Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - November 4, 2007

It was Mbeki himself who gave me the word 'disconnected' to describe his (to all intents and purposes) parentless childhood, and then his itinerant adult life. Now I wondered, after our time together, whether it was not a condition still very much alive in him

It was August 2000, just over a year after Thabo Mbeki became President, and I was sitting with him in a downstairs reception room of Mahlamba Ndlopfu, his official residence in Pretoria.

It was a Saturday and he was dressed casually - slacks, a cardigan buttoned over a polo shirt, a well-gnawed pipe in his mouth. But bloodshot eyes betrayed his exhaustion. He had burst out of Mandela's shadow and into international recognition, not only as the liberating philosopher king who was beginning to make post- apartheid South Africa work, and as the first African leader since the uhuru generation to have a visionary plan for African development, but also as the putative defender of a loathsome tyrant to the north, and as an "Aids-denialist" crank.

Over the past year I had watched the South African presidency become more logical, more substantive and more hands-on than it had been during the rousing but scattershot Mandela era. But I had also watched it contract to a point where it had become nitpicky rather than all- embracing, introverted rather than communicative, too often mistrusting and not often enough inspiring. I had watched Mbeki withdraw from the unexpected but highly effective expansiveness of his election campaign into an increasingly sullen and irascible isolation.

The expectations were high, then, as I sat opposite him now, and watched him carve a space for us, with his pipe-smoking paraphernalia, out of the official-residence nowhereland that would be his home for the next decade. The perpetual scraping and tapping kept his restless hands occupied, freeing his mind to work, as he conjured with pipe smoke the illusion of home, an intimate study in which we might comfortably sit. We talked about the "disconnection" - his word - of his childhood, and about the way his African renaissance ideology was powered, at least in part, by his need to reconnect with his roots. We talked about race and transformation, about the difficulties of governance, about his history in exile. And we talked, for over two hours, about Aids. I was impressed at his grasp of detail: his recall of information is almost as astonishing as his stamina. Mbeki's seductive capacity in one-on-one meetings is legendary, but I felt neither seduced nor charmed by him - and had no sense that he had set out to do either. This was a job, and he worked.

At some point, his wife Zanele rode into the room on the warm breath of a day's outing: she was lively and effervescent, engaging and solicitous, excited by the prospect of joining us. I willed her silently to stay, but he willed her, with the greater force, to leave, and she disappeared into the gloom, reappearing a couple of hours later in a dressing gown - "Oh, are you two still at it? Thabo will keep you all night!" - to offer some refreshment.

A waiter emerged from the bowels of the darkened house, bearing a tray of those cold, fried hors d'oeuvres at which official residences seem to excel. Mbeki waved him impatiently away, and the tray was put just beyond our reach. Finally, at close to midnight, I was running out of tape. I was exhausted and hungry, dying for a toilet but terrified to go in case, in my temporary absence, he realised he had a country to run. If this was an endurance test, he won. I found myself thanking him for his time, and terminated the interview.

He saw me out personally, and my last image was, finally, that of a host; of a solitary man snug in his woollen cardy standing at the hardwood door of the grand gabled Cape Dutch-styled residence, offering what seemed to me to be a somewhat regretful half- wave goodbye. I imagined him wandering aimlessly about the huge old pile of Mahlamba Ndlopfu before finding himself upstairs in the comfort of his study, lost in his books and on the Internet, bathed until dawn in the flickering blue light of his computer screen, a bottle of Scotch and his rack of briars his only company.

AS I drove home to Johannesburg, I tried to understand the emptiness I was feeling. This was the president of my country; enormously busy. He spoke to almost no journalists, and yet he had given me over six hours of his time. Why, then, was I bothered that he did not ask me a single question, did not wish to break bread with me, did not respond to any of my gambits for small talk?

It was Mbeki himself who gave me the word "disconnected" to describe his (to all intents and purposes) parentless childhood, and his itinerant adult life.

Now I wondered, after our time together, whether it was not a condition still very much alive in him. For any returning freedom fighter, coming home must mean the expectation of reconnection and reintegration, of release from the vagabondage of exile, of deliverance from the oppression which sent one off in the first place - and for many, the homecoming is profoundly traumatic, for it can never match up to such fantasies for redemption. How much more acute that expectation must be - and how much more difficult its lack of fulfilment - for one who felt, as Mbeki did, "disconnected" to begin with.

From a very young age, his response to this condition of disconnection had been to sublimate all emotions, all relationships, all desires, into the struggle for liberation. He had long made a political career around pragmatism, but at his core he was a revolutionary idealist. He had given himself entirely to the ANC, to redeem the hardship of his life, his parents' life, the life of his people. So much had been sacrificed - father, son, childhood, family, innocence - to the cause of the liberation of his people, a task he had been predestined to fulfil since his youth, and here he was, home at last, free at last, in power, trying to make the grand project of post-apartheid South Africa work, against impossible odds and crushing expectations.

In a previous conversation, Mbeki had told me that living in Britain - where he was a student through the 1960s - was "very easy ... but it couldn't quite be home". Living in other parts of Africa was "not quite home", either. He had spent most of his adult life on aeroplanes, in hotel rooms, in hotel lobbies, and the overwhelming feeling I had, now, was that he was still in transit; "not quite home" yet. He did not, yet, seem to be able to bridge the distance that existed between his fantasy of leading South Africa to freedom and the reality of actually being there, full of patterns for redemption but without the necessary power, really, to implement them.

