Tenacity and Consistency

Key aspects of Mbeki’s political career include a sense of tenacity and consistency. From the mid-1930s onward, he regarded himself as an African nationalist and as a Marxist. These twin strands remained constant, even if the balance between them shifted over time.

Historically, the most distinctive aspect of Mbeki’s politics was his insistence over the course of decades that both African nationalism and the Communist movement in South Africa should take the country’s peasants and migrant workers seriously. This standpoint meant that he swam against the tide in both political currents. South African communists were orthodox in their emphasis on the urban proletariat, while the ANC long took scant notice of the rural poor as a basis for mobilization.

Mbeki was born in 1910 to a family that belonged to a modestly well-to-do peasant elite in the western Transkei. The Transkei was a large rural area where traditional chiefs exercised considerable power, although they were subject to white magistrates. His father was a salaried headman who also farmed and ran an ox-wagon transport business; both his parents were devout Methodists.

After attending a missionary boarding school, Mbeki studied at Fort Hare, the only university in southern Africa that admitted African students. During the 1930s and ’40s, it became a seedbed of African nationalism. Mbeki and many of his student contemporaries were radicalized in 1936 by domestic political developments such as the disenfranchisement of black voters in the Cape and the segregationist bills introduced by the government of J. B. M. Hertzog. International events like Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia also shaped their outlook.

On his journey toward African nationalism, Mbeki had many of his peers alongside him. But he also followed another much less traveled political road in the same period. Two men who he met at Fort Hare kindled his socialist beliefs: Eddie Roux, a Communist Party member, and Max Yergan, an African American on the university’s staff. The young Mbeki was a zealous convert, distributing communist literature and devouring whatever Marxist materials he could lay his hands on.

On visits to Johannesburg, he grew close to Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, a leading member of the Communist Party. However, he did not join the party until much later, which he subsequently explained in terms of his theoretical heterodoxy. He believed that organizational efforts should be primarily directed toward rural areas, while Mofutsanyana insisted that they should focus on urban workers. As Mbeki once told me, “We used to debate and debate and debate.”

Waking the Transkei

His first job upon leaving university in 1937 was as a high school teacher in Durban. In tandem with his classroom duties, his intellectual horizons continued to widen. He registered for a degree in economics with a long-distance university, having found the writings of Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin “interesting but difficult.”

In 1938, he published a series of eight articles that subsequently appeared in the form of a short book, Transkei in the Making. It challenged the view that rural Africans were backward because of their own cultural conservatism, arguing that the Transkei’s poverty was the product of colonial conquest and laws that drove young men to work in cities and mines.

At the school in Durban, Mbeki met Epainette (Piny) Moerane, who also came from the rural Transkei, and who had joined the Communist Party in 1938. The couple married in 1940 and moved to the Transkei. Govan taught for eighteen months before he was dismissed for his political work and robust secularism. He went on to spend the next ten years working as a storekeeper, journalist, and political organizer.

From 1938 to 1943, he edited Inkundla ya Bantu, the only newspaper owned and run by Africans, and throughout the 1940s he also wrote for left-wing papers aligned with the Communist Party. He used these outlets to analyze the political economy of African reserves like the Transkei, and more generally to understand African society in terms of its class composition.

The prolific journalist was also a tireless organizer. In 1941, Mbeki wrote to the ANC president Alfred Xuma, describing the Transkei as “politically in midnight slumber.” He dedicated his energies to prodding the region awake. He launched the Transkeian Organised Bodies, an attempt to create a single progressive voice out of local groups and disparate interests and to link local issues with the national ANC campaigns. From 1943 to 1948, Mbeki was unceasingly active in politics based on this approach.

The years of politicking came at a cost domestically. Mbeki and Piny had four children in the 1940s, but their marriage was strained. Piny’s activism was drained by the daily slog of existence, while her husband was frequently absent. He left the Transkei in 1953 to take up a teaching post in Ladysmith, Natal. Once again, his political involvement outside school hours led to his dismissal by the department responsible for African schooling.

Mbeki was then offered the post of local editor and office manager in Port Elizabeth for New Age, a newspaper that served as an unofficial SACP publication. In July 1955, he made his way to the port city, entering a political milieu that was unlike either the rural Transkei or the Natal Midlands with which he had previously been familiar.

Port Elizabeth

Port Elizabeth was the cradle of organized African politics in South Africa. In the 1940s, local trade unions linked a series of strikes to community struggles over rents, food prices, and the pass laws that restricted the movement of black people. By 1955, however, the space for overt political resistance was severely restricted, and the ANC was prohibited from holding meetings in the city.

