"Diplomacy can be a deadly business, all the more so for being clothed in conciliatory forms", Henry Kissinger, "Ending the Vietnam War", 2003, page 337.
The local media and intellectual class have lately been perplexed by the hard-to-explain phenomenon of our society's intense interest in, and even fascination with, the legacy and personality of former President Thabo Mbeki. Some commentators and analysts describe this interest and fascination as "nostalgia" for Mbeki.
But it is in the area of South Africa's conduct of its diplomacy, in other words with regard to South Africa's foreign policy, that this "nostalgia" for Mbeki finds concentrated expression in the South African society.
There is general consensus in our country that it was in the area of diplomacy that Thabo Mbeki was most impactful during his long years of public service. He is acknowledged by admirers and detractors alike as Africa's finest diplomat ever.
Others make bold to place Thabo Mbeki in the elite pantheon of all-time international diplomatic colossi like Lord Castlereigh, Prince Metternich, Prince Talleyrand, Otto von Bismarck, General Marshal, Andrei Gromyko, Dag Haamerskjoldt, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, Chou En-Lai, Peres de Cuellar, and Boutros-Boutros Ghali.
The importance of re-evaluating Thabo Mbeki's pre-1990 contribution to the exiled ANC's search for freedom through diplomacy can best be understood in the context of Deng Rong's statement that "we sum up history; we appraise historical figures, for the sake of the present, and even more, for the sake of the future." (Deng Rong, "Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution - A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years, Beijing, 2002, page 451).
So it was with a measure of interest that one read the edited version of a public lecture by Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, the SA Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, delivered at the UCT and carried by The New Age newspaper of Friday, March 9 2012, (page 19).
In the Speech the Minister correctly stated that:
"Between the 1960s and its unbanning in 1990, the ANC perfected the use of diplomacy as a weapon in our struggle. With international solidarity identified as a pillar of our struggle alongside armed struggle, the underground, and mass struggle, the ANC built an unrivalled diplomatic arsenal that stretched from the OAU and the UN to many countries all over the world."
But the Minister proceeded to do something inexplicable, which maybe can only be understood in the context of the ANC's ongoing post-Polokwane and pre-Mangaung factional politics and succession battles: She went on to heap praises on Thabo Mbeki's predecessor as the Head of the ANC's Department of International Relations (DIR), namely the late Johny Makhathini, describing him as "highly influential and known by every diplomat worth his salt."
Astonishingly, Minister Nkoana-Mashabane uttered not a word of acknowledgement, let alone praise, in the direction of the other former exiled Head of the ANC's DIR, Thabo Mbeki.
Yet there is existing and sufficient ANC and other published historical record to affirm that from the middle of the 1970s, Thabo Mbeki played a pivotal, and oft-times surpassing, role in the conceptualisation and execution of the exiled ANC's diplomacy for the purpose of the attainment of freedom in our country. In fact between the middle of the 1980s until the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, Thabo Mbeki became, alongside former exiled ANC President Oliver R Tambo, without question, the most recognisable face of the ANC's international diplomatic work in exile.
Writing about the source of Thabo Mbeki's enduring influence and power within the exiled ANC, Mac Maharaj, the current SA Presidential Spokesman, himself no known fan or flatterer of Thabo Mbeki, and in an unintended and back-handed compliment, stated that "...Mbeki was prone, at meetings he participated in, to say little but to volunteer to write the minutes or draft the necessary resolutions, thus effectively controlling the statement of the outcome." (Padraig O'Malley, "Shades of Difference - Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, 2007, page 434).
Thabo Mbeki himself puts it in a more nuanced way:
"Later, appointed to work as Political Secretary to the Acting President of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, I had the responsibility of preparing the drafts of OR's public speeches and the major public documents of our movement...Many a time I had to live with the embarrassment of OR completely rejecting my draft texts and, on a number of occasions, using his own notes to deliver addresses radically different from the draft speeches I had prepared." (Thabo Mbeki's article "Oliver Tambo: 'A Great Giant Who Strode The Globe Like A Colossus', in the book "Oliver Tambo Remembered", 2007, page xvii).
