The Arrogance of Power. Xolela Mangcu
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culminated in a victory over one of the most heinous political systems of the 20th century do indeed call for a celebration. But history is important also because it can serve as a guide to present and future action. Indeed, a cursory look into the history of the ANC has helped me develop my own theory of President Thabo Mbeki’s leadership. The essence of my theory is that Mbeki is a hybrid child of the three different strands of African nationalism that have evolved since the late 19th century.
The first strand goes back to the early conservatism of ANC founders such as John Dube and Pixley ka Seme. Those leaders studied in the United States and became part of a growing global African nationalism led by people such as W E B Du Bois and Booker T Washington. Those early ANC leaders had a complete disdain for any notion of a radical mass politics. Dube even warned that ‘unless there is radical change soon, herein lies a fertile breeding ground for hot-headed agitators amongst us Natives, who might prove to be a bigger menace to this country than is generally realized today. Let us all labour to forestall them.’ How does this early history link to Mbeki’s leadership today, and what historical lessons can the president take from it?
There is indeed in Mbeki’s leadership style the patrician, cerebral politics of those early leaders. Contrary to the dismay we often express about tensions between the president and his socialist alliance partners, the historical record shows this is not a new tension in the ANC. After all, Mbeki’s idol Pixley ka Seme ousted the ANC president Josiah Gumede because Gumede suggested links with the Soviet Union. But Seme also presided over the most precipitous decline of the ANC. As Gail Gerhardt has put it: ‘Under his autocratic leadership, the ANC had declined in the 1930s into an annual conclave of his own sycophantic personal followers.’ The first historical lesson is that the current president must avoid Seme’s fate, much as he admires him.
Paradoxically, the second strand of African nationalism to inform Mbeki’s leadership comes from the radical nationalism of the ANC Youth League of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, A P Mda, Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. This generation ushered in the mass politics of the 1940s and 1950s. The more radical among them formed the PAC. Mbeki’s critique of white racism could only have come from the legacy of this generation. Seme would have recoiled at such audacity. But even for this second generation of nationalists, ideas such as pan-Africanism were still the domain of the political elites. It is of no small social significance that Sobukwe was called ‘Prof’. The historical lesson for Mbeki from this period is that even the most radical nationalism is not exempt from the demands of political decentralisation.
If the president is to overcome the limitations of the two nationalisms, he must look to the third strand of the community-based cultural nationalism of the black consciousness movement. This movement produced a new cultural vision of society through everyday popular culture, even though the movement itself was started by student elites. That’s the way to go, Mr President! As an academic friend of mine puts it: ‘While futures are indeed created, they are not typically created on a clean slate. It is hard for nations to leave their pasts behind. The ideological task is to retrieve that which is valuable, and to make this selective retrieval a political reality.’
II
THE STUMBLE
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