'What happens to a dream deferred?" Driving back to Johannesburg from Mahlamba Ndlopfu, I found myself reciting this line from Langston Hughes's great cycle of poems.

Mbeki had said repeatedly, in one way or another, that he was haunted by the nightmare of a seething majority that would boil over into rebellion because its dream of liberation had been deferred rather than redeemed. But it came to me, as I thought about our six hours together, that his own dreams of redemption, of connection, of homecoming - of possessing the potency to free a people - might also have been deferred, and that his anxiety about the potentially violent possibilities of the nation's "dream deferred" might have had a more private application, too.

"What happens to a dream deferred?" Mbeki had asked this question in Parliament to introduce a debate on reconciliation in 1998: "It explodes." As soon as I got home after my meeting with Mbeki in August 2000, I looked up the poem and saw that Mbeki had turned a question into a prophesy. Hughes eschewed any such certainty: "What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?/ Or fester like a sore - And then run?/ ... Maybe it just sags/ like a heavy load./Or does it explode?""

Mbeki might have deliberately misquoted Hughes, turning a question into a prophesy so as to shock his complacent listeners into action. But if we believe that slips can be pathways into their speaker's unconscious, then we need to consider another possibility : that Mbeki's certainty about explosion - his uncharacteristic lack of ambiguity - came from something else as well. That he remembered the poem in a certain way because it reflected his own experience. Perhaps he too was living the dream deferred; perhaps he too feared an explosion.

It had fallen on Mbeki's shoulders, finally, to honour the promise he had inherited from Nkrumah, from Nyerere, from Mandela, from his own father lost to the struggle. And so he had made the African renaissance his mantra, staking his political future on the promise of the "rebirth and renewal" of the continent, and becoming Africa's most important statesman as he travelled the world, selling his vision. If the African renaissance was the consequence of a personal attempt to reconnect with his roots, then it was also a defence - admirably creative - against the anxieties of the dream deferred; the willing of a self- determination that was not always possible in the real world he had come to govern.

In July 2004, shortly after he led the ANC to a triumphant re-election, I met Mbeki in the same downstairs drawing room as before, on a Sunday afternoon. I had been struck by his exuberance on the campaign trail, and I asked him whether he was still haunted by the apocalyptic nightmare of "the dream deferred". He waved the question aside as the preoccupation of another era, and verified my sense that such anxieties had been closely linked to the profound "disempowerment" that he and his comrades had felt upon going into government in 1994.

To illustrate the point, Mbeki used the way he and his government had been forced to acquiesce to the "Washington Consensus" on macroeconomic policy, when they implemented their controversial Gear programme in 1996. But now, he assured me, after a decade in power, he had a lot more confidence, and was far more firmly in control of the levers of power.

He also told me that his experiences on the campaign trail had proven to him that there was no longer any possibility of "some big eruption" on the streets of South Africa. People complained, certainly, but in good cheer rather than with flammable grievance, and he had encountered something entirely new on the hustings: "A much greater sense of joy in South African society today," "a much greater sense of celebration."

I had spent a little time trailing Mbeki on both the 1999 and 2004 campaigns, and it did not seem to me that South Africans were any more (or less) "joyful" now than they had been five years previously. Rather, I surmised, Mbeki had simply been confident enough and thus open enough to receive this "joy" for the first time, and to allow it to affirm him. As I probed deeper, it seemed I might be right: Mbeki told me that one of the main indicators of this new mood on the streets was the extremely positive response he got from ordinary white South Africans. They accepted him as their president even if they were not going to vote for him, and this led him to believe that there was no longer any significant "sense of distance" between whites and blacks.

Was it possible that, just as his earlier anxieties about explosion were linked to his own experience of the dream deferred and his worries about self-determination, his perception of a new sense of "joy" abroad in South Africa was a reflection of his own new- found sense of wellbeing and confidence? His international reputation had never been higher; the Aids wars seemed to have abated; his economic policies seemed to be working, at last; his hold over the ANC also seemed to be stronger, even, than Mandela's had been at his heyday. He had just won an election, gaining for the ANC an unprecedented margin on the strength of his own incumbency rather than on the legacy of his predecessor.

Once more, Mbeki saw me out himself. But this time, as I drove back to Johannesburg, I reflected on a story he had just told me, about a trip to the Karoo which suggested that he had found some form of inner peace. I convinced myself that my subject was finally "home". And I heaved a sigh of relief.

Was I wrong?

***

Hear the author speak

# Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is published by Jonathan Ball.

The Sunday Times will co-host a public lecture by the author, at the Wits Great Hall at 6pm on November 12, with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Jonathan Ball and Exclusive Books.

Mark Gevisser will be introduced by Elinor Sisulu. After his lecture he will respond to questions from a panel including Phumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Ferial Haffajee, Bheki Khumalo, Xolela Mangcu and Deborah Posel. For details, contact Najhiba on 011-717-4234; or at admin@wiser.wits.ac.za

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