It was this drafting and writing tutelage under former ANC President Oliver Tambo that was to later impress the SA and international reading public so much and was to move the SA New York-based academic, Hlonipha Mokoena, to declare that "whatever may be said about Mbeki's intellectualism and aloofness, we can at least believe that he wrote his own speeches and infused them with originality and sagacity." (Mail & Guardian, October 31 2008).
This picture of Thabo Mbeki, as the exiled ANC's intellectual and diplomatic whiz-kid, can be contrasted with that of Pik Botha, apartheid South Africa's longest serving Foreign Minister. Jan Heunis, in his book "The Inner Circle - Reflections on the Last Days of White Rule", describes Pik Botha thus:
"Pik is a flamboyant person, a shrewd politician and an excellent orator, both at public gatherings and in front of the television cameras. He is not, however, a fundamental and original thinker. This he compensated for by relying on the advice of his officials, and was a good judge of the quality of the advice." (2007, ibid, page 24).
One of the very first of the then young Thabo Mbeki's major diplomatic tasks on behalf of the exiled ANC was to attend an OAU conference in Swaziland, together with Max Sisulu, in November 1974. (Elinor Sisulu, Walter & Albertina Sisulu - In Our Lifetime", page 351). In addition, the two young exiled ANC rising stars were tasked with opening 'an informal' ANC representative office in Swaziland.
This is how Vladimir Shubin described this important moment in Thabo Mbeki's diplomatic evolution:
"Initially, Thabo Mbeki and Max Sisulu participated in a UN-sponsored meeting in Swaziland, and Mbeki soon became the ANC's informal representative there." (Vladimir Shubin, "ANC - A View From Moscow", 2008, page 117).
Interestingly, for reasons still unclear, it was to be this important foray into ANC diplomacy by Mbeki that would account for one of his major differences with Mac Maharaj, at least as told by Mac Maharaj himself.
Padraig O'Malley quotes Maharaj as saying that in a December 1978 meeting in Angola, Thabo Mbeki revealed to the meeting that whilst in Swaziland he (Mbeki) did "such and such, but nothing happened", and revealed the existence of a 'trunk' with all the 'records' accounting for Mbeki's underground work in South Africa. But Maharaj claimed he was never able to lay his hands on the said "trunk". (Padraig O'Malley, ibid, page 218).
But in fact the real stepping-stone to Mbeki's diplomatic career within the ANC was anything but diplomatic. However, the event was so pivotal and momentous in the evolution of the exiled ANC, that Mbeki's decisive and influential participation in it caught the eye of, and hugely impressed, the then ANC Acting President OR Tambo. As told by Luli Callinicos, when Tambo prevaricated in the early to mid-1970s about what to do with the Group of Eight, which was openly rebelling against him and challenging his leadership and authority, as well as sowing divisions amongst exiled ANC's ordinary members on an Africanist platform, "ultimately, it was the younger people, including Thabo Mbeki, Mavuso Msimang, Chris Hani and others, who argued that the movement could not take this continued factional activity." (Luli Callinicos, "Oliver Tambo - Beyond The Engeli Mountains", 2004, page 350).
In so arguing, the younger people, including Thabo Mbeki, strengthened the resolve of OR Tambo and the ANC NEC to decisively deal with and expel the Group of Eight from the exiled ANC, and thus putting an end to one of the first bouts of factional activities during the first decade and half of the ANC's exiled existence.
[It would become a truly poignant irony that much later it would be the more vicious pre-Polokwane factional activity within the ANC that would put an ignominious end to Thabo Mbeki's ANC Presidency in December 2007, and finally his SA State Presidency in September 2008. Even more ironic, it was he (Mbeki) who, this time around, was being accused by some of his political opponents of pushing an Africanist agenda within the ANC, SA public and abroad. Matters had come full circle indeed for Thabo Mbeki almost thirty five years later.]
In 1974 Thabo Mbeki represented OR Tambo at the Stockholm international symposium hosted by the Swedish Liberal Party. From this participation by Mbeki developed one of the long-standing and strongest international diplomatic support for the ANC, as Sweden, and later all the Scandinavian countries, became some of the staunchest international supporters of the ANC, right until the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994.
