At the height of his intellectual influence over the South African society, some amongst us were wont to refer to former SA president, Thabo Mbeki, as "the Philosopher-King." It is a type of portmanteau that was intended to convey a sense of Mbeki's great skill as a competent, "managerial" SA State president, as well as his impressive and widely-acclaimed intellectual erudition.
It is also a term that represented a rare occasion of our collective public endorsement, as a form of sincere flattery, of this rare quality in Thabo Mbeki, which clearly set him apart, in a positive sense, from his iconic predecessor, Nelson Mandela, the father of the nation and archetypical reconciler. But uneasy laid the Mbeki head that wore the philosopher-king throne.
It was really never clear whether Mbeki's undoubted intellectual influence owed much to his long-held positions at the apex of our democratic State, both as Nelson Mandela's deputy president, and later as SA's president in his own right, or whether it was Mbeki's intellectual erudition that made his pulsating presidency both so compelling and highly controversial, synchronously.
Now that Mbeki has lost his "political kingdom" - or the "king" nomenclature of the portmanteau "philosopher-king" - after his unceremonious ouster from power in the late 2008, we are coming closer by the day to answering the quizz. For Mbeki the King is finished politically, at least in terms of the above portmanteau. What should remain as part of his presidential rule's oddments is Mbeki the Philosopher.
But is Mbeki the Philosopher still as intellectually influential over our society as Mbeki the philosopher-king was? Is Mbeki the Philosopher still taken seriously without the formidable prop of the massive and far-reaching SA state apparatus? Do we now have less of Mbeki the Philosopher, and more of Mbeki the sagacious African Sage, as a result?
The best way to seek to solve this puzzle is to look at Thabo Mbeki's recent pronouncements regarding the specter and threat of rising tribalism in South Africa under SA President Jacob Zuma. This is because Mbeki's statements about tribalism are his most pointed critique of post-Mbeki South Africa yet. But they also indicate Mbeki's continuing determination and interest in shaping post-apartheid South Africa as a major and influential intellectual powerhouse, or as Mbeki the Philosopher/African Sage.