The challenge was to find different ways of engaging with an ardent mass base and sustaining activism beyond state surveillance. Years later, Mbeki recalled that “it was during this time, 1956 to 1960, that we perfected methods of working underground.” Embryonic cell structures were already operating in the city, to which Mbeki added two elements: a program of political education without equal in any other South African city, and an emphasis on secrecy, punctuality, and discipline in order to avoid police attention.

Mbeki sought actively to link urban and rural struggles. He traveled frequently to rural areas in the Eastern Cape and Transkei, and in Port Elizabeth he made a point of organizing within the hostels housing rural migrant workers. He produced a clandestine monthly broadsheet aimed specifically at rural communities, cyclostyling and delivering thousands of copies.

At the same time, he was deeply involved in writing about developments in the Reserves and the significance of the Bantu Authorities Act: “Now every Sunday I would go to the [New Age] office, I would lock myself up there and hide.” He “hid” in order to conduct research, scouring press reports, official documents, and government records.

Based on this work, he went on to publish a series of articles, hammering away at themes he had raised for twenty years as well as describing peasant resistance to chiefs and magistrates. These articles presaged Mbeki’s best-known work, The Peasants’ Revolt.

Rivonia

During the period between March 1960 and July 1963, from the massacre of demonstrators at Sharpeville to the Rivonia raid, Mbeki’s life changed decisively. The political context impelled this teacher and writer into revolutionary politics and positions of leadership for the ANC, SACP, and MK.

He was directly involved in the move from nonviolent protest to armed struggle and present at the meeting when the SACP formally approved this policy shift. MK was launched in 1961 to mount a program of sabotage directed against selected targets and designed to avoid casualties. Mbeki led an MK cell in Port Elizabeth.

In September 1962, he moved to Johannesburg, and then to Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia, a property the SACP had acquired for use as a safe house. However, just when security should have been made tighter, it grew more porous. A raid by the apartheid regime’s police force resulted in the arrests of seventeen people on the site, including Mbeki.

Nelson Mandela was the prime defendant at the ensuing trial. Mbeki was one of the other nine men charged with organizing or supporting MK’s sabotage campaign — charges which potentially carried the death penalty. At the conclusion of the trial, eight of those charged were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Denis Goldberg, the only white comrade among those found guilty, was imprisoned in Pretoria. The other seven were flown to Robben Island, a newly built maximum-security prison for political prisoners, six miles south of Cape Town.

Robben Island

Every prisoner found different ways of coping with the privations and indignities of prison life. Mbeki coped — he survived — but at considerable physical and psychic cost. Other prisoners remembered “Oom Gov” (Uncle Govan) as something of a loner, given to solitude and tending not to become involved in available forms of recreation.

Two features of his prison years stand out. Firstly, when major tensions developed within the ANC leadership in Robben Island, they crystallized around the deteriorating relationship between Mbeki and Mandela. From 1969 to 1974, two hostile groups differed over issues of principle and policy, although clashes of personality and temperament also combined with the unforgiving context of prison to heighten tensions.

Secondly, Mbeki was the central figure in an extraordinary program of political education that was compulsory for all ANC men on the island. It was a creative response by the Rivonia veterans to an influx of younger, angrier prisoners after the Soweto revolt of 1976 and the capture of MK soldiers. The syllabus included history, politics, and economics. Mbeki wrote extensively while in prison, and the fruits of his work were published as Learning from Robben Island.

Mbeki was released from Robben Island in November 1987. The other Rivonia men followed in 1989, while Mandela finally gained his freedom in February 1990. Formal negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid regime began in 1991. Three years later, an ANC government was elected in the first democratic election with Mandela as president.

In prison, Mbeki had scoffed at the notion that “the liberatory forces could find accommodation with the bourgeoisie” and warned that the outcome of any such accommodation “would be to entrench capitalism to the detriment of the oppressed.” He now watched from the sidelines as the negotiated settlement delivered far-reaching political change with broad continuity in the economic sphere: South African big business and the ANC decided that they needed each other.

Fighting to a Draw

Loyal to the end, Mbeki settled, however reluctantly, for the new order and accepted an essentially ceremonial office as deputy president of the Senate. The closest he came to expressing reservations about the terms on which the ANC came to power was in a little book published in 1996, Sunset at Midday.

For Mbeki, the liberation struggle proved to have been “a war without absolute winners,” one in which African nationalism and Afrikaner nationalism “had fought to a draw.” But as he went on to remind his readers, “revolutions, even modest ones, are made not in our dreams but in concrete historical circumstances. What we have, although far from perfect, is a starting point.”

The tone is far from triumphalist. It makes the best of an achievement short of victory — the old revolutionary comforting himself that it had been, after all, a modest revolution.