Later Mbeki was appointed the ANC Chief Representative to Nigeria, where he developed and strengthened the ANC's diplomatic relations with a major African country that today is as important to South Africa's diplomacy, in the African context, as China is to the USA's diplomacy, in the global context. Mbeki's chief diplomatic task in Nigeria was to entrench the ANC's political influence in a country that was decidedly sympathetic to the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCM)'s 'Black Power' message.
But it was to be Thabo Mbeki's participation in the 1978 OR Tambo-led visit to Vietnam that consolidated Mbeki's position and stature within the exiled ANC, at the time also as a leading ANC NEC member. Following the Vietnam visit, which the ANC undertook to study how the Vietnamese revolutionaries, under the leadership of Ho Chi Min's Vietnamese Communist Party, had prosecuted their heroic national liberation struggles against first the French, and later the American, aggression and imperialism against their tiny South-East Asian country.
In the feed-back meeting in December 1978 in Luanda, Angola, chaired by OR Tambo, where, according to Callinicos, Thabo Mbeki and Joe Slovo, (then the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party ((SACP)), and also a participant in the Vietnam study visit), drawing from the experiences they both gained in Vietnam, articulated contrasting strategic visions and perspectives about the nature and future direction of the ANC, in terms of the exiled organisation's prosecution of a "People's War" against the racist white minority regime in South Africa.
In the debate, Joe Slovo questioned "as to whether the time had not come for the ANC to position itself more clearly as a socialist party", whilst Thabo Mbeki, although then still a leading SACP member, believed that "it was wrong the notion that the ANC was a party of socialism. I said, 'Well, if that is the case, then what is the SACP doing? You might as well dissolve it'."
Mbeki, supported by another leading SACP member, Moses Mabhida, won the argument. (Callinicos, ibid, page 526). In an intellectual tussle between two of the exiled ANC's finest brains at the time over the all-important question about the overall strategic direction and the fundamental nature of the ANC, Mbeki came out tops. It was the first massive personal, intellectual and leadership gain for Thabo Mbeki, arising out of his now intimate and intricate involvement in the exiled ANC's diplomatic machinery and work abroad, in this particular instance, the now mythologised 1978 ANC visit to Vietnam.
Earlier the same year, on 19-22 February (1978) at a symposium in Ottawa, Canada, Thabo Mbeki delivered his now very famous 'The Historical Injustice' paper, arguable his best and most thoughtful writing ever. The paper established Mbeki as the pre-eminent ANC intellectual powerhouse of his age cohort. But the paper also represented Mbeki's unique "audacity to hope" (Barack Obama) about the kind of future post-apartheid South Africa he was envisaging fourteen years before the dawn of freedom in our country in 1994. 'The Historical Injustice' is a paper of magical political power, mesmerising intellectual insightfulness, and a truly towering command of the knowledge about the crucial nexus and intersection between the exiled ANC's domestic and regional freedom agenda, and its appreciation of the balance of forces in the world, and the need to successfully marshal and harness these international forces, in a disciplined and thorough manner, to dislodge the cruel Apartheid rulers from power.
In their books, Chester Crocker (USA) and Vladimir Shubin (USSR), then representatives of the Cold War-era two opposing Superpowers, show that the first formal contact between the ANC and an American administration was a meeting between Thabo Mbeki and Robert Cabelly, who was an assistant to Chester Crocker, then USA's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, in August 1983. Again here Thabo Mbeki was displaying his amazing strategic foresight, thus blazing an unchartered trail to what later became the exiled ANC's finest diplomatic triumph, namely, the USA administration's recognition of the exiled ANC as a freedom movement in 1987.
This August 1983 meeting between the ANC and the USA administration was followed by other meetings in 1985 between Frank Wisner, Chester Crocker's Deputy at the USA State Department and ANC representatives. By October of the same year (1985) Robert Cabelly, who had initiated the first ANC-USA formal meeting with Mbeki, flew into Lusaka for further talks with the ANC. (Vladimir Shubin, "ANC- A View From Moscow", pages 208-209, and Chester Crocker, "High Noon in Southern Africa", page 180).
