Mbeki’s leadership of these secret talks.6 Unlike the discreet and tactful Mbeki, Hani was outspoken, accusing the ANC leadership of nepotism for sending their sons to universities in Western Europe in preparation for taking over leadership posts in South Africa after the foot soldiers from non-elite families had overthrown the apartheid government. He dismissed the ANC Youth and Students section, which was at one time led by Mbeki, as ‘bogus’, and derided those like Thabo in the ANC headquarters in Lusaka as ‘armchair revolutionaries’.7 This rivalry did not stop both men from going together on a ten-day vacation with their wives to the Black Sea resort of Sochi in July 1988.
Mbeki also famously clashed with the SACP stalwart and key ANC strategist, Joe Slovo, who remained a close ideological soul-mate of Chris Hani. Slovo was sent by the SACP central committee to Moscow to discipline Mbeki while he was at the Lenin Institute over an unspecified incident regarding Thabo’s conduct towards a woman. This episode reportedly damaged their relationship irreparably.8 After Slovo criticised Mbeki for an article he had written on China in the African Communist in 1972, Thabo left its editorial board and never wrote for the journal again. Despite these difficulties, both Mbeki and Slovo served on the SACP’s seven-member Politburo, created in 1977. In the 1980s Slovo saw Mbeki as opportunistically using the ANC’s opening to the West to push for the adoption of a centrist social democracy; while Mbeki regarded Slovo’s doctrinaire efforts to declare the ANC a socialist organisation as suicidally unrealistic. Thabo once reportedly told a confidant that Slovo did not like him because he had rejected the older man’s offer of mentorship.9 What Mbeki consistently objected to was the patronising arrogance of many white ANC and SACP members who he felt wanted to assume leadership positions rather than remain as ordinary members.
The SACP boss used Thabo’s absence from an SACP Politburo meeting in 1982 to drop him from the party’s highest decision-making structure, before Thabo was reinstated two years later following an outcry from other party members. Mbeki unsuccessfully opposed Slovo’s election to the SACP chair in 1984, noting that a liberated South Africa would not countenance a white president. In a public confrontation, Slovo condemned Mbeki’s views as racist. Mbeki – who was himself consistently sceptical of the ANC’s military abilities to defeat the apartheid state – grew increasingly wary of Slovo’s and Hani’s insurrectionist militancy, correctly reading the international environment in the mid-1980s as having become more conducive to a negotiated settlement. In keeping with his political pragmatism and calculating caution, Thabo remained a member of the SACP until 1990.10 The ‘man for all seasons’ continued to watch closely which way the political wind was blowing before nailing his colours to the mast and quietly abandoning the SACP on his return to South Africa.
In April 1971 Thabo Mbeki returned to Africa from London for the first time in nearly a decade. He would work for the ANC on the continent for the next two decades until his return home in April 1990, serving at the ANC headquarters in Zambia, as well as in Swaziland, Botswana and Nigeria. It is important to stress that Mbeki’s two-decades-long path to power ran directly through Africa, and not through Europe. In the process, he developed great respect for African solidarity and gratitude for continental support of South Africa’s liberation struggle. It was also during this period that Thabo directly witnessed some of the political and socio-economic challenges of post-colonial Africa which he would have to tackle as president.
In Africa he was joined by his wife. In 1971 Zanele won a scholarship to start a doctorate on social welfare – focused on the status of black women under apartheid – at Brandeis University in Boston, though she would never complete it. She was widely respected within the ANC as an intellectual with independent and radical views, and was elected to ANC Women’s League positions when the couple lived in Lusaka. She returned to Zambia from the United States to set up the family home in 1974, working for the largely Swedish-funded International University Education Fund (IUEF), which sourced scholarships for black South Africans, until its deputy director, Craig Williamson, was exposed as an apartheid spy. A three-bedroom terraced house on Martin Luther King Close in the Lusaka suburb of Kabulonga became the Mbeki family home for the next two decades. The couple were said to be very private. They spent much time apart because of Thabo’s political activism and Zanele’s equally busy schedule.
After returning home from exile in 1990, Zanele decided to set up the Women’s Development Bank – a micro-enterprise project to support poor women – rather than join ANC party structures. Her devotion to her husband was again evidenced when in the mid-1990s she put her doctorate on hold for a second time to support Thabo’s political ambitions. She managed the family’s finances and had the foresight to invest in property in Johannesburg following their return to South Africa. After Mbeki assumed the presidency in 1999, she kept a low profile as ‘first lady’, refusing requests for interviews.11
Returning to Africa from European exile in 1971, Thabo served as the assistant to Moses Mabhida, the secretary of the ANC’s newly established Revolutionary Council, a body whose task was to get MK soldiers back into South Africa. Exile was not an easy place to be: the ANC had been expelled for a time from Tanzania, while their Zambian hosts were ambivalent about their presence, restricting their activities for fear of provoking a military response from the apartheid regime. In Zambia the ANC built up a sizeable infrastructure, and would eventually build up a sizeable army in Angola by 1990. But further problems were created for the ANC when Mozambique signed the US-brokered Nkomati Accord with Pretoria in March 1984, in a further betrayal of the anti-apartheid struggle, as the ANC had to withdraw its military leadership and hundreds of cadres from this strategic country and neighbour of South Africa. In 1989, as part of a superpower-brokered deal to end the Angolan civil war, thousands of ANC fighters were also forced to leave that country for camps in Uganda. While exiles like Mbeki were grateful for African support for their liberation struggle, these actions of the Front Line States must also have rankled and created some resentment.
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