Today, five years after the apartheid era ended with the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, Botha coaches youth soccer teams in an effort to keep kids away from crime. He proudly points to new power lines that have brought electricity to the shacks of Duncan Village. Last week he egged on a crowd that packed the township’s main street to welcome the African National Congress candidate to succeed Mandela, Thabo Mbeki. “There’s a lot of young blood coming in now,” Botha said as Mbeki’s motorcade moved toward a stadium rally.
Mbeki’s all but certain election next Tuesday represents the unusually orderly working of a new African democracy. Mandela, 80, will be the first elected African president to liberate his country from white rule and then relinquish power after a relatively short term in office. But the end of the historic Mandela era signifies even more. A new generation of leaders will take center stage with Mbeki, 56–men and women who came of age at the height of white oppression. They are the children of apartheid.
Once elected, the small, impeccably dressed Mbeki will climb a platform outside Pretoria’s Union Buildings to take the oath of office on June 16. That’s the 23d anniversary of a bloody student protest in Soweto that reignited the struggle to defeat a white faction that had taken power in 1948 under the banner of the National Party. While ANC leaders of Mandela’s generation spent much of their lives in prison, Mbeki’s generation came to maturity either in exile or underground at home, battling the white regime. The elders, largely educated in mission schools, looked up to whites and wanted to be treated equally. Mbeki’s peers, more worldly and pragmatic than Mandela’s, fought to take over. “Mbeki belongs to an angry generation,” says Durban editor and commentator Kaiser Nyatsumba. “He’ll set about putting Africans in charge.”
That worries many whites. They fear that where Mandela preached reconciliation, Mbeki will become a dictator and push them around. He has repeatedly said that the next government will have to concentrate on addressing employment and poverty rather than on reassuring whites. Whites’ fears focus on the possibility that the ANC will win a two-thirds parliamentary majority, giving it the power to amend the Constitution. “That would enable them to govern by fiat,” says Marthinus van Schalkwyk, leader of the New National Party. An NNP poster warns, “Mugabe has two thirds,” suggesting that Mbeki could become as dictatorial, corrupt and anti-white as the president of neighboring Zimbabwe, who has been in office nearly 20 years. Mandela calls the prediction “absolute twak” (rubbish, in Afrikaans).
Mbeki’s biggest challenge will be to curb rampant crime and corruption and to get the economy moving. Most analysts expect Mbeki’s government to be younger, smarter and more effective than Mandela’s. In the new cabinet, Mbeki will keep the best and the brightest from Mandela’s administration (like Finance Minister Trevor Manuel) and ditch the octogenarians rewarded with cabinet posts for their role in the struggle. “With all its problems, this administration has been the best South Africa has ever had,” says Tom Lodge, director of research at the Electoral Institute of South Africa. “And it will get better under Mbeki.”
Mbeki has spent a lifetime preparing for his new position. He was born in a hut in the wild and beautiful Transkei region in southeastern South Africa. It is the homeland of the Xhosa people, who came to form the core of the ANC–Mandela is a hereditary Xhosa chief–and remain its most dedicated supporters. His parents, teachers steeped in Marxist ideology, founded a store as the base from which to uplift the peasants. Thabo grew up working in the store, his nose in Dostoevsky or Marx whenever he wasn’t herding cows or writing or reading letters for the illiterate customers. By the time he went away to boarding school at the age of 10, he had already been radicalized by his father, Govan, a founding member of the armed wing of the ANC. At 14, Thabo joined his school’s ANC chapter.
The National Party’s election and its progressive imposition of formal apartheid hit Mbeki at a time when most boys are building dreams of future success. Apartheid stripped away what few rights blacks had. New laws required them to live only in “black” areas, limited what they could legally study and made the local library off limits. The Suppression of Communism Act made outlaws of Mbeki’s parents, both party members. The police were given unprecedented powers, and their repression savaged activist families. Mbeki’s father left home in 1953 and soon went underground, leaving his wife to manage on her own.
In the Transkei, blacks suffered. Last week Mbeki choppered into his father’s hilltop birthplace, a village called Nyili, for a combination rally and family reunion. Village elders ritually slaughtered a white goat in the ancestral compound as the president-to-be looked on and his mother and sister waited in a limestone building nearby. While the goat meat cooked in an iron pot, Mbeki told a crowd of local people that the new government would bring them improved water, electricity and phone services so they wouldn’t have to move to the cities to better their lives. At the back of the crowd, Peddie Tyalana, 40, recalled that before Mandela’s election it had been “very bad for us here.” In nearby towns, police harassed any black person on the street after 5 p.m., and white merchants cheated black boys who had walked for hours to sell them bags of corn. “From that time I have a hatred of white people,” said Tyalana, who now helps supervise 250 new bus routes the government has subsidized in the Transkei.