As a result of the quickening tempo of soundings by international players regarding the possibility of 'talks about talks' between the ANC and the apartheid white rulers in South Africa, Shubin quotes Tambo as informing his audience at the ANC's Mazimbu camp in Tanzania thus in May 1984: "We would like our people to know that there are attempts to bring the ANC into discussions with Pretoria racists...They are under pressure. We are under pressure to talk to them." (Vladimir Shubin, ibid, page 211).
In his opus, "The Rise and Fall of Apartheid", David Welsh writes extensively about the first meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, on 13 September 1985, at the Mfuwe Lodge, between the ANC delegation led by OR Tambo, with Thabo Mbeki as his right-hand man, and a South African business delegation led by Gavin Relly, the Chairman of Anglo-American Corporation, which included leaders of other SA blue-chip companies. Welsh quotes Tony Bloom, the leader of Premier Milling at the time, as showing the central role Thabo Mbeki played in this first informal 'talks about talks', especially as regards the contentious and vexatious economic issue of the ANC's commitment to nationalisation. (David Welsh, ibid, page 262). According to Gavin Relly's subsequent account of this Lusaka encounter, "Mbeki gave a very good impression" at this meeting. (Callinicos, ibid, pages 582).
The following year, the international diplomatic stature of the ANC was underscored by a meeting between ANC President OR Tambo and Chester Crocker on 20 September 1986. This meeting was in preparation to the eventual meeting in January 1987 between OR Tambo and George Schultz, the USA Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, the first-ever high-ranking contact between any American administration and the exiled ANC. Thabo Mbeki was present at both meetings and played a pivotal role in both. OR Tambo also met Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, and also went on to meet General Motors and Citibank, two big investors in the SA economy suffering international economic sanctions at the time.
The importance of this USA diplomatic breakthrough for the exiled ANC in its quest to isolate the racist Apartheid regime cannot be over-emphasised. As Shubin puts it, "the ANC President had come away from that meeting satisfied by the USA administration's formal recognition of the ANC, but he was worried that the USA wished to be the only mediator in future talks." (Shubin, ibid, pages 239, 249, and Elinor Sisulu, ibid, page 523).
Luli Callinicos also points out the significance of the growing diplomatic stature of the ANC in the then USSR around the same time. At the end of 1984, for the first time ever in the history of the ANC in exile, an official ANC delegation was received at the USSR's Foreign Ministry. "Then", writes Callinicos, "in November 1986, for the first time a discussion took place between the President of the ANC and the Soviet Head of State, Mikhail Gorbachev". A picture capturing this historic meeting shows that Thabo Mbeki, sitting on the right of Tambo, was the only ANC leader accompanying the exiled ANC President at this historic diplomatic meeting between the ANC and the USSR. (Callinicos, ibid, page 578 and pictures).
In 1987 Thabo Mbeki led the ANC delegation to a meeting with Afrikaaner intellectuals, led by Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, the former leader of the opposition in the racist South African parliament, in Dakar, Senegal. (Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, "The Other Side of History").
The Dakar meeting was a follow-up to the USA Ford Foundation-brokered meeting between prominent Afrikaners, including the Chairman of the Broederbond, and a delegation of the ANC that included Thabo Mbeki, Mac Maharaj and Seretse Choabe in June 1986. There were also meetings at Mells Park in London, led by Thabo Mbeki, and which included Jacob Zuma and Aziz Pahad on the ANC's side, with "more than 20 prominent Afrikaaners, both church and business leaders..." (Elinor Sisulu, ibid, pages 523-524).
Elinor Sisulu further states that the first of these meetings in October 1987 was "between Thabo Mbeki, Harold Wolpe, and Tony Trew (on the ANC side) and Sampie Terblanche, Willie Esterhuyse, and Willie Breytenbasch." (Ibid, pages 523-524).
After catching wind of these talks, Neil Barnard, the Head of apartheid SA National Intelligence, fed the information to Kobie Coetsee, the Justice Minister in PW Botha's Cabinet. Coetsee in turn established "The Team", which included Neil Barnard, to enter into discussions with Nelson Mandela at the Pollsmoor Prison. (Elinor Sisulu, ibid, pages 523-524).
In this regard, Vladimir Shubin states that "the ANC leadership was aware that numerous meetings had taken place between Mandela and government representatives. Tambo mentioned about 30 or more. (According to Sparks there were 47)." (Shubin, ibid, page 283 and also Alister Sparks, "Tomorrow Is Another Country", page 36).
