Q: Can you fill Mandela's shoes? A: He's got very big feet

When South Africa goes to the polls tomorrow it marks the end of Nelson Mandela's political career and his succession by Thabo Mbeki. PETER TAYLOR examines what type of man he is

WHEN South Africa voted five years ago, the event was rightly described as a watershed, the first universal suffrage elections in the bitter history of the Beloved Country.

Yet the elections that take place tomorrow are just as significant, marking the end of Nelson Man-dela's political career, and handing the leadership of South Africa to a man who is variously described as ruthless, charming, manipulative - and always as "enigmatic". Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's 57-year-old deputy and successor, is accustomed to the levers of power. His father, Govan Mbeki, spent 25 years in jail with Man-dela, and there is no finer pedigree in the African National Congress. It was the suave Mbeki, educated at Sussex University, and with a fondness for W B Yeats, Sherlock Holmes pipes and fine malt whiskies, who persuaded a nervous white establishment that majority rule need not entail the end of civilisation. Throughout Mandela's Indian summer presidency it is Mbeki who has chaired cabinet meetings, and who has, effectively, been running the country. Yet Mbeki is very different from Mandela. It is difficult to imagine Mbeki flattering the Spice Girls - as Mandela did, and on television, Mbeki physically recoiled from a child on World Aids Day. Again, while Mandela finally came to see that his former wife, Winnie, was irredeemably bad news and dropped her, Mbeki has remained politically close to her, despite her conviction for child kidnapping. "Winnie has been unfairly crucified for things done within the political atmosphere of the time," he said recently. "I am prepared to stand by her." To unravel Mbeki's contradictions one has to remember that he came from a highly political family under constant scrutiny by the security services. His father was a devout communist and the young Thabo was largely brought up by relatives. By the age of 14 he was in the youth wing of the ANC and the South African Communist party. After Lovedale College in Alice, he did A-levels at a private school in Johannesburg. At this time he fathered a son, Mon-wabisi, his only child, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances 21 years later. In 1963 his father was sentenced to life imprisonment for treason and sabotage, and friends encouraged the young Mbeki to flee the country. A place was found for him at Sussex, where he did an MA in economics and is remembered as a keen partygoer with an eye for pretty blondes. (His education was paid for by Tim Beaumont, now Lord Beaumont of Whit-ley, the wealthy Liberal Democrat peer). He had not, however, forgotten his Marxist roots. In the university magazine in 1964 he wrote: "It is a basic tenet of scientific socialist theory that modern capitalism has outlived its usefulness." Sussex was the beginning of 30 years of exile, in which he went to Moscow for military training and held a variety of posts, clandestine and official, for the ANC. IN 1989 became head of the ANC's international affairs department. It was after Man-dela's release in 1990, however, that he gained his reputation for Machiavellian ruthlessness. The assassination of Chris Hani, a popular ANC figure, by Rightwing extremists removed one rival, while Mbeki saw off the challenge from Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC secretary-general - with a little help from Winnie Mandela. During his time as Mandela's anointed heir, other possible rivals, such as former Transkei leader Bantu Holomisa, were unceremoniously bounced in classic Stalinist fashion. His relationship with whites is ambiguous. He has numerous white friends, but his political inner circle is exclusively black. Nevertheless, he has been close to a series of controversial white financiers. (At his 50th birthday party, he was photographed with casino owner Sol Kerzner, who built Sun City in the apartheid years). Mbeki was instrumental in persuading the white Rightwing Freedom Front to sign up to the new constitution, but he also wrote Mandela's most anti-white speech. In it, South Africa's crime rate was ludicrously blamed on a "counterrevolutionary network" of whites. Mbeki's "big idea" is the "African renaissance", a notion that the continent's imagined former glories can be rekindled - although it is difficult to see what glories he has in mind. He is said to be a bit of a dreamer, and even Mandela has admitted that his successor "can be diplomatic to the point where many people regard him as weak". Mbeki has spoken of the problem of filling Mandela's shoes: "He's got very big feet. What does that mean? Does it mean we start off by going to jail for 27 years and then sort of graduate from there, grow taller, wear those strange shirts? No, no, it's not a rational expectation." Perhaps not, but there is a rational expectation among the teeming multitudes of the townships that South Africa's abiding inequality, unemployment and lawlessness be tackled with urgency. Mbeki, the darling of the white liberal dinner party circuit, as well as a Moscow-trained Marxist, will have to put that in his Sherlock Holmes pipe and smoke it.

Copyright 1999
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