and economic inequality. But if Nehru could forge a pluralistic modern Indian identity in India, the world’s largest and most diverse society, Mbeki can learn from India’s imperfect experience and Nehru’s personal experiences, which are remarkably similar to his, and brilliantly portrayed in Nehru’s autobiography The Discovery of India (1946), written in prison before independence.
Like Nehru, whose father was one of the founding fathers of the Indian National Congress, Mbeki also comes from ‘struggle royalty’. While his intellectual and organisational abilities are widely recognised, this ‘pedigree’ is also an important leadership asset. Notwithstanding Nelson Mandela’s protestations about the focus on him as an individual, the truth is that people yearn for some kind of inspirational leadership that gives them hope and faith in democracy, above and beyond brick and mortar issues. As Mbeki pointed out in his inaugural address, it is now up to him and all of us to advance the democratic ideals of his father’s generation.
Both Nehru and Mbeki can be described as detribalised intellectuals who were educated outside their traditional communities, but given the historical responsibility of building democracy in their societies. Nehru was educated at two of England’s most prestigious institutions: Harrow and Cambridge. Once, at a public rally with the great Mahatma Gandhi, he asked: ‘What do I have in common with these people?’ Mbeki was educated at the University of Sussex, and hobnobbed with members of British high society. His attendance last December of a ceremony to welcome him back to his home at Idutywa in the Eastern Cape after many years in exile was perhaps an attempt to start building bridges with his traditional roots. Hopefully, he will take Gandhi’s and even Mandela’s connection with traditional communities more seriously than Nehru was ever able to, without pretending to be what he is not.
Much has been said about Mbeki’s ‘formality’ as an impediment to his ability to connect with the people. But it’s also important that Mbeki should be himself, and he may be surprised to learn that people like him just the way he is. Gimmicks such as dressing informally will go only a certain distance. What is more important is whether he comes across as a leader who is respectful of the people.
Mbeki should muster his personal strengths and abilities to keep to the former, for that is where his legacy lies. What people will most appreciate is his respect for their ideas, and their ways of doing things. One practical suggestion is for him to go back to the townships and villages he visited during the election campaign to engage people directly in the policy process. If he could do it in the short space of an election campaign, he can surely do it during the term of his administration.
Finally, if Mbeki is going to translate the overwhelming vote for the ANC into a victory for our society, he should also build bridges with civil society. As the American political philosopher Michael Walzer has noted: ‘No state can survive if it is alienated from civil society. . . . The production and reproduction of loyalty, civility, political competence and trust in authority are never the work of the state alone, and the effort to go it alone – one meaning of totalitarianism – is doomed to failure.’
Also instructive for Mbeki on this matter would be the following remarks by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere at a workshop I organised in October 1997 at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference centre in Bellagio, Italy:
We committed two basic mistakes in Tanzania. First, we abolished local government. We thought local officials did not have the vision that we had at the national level. They seemed not to realise how urgent the business of transformation was. I had been writing all these things about freedom and participation and yet taking away power from down there and centralising it in national government because I thought things would move quicker. That was one basic mistake. Second, we abolished the cooperative movement. During the process of the liberation struggle we had built up a strong cooperative movement as an economic power base for the people, and now we were abolishing it. However, it soon became clear that we could not sustain the path of a centralised bureaucracy. We had to make government responsive and accountable to the people. That’s when I started calling for a multiparty democracy. I had thought I could reform the party from within, but the inertia of corruption was too heavy. The pressure had to come from outside. In addition to political parties, we had to build self-governing communities and people’s organisations.
Mbeki’s historical responsibility is therefore to make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes. There’s one final international parallel I would like to draw. Just as Thomas Jefferson followed George Washington in founding the United States, and Nehru followed in Gandhi’s footsteps, Mbeki follows in the steps of the towering Nelson Mandela. Like those other ‘crown princes’, Mbeki has an historic opportunity to help us develop a positive national consciousness and identity. That is his tryst with destiny. Whether or not he will fulfil it will be for future generations to tell. It is that long-term perspective which differentiates nation-builders from party builders.
Will he who strikes the presidential pose add body to democracy’s slight frame?
Sunday Independent, 27 June 1999
‘Material poverty is bad enough; coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.’ – Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (1976)
‘People, especially, poor and degraded people, are also hungry for meaning, identity, and self-worth.’ – Cornel West, Race Matters (1992)
Last week, I suggested that Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration speech had not been as exultant and inspirational as it should have been. He seemed tired, unrehearsed, and just out of it – even though the content of the speech was serious enough to make tears well up in one’s eyes.
This week, in his ‘state of the nation’ address to parliament, we saw a different Mbeki: relaxed, poised, and clearly familiar with the subject at hand. I have seen American presidents give ‘state of the union’ speeches before, and this one must rank up there with the best. Mbeki’s last such performance was his ‘I am an African’ speech to parliament in 1996. All of this leads me to one conclusion: Mbeki is much more at home in the formal setting of parliament than at mass gatherings. Maybe his aides should think about having him give his most important addresses in parliament. This was vintage Mbeki at his brilliant best: articulate, consistent, and analytical. In fact, I would go on to suggest that some of this is what he should have said at his inauguration.
For the first time, I heard him articulate a vision for South Africa, which he described as the ‘caring society’. He spoke of the need to ‘give birth to something new, good and beautiful to replace the old order’s law of the jungle’. Yes, Mbeki has been on the stump before, talking about the need for moral regeneration as the basis of the African Renaissance. But until now he has never – at least as head of state – spoken systematically about the African Renaissance as the basis of what the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the ‘civil religion’: a new set of values for our common national identity. I have always maintained that South Africa’s ability to project the African Renaissance across the continent will ultimately depend on us asking ourselves what it means to be South African and African.
I am therefore heartened by the fact that Mbeki will be bringing issues of nation-building and linguistic pluralism to the centre of his governance. I was also heartened to hear the president say that ‘no one should feel that sense of alienation which drives people into peripheral existence’. As the American political theorist Michael Walzer has written: ‘When minorities are free to celebrate their histories, remember their dead, and shape in part the education of their children, they are more likely to be harmless than when they are unfree.’
As South Africans, we have done a great job with developing procedural democracy – elections, constitutions, courts, and so on. What we need now is to fill these structures with content. What Mbeki can help us do is to build a more substantive