Nelson Mandela, in his book, "Conversations with Myself", alluded to the central role of Thabo Mbeki in the initial 'talks about talks' between Nelson Mandela, Koebie Coetsee's 'The Team', especially Neil Barnard, and the exiled Thabo Mbeki of the ANC. As Nelson Mandela puts it:
"I was therefore shocked when I later discovered that Barnard had ignored my advice and contacted Thabo Mbeki. But the latter was wise enough and refused to engage in clandestine talks without the consent of the organisation. He reported to the President [Oliver Tambo] who authorized him and his friend, Jacob Zuma, to meet Barnard." (Nelson Mandela, ibid, 2010, pages 248-249).
On the other hand, Shubin states that "Thabo Mbeki and Aziz Pahad...were heavily involved in talks about talks with informal emissaries of the South African government..." (Shubin, ibid, page 288).
In 1989, on the eve of the unbanning of the ANC and the return of South African political exiles to their country, Thabo Mbeki again played a pivotal and superb role in the exiled ANC's conceptualisation, drafting and final adoption of the ANC's Harare Declaration, which set out the Constituional Principles to guide future negotiations between the ANC and the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa. The raison d'être for the ANC's adoption of the Harare Declaration was best captured by Shubin:
"The organisation's main idea was that the Front Line States should work on the basis of a paper drafted by the ANC, and not on 'Thatcher's one', as had happened during the Lancaster House Conference on Zimbabwe." (Shubin, ibid, page 281).
[In his biography of Mac Maharaj entitled "Shades of Difference - Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa", Padraig O'Mally, under APPENDIX, Section G, inexplicably attaches a long note, the author and origin of which are not clear nor explained, but which, upon careful reading, has the effect of casting damaging aspersions on the truly heroic, revolutionary and remarkable role that Thabo Mbeki played in the exiled ANC's international campaign of 'Freedom through Diplomacy' since the mid-1970s until the unbanning of the ANC in 1990. This Section G APPENDIX attachment makes an oblique, but unflattering and very tenuous reference to, and connection between, Thabo Mbeki and the Harare Declaration. (Padraig O'Malley, ibid, page 526)].
The contribution of Thabo Mbeki in the drafting of the Harare Declaration is told by Luli Callinicos, who quotes the late Steve Tshwete as saying about the Harare Declaration:
"No liberation movement on the continent of Africa had ever produced a document of that integrity." (Callinicos, ibid, pages 604-610).
With such "a document of great integrity" as the Harare Declaration, the ANC was able to avoid, as Thabo Mbeki put it then, being "locked into somebody else' plan, somebody else's thinking." (Callinicos, ibid, page 604).
On the other hand, Elinor Sisulu states that "the Harare Declaration also won the support of the United Nations and the international community. It was a major diplomatic coup for the ANC, because it put the onus on the apartheid government to meet the conditions that would provide the necessary climate for negotiations." (Elinor Sisulu, ibid, page 583).
I have sought to demonstrate that existing ANC and published literature in general leave no room for casting aspersions or doubting that indeed Thabo Mbeki's contribution to the ANC's diplomacy for freedom against the racist Apartheid regime before 1990 has made him one of Africa's diplomatic and intellectual colossi of his generation.
Thabo Mbeki, like, (if not more than), Johny Makhathini, was "highly influential and known by every diplomat worth his salt", to quote Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, SA's Minister of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO).
The only question really is whether Thabo Mbeki himself is quite aware of the enormity of the fine diplomatic service he has rendered, as a leading exiled ANC light, in the fight for our freedom in South Africa prior to 1990, using diplomatic tools. The question arises because, as Howard Gardner puts it in his book, "Leading Minds - Anatomy of Leadership":
"One of the most intriguing features of individuals whom we come to consider outstanding is that they themselves often fail to appreciate just how unusual they are." (Howard Gardner, ibid, 1995, page 149).
Or as the famous German historian, Leopold van Ranke, once evocatively put it: "Every age is next to God."
Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director, Centre of Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA). He is a businessman, a former diplomat, and a former ANC exile (1980-1990).
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