Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 10, 2004
Brendan Boyle

Mbeki's recent attack on Anglo American chief executive Tony Trahar stirred up a hurricane, mainly from whites, but it highlighted a widely held perception that business is not doing its bit to eradicate the legacy of apartheid.

Last week's letter on crime statistics was more defensive, but it starkly revealed the depth of his anger at whites who fail to acknowledge or refuse to believe that progress is being made.

For the President, who reputedly works into the small hours to write the letters, they give him unmediated access to a small, but influential, audience. They are his opportunity to speak his mind without being edited or cross-examined.

The ANC says the letters reach around 12000 people a week but, like any publisher, Mbeki is finding there is nothing like controversy to boost circulation. His recent attacks on Trahar and sceptics who doubt the accuracy of the government's latest crime statistics must be driving readers to the ANC website.

Mbeki began the weekly missive when the party abandoned its plans for a daily ANC newspaper and launched its Friday ANC Today on the website in January 2001.

The mass media remained in the hands of hostile owners and editors who refused to give the ANC a fair platform for its ideas, he said in that inaugural letter.

Sometimes, Mbeki uses the letter to advance a noble idea; sometimes it just marks an important anniversary. Often, however, it reflects a more passionate man than the urbane President who speaks for this country and continent on platforms around the world.

If the 187 letters written so far are an accurate reflection of the man who is our President, he is indeed as astute as his reputation suggests, absolutely committed to the social and economic success of our continent, and highly creative.

He is also a man who seems often to be angry, who imputes to many whites an ugly world view based largely on what he sees as their crude racial prejudice and who is not beyond the opportunistic use of facts and figures out of context to make a point.

Mojanku Gumbi, possibly Mbeki's closest adviser, says a British friend of long standing was able to persuade him that his rank now denied him their remembered student-era pleasure in polemics; that to put a controversial question for debate - such as his questioning of the origins of Aids - was a privilege of obscurity.

The letters suggest that the friend was not entirely successful.

At home with his laptop, he writes as leader of the ANC, floating ideas, tackling foes real or imagined and arguing with absent rivals about the policies and perceptions that are shaping South Africa.

"He tends for some reason to be a little more combative in his letter," says Centre for Policy Studies senior researcher Steven Friedman. "If he is going to do a polemic, he tends to do it in the letter."

Ronald Suresh Roberts, one of at least two writers preparing biographies on the President, says Mbeki uses the letters to lead intellectual debate on critical issues in much the way that former US President Bill Clinton was reputed to explore ideas in endless discussion with aides, adding: "Frankly, government is much the better for it."

"On the continuum between bureaucratic discipline and intellectual freedom, the letter tilts towards activism and freedom of expression."

Independent analyst Xolela Mangcu argues, however, that it is impossible to fully separate the roles of party and national leader, adding: "It is a convenient confusion which nearly every leader uses to his own advantage.

"Without denying him the right to speak this way, I am concerned by the obliqueness of the medium and the topics raised. I would prefer the President to use his position to address important issues to a broader audience."

While Mbeki has written at length about Zimbabwe, Aids and Africa's renaissance, racism and white opposition are regular themes of his online essays.

Published around 11am every Friday, they underline again and again that he is angry, and perhaps hurt, about the continuing scepticism of his critics towards the success of the South African democracy.

Usually about double the length of this article, the essays are meticulously argued and thoroughly sourced, but they do not often ascribe similar virtues of non-racialism and good intent to his critics.

In March 2001, responding to criticism of his policies on Zimbabwe, Mbeki wrote: "The response to the events in Zimbabwe has confirmed what many of us suspected: that the negative stereotype of black people is firmly implanted in many white minds."

He identified in that essay what has become a tenet, which is that many of his foes disguise their racism as criticism, saying "...we must respond to the insult in a measured way so that we do not feed the stereotype that a vigorous response to insult, described as criticism, demonstrates a typical black African intolerance of critical views ...that we must therefore do everything in our power to prove that we are not savages, to the satisfaction of white South Africa".

Later that year, responding to allegations of corruption in the arms deal, he wrote: "At the base of all this lies the racist conviction that Africans, who now govern our country, are naturally prone to corruption, venality and mismanagement .. that, as Africans, we are less than human."

Mbeki returned to the theme of alleged white perceptions of blacks last month when he attacked Anglo's Trahar for saying that the political risk facing investors in South Africa had declined but not disappeared. "Is it simply that, as Africans, we are assumed to be a political risk until we prove that we are not? Was Mr Trahar making the statement that, 10 years after our liberation, we have just begun to convince some important people that we are not the barbarians they thought we were?" he asked.

Journalists are often his prey, sometimes named in accusations of "fabrication and myth".

In April he labelled the Democratic Party's merit-based policies as "nothing but a camouflaged message that black upliftment is contrary to the interests of the white section of our population".

Last week, in a controversial defence of the accuracy of the government's modestly positive crime statistics, Mbeki ridiculed a white woman emigrant to the US, saying "she fled from her white suburb in Cape Town because the black savages were at her door".

In March 2002, he reeled off unrelated statistics about crime in Russia, Britain and Canada to support his charge that journalists wrongly describe South Africa as the crime capital of the world.

Readers might fairly wonder whether the preoccupation with racial stereotypes and critics who do not give Mbeki and his government their due are part-time concerns; or whether they define the man and his motives.

"There is no doubt that the letter is as close to Thabo Mbeki in his own voice as you are going to get," says UCT political scientist Robert Schrire.

At his laptop late on a Thursday, Mbeki is passionate, intense and articulate. He is right about most things and frighteningly wrong about a few. He will make some readers cheer and others howl, but at least he is thinking out loud.

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