about it.’6 From an early age Govan’s eldest son wrote and read letters for illiterate villagers in his community to and from their migrant family members working on the mines and in domestic service across South Africa. Along with his siblings, they were exposed at an early age to the poverty of South Africa’s black majority and the awful conditions of black mineworkers who came back to the village to die of lung disease. As a young boy Thabo attended the local primary school. Though a good student, he did not like maths and played truant to avoid classes until Epainette discovered the problem, and gave him private lessons at home.
From the age of eight, Thabo was sent away to live with various relatives across the country, as both Govan and Epainette believed it was best that their children should live apart from their politically active parents, who constantly faced the threat of arrest. This nomadic existence created a sense of dislocation even before Thabo left South Africa to go into political exile. Practically orphaned and without a stable family and friends, he became somewhat of an introverted loner. Thabo attended a Moravian school in Queenstown, before going to the famous Scottish Presbyterian missionary secondary school of Lovedale College – the ‘Eton of Africa’ – in 1955. Lovedale was located in Alice on the banks of the Tyhume River in the Eastern Cape. Here, at an institution modelled on British public schools, where the pupils wore blazers, Mbeki became acquainted with the works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, as well as the Xhosa poetry of S.E.K. Mqhayi, the great ‘poet of the nation’. For more than a century, black students from across southern Africa and latterly from further north, as far as Uganda, had attended the school and been prepared for leadership roles in their own communities and countries. Thabo was thus simultaneously exposed at Lovedale to a pan-African identity and to British traditions, both of which he would later come to embody.
Thabo entered Lovedale soon after the National Party (NP) came to power in 1948 and started implementing the racist policies of apartheid. In reaction, most students at Lovedale developed a heightened political consciousness. The year he entered, 1955, was the one in which the apartheid government ordered the forced removal of black residents from Sophiatown in Johannesburg. While at Lovedale Mbeki joined the ANC Youth League at the age of 14, learning to sing struggle songs in honour of the ANC president, Albert Luthuli, and the Congolese liberation
