 African political thought Part 7. Today we're going to have a discussion about the thought of Thabo Mbeki, the second president of majority ruled South Africa, and of course, when Mandela was the first president, it was Mbeki who was his deputy. The interesting thing, however, is that after Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and the ANC was unbanned by what was still the apartheid government, four years of negotiations before elections for majority rule were finally held. Mbeki came back at that period of time after Mandela's release and by the time he came back, he'd actually spent more years living outside South Africa than he had living in South Africa. He was to a certain extent someone who came back as a stranger to his own country. And his ideas of what he called an African renaissance, something which was very, very dear to him, was an idea that was developed in exile and was greatly influenced by Pan-African currents of thought and was very deeply influenced by Caribbean currents of thought and certainly influenced by the North American black deersporic experience and thought. So Mbeki came back with a very, very cultured background, a cosmopolitan cultured background, which was anything but South African. When he was president, he had to write a regular newsletter for the ANC. The ones that President Zuma now writes are very, very short and pithy, no-nonsense epistles to the faithful. The ones that Mbeki used to write were literary essays. Nobody could understand them. And in fact, in writing in this way, it probably played a huge part in his losing support within his own party that then flocked to the banner of Jake and Zuma. But he couldn't help himself being this kind of cerebral character, deeply influenced by thinkers and writers and poets who were not themselves South African. This kind of very, very literate and literary imagination is at odds with another side of Mbeki. He actually received what we might today call terrorist training in the Soviet Union. He learned to be a saboteur. When Jacob Zuma was himself finally released from Robin Island, the comrades smuggled him out of the country in case he would be arrested again. And he crossed the border to Swaziland where he was greeted by Patabo and Mbeki. And it was Mbeki who taught Jacob Zuma how to use an AK-47. So the very literary, literate gentleman in the perfectly tailored clothes and the perfectly knotted neck tie with all of the references to high culture had another side. There was the high cultural side that Mbeki tried to bring to his African renaissance. Insofar as there was a genuinely African figure that he allowed to inform his views of this African renaissance, then it was the Kenyan novelist Nguki Watyongo. Nguki Watyongo was a very, very interesting character who wrote great novels. In many respects he should have been a prime candidate to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He never did although his name keeps making the short lists up to this present day even though he is well past his best. But he was also an essayist and one of his extended essays which was published in book form is called Decolonizing the Mind. It was actually based on a series of lectures he gave in a war place in New Zealand and Decolonizing the Mind asks the fundamental question. He asks it of himself, why do I in Nguki Watyongo continue to write my novels in English? To what extent does the use of a metropolitan language infuse my own thinking with metropolitan biases? And after that Nguki began writing in Kikuyu, his own language, his subsequent books had to be translated into English and this became a celebrated mission for Nguki to liberate the mind of metropolitan biases towards Africans, towards black people. This idea of liberating the mind against metropolitan biases whether direct biases or inflected biases or nuanced biases, this idea had a huge impact on Nbeki. But it also instigated in his demeanour, in his thinking, in his speaking an essential contradiction. Here was this man who had been educated in Britain as a master's degree from the University of Sussex, someone who was the ANC's international secretary, someone who roamed the world seeking support for the ANC during the years of struggle, someone who felt comfortable negotiating with the Afrikaner rulers of apartheid South Africa in the final countdown to the release of Mandela and they felt comfortable negotiating with him, someone who was very, very worldly trying to suggest that it was time to cast off what were essentially worldly influences and in saying that this should be done, brought to South Africa and may launch of influences from other black communities around the world which were not necessarily related to the feelings, the currents of thought and above all the frustrations of black South Africans. And the whole experience of Nbeki asks, almost begs the essential question, to what extent can the general pan-African aspiration, to what extent can the generalized pan-African ambition to see blackness as one condition, to what extent can that be actualized in a single country with highly specific problems, with a highly specific problematic history and with highly specific aspirations born of a particularly specific struggle. And Nbeki never answered that, he was overthrown by his own deputy, Jacob Zuma, these days in South Africa is regarded as most unfashionable if not politically unsafe within the ANC to talk about one's affection or admiration for Nbeki. It's very, very safe to talk about the great moral statesman that was Mandela. It's very fashionable to say how incompetent Jacob Zuma was. At some point in time there will have to be a rehabilitation of Nbeki. But he leaves us with more than just the legacy of contradiction. It is a contradiction which reached into an international political practice in the sense that in the Congo, most notoriously in Zimbabwe, more recently in an attempt to bring peace to Darfur, what Nbeki did was to pioneer a principle of inclusiveness in compromise coalition governments. On the grounds that no matter who won the election, and in Zimbabwe in 2008 it was patently clear that Morgan Changarai had defeated Robert Mugabe in the elections of that year. But because of great resistance from Mugabe's party, Nbeki had to act as an mediator and the man who should have been President, Changarai, had to be satisfied with the role of Prime Minister. Basically, Nbeki was saying that you had certain choices, great bloodshed and turmoil, great struggle, and great number of deaths if the victor in a democratic competition was allowed to be the victor. At the same time, bringing everybody around the table, everybody included in a compromise government. This he put forward as a key value in his African renaissance the idea of inclusiveness. It established a government in Zimbabwe which was a great contradiction. In this sense it almost reflected the contradiction that was Nbeki the intellectual who tried also to be the President of South Africa. Thank you.