Mbeki was expelled from school for organizing protests against apartheid. He moved to Johannesburg to study and met Mandela in 1961–the year after the ANC was banned. Mbeki’s father counseled him to flee into exile, and he headed for London. Within two years, both his father and Mandela were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mbeki studied economics at the University of Sussex by day and worked with the ANC’s growing exile movement by night. ANC leader Oliver Tambo became a surrogate father, the party his family. After completing his master’s degree in 1966, he took military training in the Soviet Union and joined ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia.
The young activist sped up the party ladder. He smuggled arms from Mozambique to Swaziland, on the South African border, then worked as ANC envoy in Swaziland and Nigeria. He became the ANC’s chief diplomat, then its information chief and Tambo’s right-hand man. In 1979 he was the force behind the party’s decision to switch from stressing the military overthrow of the South African government to an approach that put politics first.
In the early 1980s, he learned that both a younger brother and his only child, a boy he had fathered out of wedlock in the Transkei, had disappeared on their way into exile, apparently captured and killed by South African security agents. In 1984 he used the ANC’s pirate radio station to call for a campaign of sabotage to make South Africa “ungovernable.” But he also argued in ANC councils that whites had to be converted to the antiapartheid cause, because the student-led insurgency within South Africa seemed doomed to stalemate.
Soon Mbeki became the ANC’s emissary to whites. In 1985 he met with leaders of the Afrikaner Broderbond, a secret society at the core of the white power structure. Such contacts multiplied as white leaders searched for a way out of the protests and increasingly costly economic sanctions. Whenever white businessmen or academics came calling, at ANC headquarters in Dakar or in London, they were won over by Mbeki’s sharp intellect, cool reason and fine whisky. Govan Mbeki was released from jail in 1987. When Thabo finally met with South African government representatives, in 1989, the two sides quoted Yeats at each other and talked peace; a year later he was back in Johannesburg and Mandela was free. Mbeki seemed to be a man without rancor. But “under the well-cut suit and the air of well-being is a man deeply damaged by the apartheid era,” wrote authors Adrian Hadland and Jovial Raantao in a new biography of Mbeki. “No one should doubt the depths of anger he feels about the degradation of his people wrought by colonialism, apartheid and their beneficiaries.”
Since his return, he has remained the cool operator. His selection by the party as Mandela’s heir upstaged Cyril Ramaphosa, the leading veteran of the “internal” opposition, and gave rise to rumors that he had eliminated his rivals through quiet backstage maneuvering. As deputy president, he continued to build ties to the white business establishment that still controls the South African economy. His pro-market growth, employment and redevelopment plan quieted fears that he remained at core a socialist. But on occasion he has upbraided whites for continuing to wallow in privilege as the government tries to address the country’s glaring economic inequalities. He recently told a rally that the ANC may have been “too forgiving.” Still, the ANC “appreciates that you have to form broad alliances to succeed,” says a highly placed Mbeki friend in the government. “They are angry–this generation felt the brutality of apartheid more strongly than the previous ones–but they are pragmatic.”
The contrast with Mandela’s generation is stark. The ANC’s prisoners were not subject to outside influences, and when they were freed they saw the world the way it was when they were arrested. In his first speeches as a free man, Mandela said the ANC would nationalize industries, not privatize them. And his outdated loyalties–to Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi and Fidel Castro–have remained. He never had the chance to formulate a style for managing beyond the nation’s liberation; Mbeki came into office already operating like a chairman of the board. “The intensity of the struggle, the repression of our people politicized us to a tremendous level,” says Essop Pahad, a top Mbeki adviser. “[At the same time], exile allowed us the luxury of reflecting on how we would govern the country.”
During the long years of struggle the ANC intentionally focused attention on the jailed Mandela, elevating him to the status of a living saint. And having a saint as president kept many whites from bolting. Mbeki doesn’t command the same kind of awe, but as a mere mortal he probably has a far greater chance of beginning to address the injustices apartheid caused. “It’s time for the Old Man to go,” says Freida Monkue, a domestic worker in Johannesburg. “He was too nice. He was even nice to the criminals. Thabo will punish them.” Mbeki combines the idealism of the generation that bred him with the worldliness of a generation forged in oppression. “He believes in reconciliation, but he is much more aware than Mandela is that if there isn’t a change in the material circumstances of blacks, no reconciliation, indeed no prosperity, can last long,” says commentator Nyatsumba. As the glow of the Mandela era fades, his successor seems fully prepared to begin carefully cracking the whip.
