Mandela Heir Remains Enigma to Nation

The man expected to be the next president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, wears smart suits and boasts a British education. He can recite the poetry of William Butler Yeats by heart. He was married in an English castle and has lived half his 56 years outside South Africa.

But home is here in the rolling hills of the secluded Eastern Cape, where people favor mud huts and English is the language of outsiders. Mbeki was born about 50 miles down the road from this erstwhile capital of the apartheid-era black homeland of Transkei. He attended primary school in nearby Butterworth, not far from where his elderly mother still runs a small general store.

Yet when people here talk about the likely president-to-be, they speak most often of the stranger from overseas, not the boy next door. The Transkei’s other favorite son, Nelson Mandela, also left his childhood home for a larger calling, but somehow his roots have sunk deeper and his bonds have held tighter.

“Mandela is a good guy and a great president,” said Templeton Goniwe, an apartheid-era political prisoner who works in a pharmacy here. “But I don’t know about this guy Mbeki. We all know his father, but we don’t have a sense of the younger guy.”

It has become a cliche in South Africa to describe Mbeki as a mystery. But there is no escaping it. Ordinary people and seasoned political analysts alike are puzzled when queried about the man who, after Wednesday’s national elections, is virtually assured of becoming South Africa’s second black head of state.

Admirers like Mbeki for what they hope for: a worldly, no-nonsense pragmatist who will crack heads and get South Africa’s transformation in high gear. Detractors dislike him for what they fear: an autocratic African National Congress insider who values loyalty over competence and power over patriotism.

“People see what they want to see in Thabo Mbeki,” said Daniel Makoko, an unemployed engineer in Soweto, the country’s largest black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. “Those who don’t know him, really don’t want to know him.”

Even Govan Mbeki, his 89-year-old father who was imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island for anti-apartheid activities, says he can offer little insight on his son as president-to-be.

“He will follow the promises of the African National Congress,” the elder Mbeki said. “I think he will measure up well. But how could I have ever thought of him as president? I didn’t see it coming way back.”

A onetime member of the Communist Party who received guerrilla training in the former Soviet Union, Mbeki now champions the country’s conservative economic policies. An eloquent wordsmith who can spend hours laboring over a single word in a speech, he becomes tongue-tied when pressed to deviate from a script. An expert in diplomatic circles and capitals around the world, he is only now learning to balance a child on his knee and look into a camera.

Colleagues say there is nothing spontaneous about the plodding, bookish and erudite man who, when pressed to be more forthcoming about his private life, responded last year by publishing a 302-page collection of his speeches, beginning with a 1964 appeal to the United Nations on behalf of his imprisoned father.

“Mbeki is not a populist and, consequently, his speeches do not contain rhetorical flourishes,” the book’s stern preface says. “They are meant to be taken seriously and deserve close and critical scrutiny.”

On Wednesday, Mbeki was decidedly more easygoing when he voted at 7 a.m. near his deputy president’s residence in Pretoria. But for Mbeki, early morning casualness meant a dash-in, dash-out solo appearance in a pressed sport shirt under a pinstripe suit. And he not only slipped ahead of the 100 or so voters in line--some of whom had been waiting in the cold for three hours--but he also sped off in his silver Mercedes-Benz without reaching for any of their hands.

“Mbeki leaves the mass audience mystified,” said Jeremy Cronin of the South African Communist Party, which is in alliance with the ANC. “I think he has several different inclinations . . . that might not quite mesh.”

A Weighty Role in Managing the Country

Mbeki has been the country’s deputy president for five years and has led the ANC since Mandela stepped down as party chief in December 1997. If the ANC, as projected, wins Wednesday’s election, Mbeki is slated to be elected president by Parliament on June 14 and assume the post two days later.

Until a frenzied public relations blitz in the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s elections, however, Mbeki’s role in managing South Africa’s young democracy has been weighty but understated.

If Mandela has been South Africa’s master glad-hander drawn like a magnet to every Klieg light, Mbeki has been its genius operator comfortably holed away in the dimly lighted control room. Political analysts characterize Mbeki as the country’s de facto prime minister, but many South Africans are so unfamiliar with him that Mandela took to wearing “Thabo Mbeki for President” T-shirts during his campaign appearances.

“He has always been in the shadow, so this is completely new for him,” said Wilmot James, dean of political science at the University of Cape Town. “He has had this experience running the government and that is a major advantage, but anybody in his position would find some comfort in having Mandela take the lead. He now has to take final responsibility for things.”

Despite his low-key profile, few would challenge Mbeki’s presidential credentials, which differ vastly from Mandela’s but are no less bona fide.

Not only did Mbeki handle some of the most sensitive first contacts between the ANC and the apartheid-era white minority regime in the late 1980s, but he did so in such a masterful manner that a top government negotiator says he knew immediately that “Thabo was the chosen one,” according to a recent account of the sessions.

ANC officials say Mbeki’s star began rising at a very early age. A child of the liberation movement, his personal life has been as much a product of the ANC as of his nuclear family.

It was the ANC, not his parents, who approved his marriage to Zanele Dlamini (and provided their wedding rings). It was the ANC that sent him into exile for 28 years, encouraged his studies at Sussex University and helped support his only child. The boy, born to a childhood sweetheart when Mbeki was 16, later mysteriously disappeared with Mbeki’s nephew. Both are presumed to have been slain by apartheid security forces.

It was the late ANC leader Oliver Tambo, also living in exile, who served as Mbeki’s most enduring father figure during the time Govan Mbeki was locked up on Robben Island and the younger Mbeki was unable to return to South Africa, even for a prison visit. When father and son were finally reunited in Zambia after Govan Mbeki’s release in 1989, it had been nearly 30 years since their last meeting.

“I still see him more on TV,” Mbeki’s father said.

Mbeki’s life was different from that of other rural Transkei boys almost from the start. As a youngster, his parents required that he read and write letters for illiterate villagers whose loved ones lived afar. With his father’s vast collection of books, he would steal away to read in his spare time, sometimes feigning illness so he could miss school and stay in bed with a book. In his early teens, according to a biographical sketch included in his book of speeches, Mbeki read Plato, Dostoevsky and John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

His long life away from home began at age 9. Fearing arrest because of their ANC and Communist activities, his parents sent Mbeki to live with an uncle.

Preparation for Black Majority Rule

A year later, he volunteered to get arrested in a protest against increasingly oppressive apartheid laws, but the ANC advised him to come back when he was older. By 17, he was a local leader in the ANC Youth League and had been expelled from school for organizing a student strike. Three years later, he was among 28 students spirited out of South Africa by the ANC to prepare themselves for the day when blacks would rule the country.

His parting advice from home--which would sustain him for the next 28 years--came in a hastily arranged meeting with Mandela who was living underground and had to wear a disguise to meet with the group.

“He said . . . there was an immense responsibility on us to succeed,” Mbeki recalled to a South African interviewer in 1996. “He said when the struggle against apartheid was over we would be expected to play a leading role in the processes of reconstruction of a post-apartheid South Africa.”

* ELECTION DAY

An estimated 85% of voters cast ballots in second post-apartheid elections. A6