Mbeki rebuffs US bid to use him on SA politics

Washington’s attempt to enlist Thabo Mbeki as an interpretive authority on South African politics has met a firm institutional rebuttal, and the episode raises harder questions about accountability and evidence than either government seems prepared to answer.

Last week, US ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III appeared on national television and hailed Mbeki as one of Africa’s great statesmen. In hindsight, the choice of reverence looks peculiar. Mbeki spent much of his presidency warning against Western intervention in African affairs, yet here he was, decades after leaving office, being invoked by one of President Donald Trump’s handpicked appointees as a figure through whom the American right could make sense of South Africa.

The Thabo Mbeki Foundation lost no time in entering the combustible dispute between Pretoria and Washington. Its intervention took the form of a 123-page paper, The United States of America and the Future of the Afrikaners in South Africa, a document so inflated by verbiage that it could put many readers to sleep. The foundation’s central claim is that the deteriorating relationship between the two capitals cannot be understood simply through disputes over land reform, BEE, farm attacks or South Africa’s foreign policy. At its heart, the paper argues, lies what it calls the unresolved “national question”: the enduring consequences of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, and of slavery and racial segregation in the United States.

That argument carries institutional weight precisely because of who Mbeki is and what shaped him. His father, Govan Mbeki, was imprisoned on Robben Island. Mbeki himself spent much of his adult life in exile, moving from Tanzania to England, the Soviet Union and several other African states. For decades he had no settled home, a foreigner in every country except the one to which he could not return. The personal losses were severe. His only child, a son named Monwabisi Kwanda, disappeared in 1981 after becoming involved with the ANC. His younger brother Jama went missing the following year. Both are presumed dead, though their ultimate fate remains part of the period’s unsolved history.

Mbeki came of age in a world in which Western governments had, at different times, tolerated or accommodated apartheid South Africa, while the liberation movement understood itself as confronting a system backed by powerful foreign interests. It is unsurprising, then, that sovereignty and resistance to external intervention became defining themes of his political repertoire. The more difficult question is what happens when a world view forged under particular historical conditions is carried into the future. Might that protective shield become a liability?

Mbeki’s handling of Zimbabwe offers one of the clearest tests. When Robert Mugabe’s government faced mounting international criticism over political repression, land seizures and economic collapse, Mbeki resisted calls for the kind of external intervention advocated by the West. South Africa’s own history gave it reason to be cautious, did it not? What this reasoning fails to acknowledge is that a government can simultaneously recognise the risks posed by foreign influence while accepting the reality of domestic repression. Accountability to one’s own citizens cannot be outsourced to anti-colonial credentials.

None of this is an argument for accepting Trump’s South Africa narrative uncritically. But American intervention should be tested against evidence rather than dismissed simply because it comes from Washington. That is where the debate becomes more difficult than either side’s political rhetoric suggests.

By contrast, the foundation’s paper contends that abandoning transformation risks entrenching what it describes as a “two nations” reality, in which economic divisions continue to follow racial lines. It invokes America’s own history, including the persistence of black poverty after formal discrimination was abolished. Is this a serious argument? The fact that inequality exists does not, by itself, establish a justification for legislation that favours one racial group over another. South Africa’s constitution attempts to hold two ideas together: equality before the law and measures designed to advance people disadvantaged by apartheid. Yet a serious democracy must be able to ask whether policies designed to correct historical discrimination are actually achieving that purpose.

This brings the argument back to Mbeki himself. His life illustrates the extraordinary power of path dependency: how the circumstances of one era can shape the perceptions of another. The experience of oppression, exile and personal loss gave way to a political world view deeply suspicious of external interference. Those instincts were not conceived in a vacuum; they were informed by real events that might still be haunting him.

The collective memory that once provided the moral foundation for liberation can become an interpretive lens through which every subsequent conflict is understood. That does not make the memory false. But it does make the responsibility to interrogate it greater. South Africa’s challenge now is not to forget its history. It is to ensure that history remains a guide rather than a prison.

Jun Kajee is a lecturer at Southern Utah University, a nonresident research fellow at the Korea Institute for Maritime Strategy, and a researcher for the SeaLight maritime transparency initiative at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Centre for National Security Innovation.