The message, the man

In March 1978 I left the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) military camps in Angola and went to Lusaka where I started to work for Radio Freedom.

That was when I met Thabo Mbeki for the first time, as the head of the department of information and publicity (DIP) in president Oliver Tambo’s office.

Mbeki was also responsible for drafting almost all of the January 8 Statements from 1979 when the tradition, including a declaration of a year’s theme, was introduced.

Most South African languages were covered on Radio Freedom – in 1978 in Zambia, we broadcast in Venda, Tsonga, Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa, Afrikaans, English and Zulu. There were people like Reg September, Solly Mokoetle, Thami Ntenteni and others, maybe about 12 people working in the team in Lusaka and elsewhere.

My impression of Mbeki is in part defined by an appreciation of his intelligence and sharpness of mind.

In terms of communication, we would have all kinds of ideas about how to present the ANC’s message over the radio to people in South Africa, but he would always question whether a particular approach was the correct one and advise on how some of the issues could be articulated.

Listening to his presentations was a form of political education.

I am not sure if this deserves any mention anywhere, but such was the impression he had on us, the young ones, as we were maturing within Radio Freedom and other structures, that many of us started smoking pipes – as a representation, in our minds, of deep reflection and intellectual posture.

But the appropriate tobacco was not always available, so most of us abandoned the adventure.

Mbeki was a very accessible, very easy-going person and he did not have any airs.

He interacted with us in a manner that encouraged critical thinking, always debating issues.

I am not quite sure about his actual position then, whether he was already political secretary to Oliver Tambo or whether that came later, but what I remember is that he was operating in Tambo’s office and he was put in charge of the DIP.

And so he headed the work that we were doing at a supervisory and strategic level. When we had done our planning for the week, we would then debate the programming and the substantive issues with him.

People like Welile Nhlapo, who came later to Lusaka, will know this, given his seniority in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) leadership then. Among the dynamics in that period was the debate among the Black Consciousness people whether to establish themselves independently as an organisation or to join the ANC or the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).

Welile and his group came to meet with Thabo in Makeni in 1978, I think. The debate itself about the ANC and how it related to Black Consciousness ideas was an eye-opener, arising in part from the perspectives that Thabo was putting forward.

For instance, he would argue with Welile and others that the ANC was more black conscious than the BCM itself, to the extent that while “non-Africans” might have been members of the ANC since the 1969 Morogoro conference, they could not become members of the National Executive Committee (NEC).

At the end of 1978, I was shifted to work on the Mayibuye journal, which was launched then as a publication for distribution within South Africa. Joan Brickhill was its first editor.

I still recall the first article I contributed to Mayibuye, in the build-up to the centenary of the Battle of Isandlwana, which was in January 1979 and which the ANC declared the Year of the Spear.

I wrote the article about the Battle of Isandlwana and I thought it was quite good. At the time, Mbeki was kind of editor-in-chief of Mayibuye: we sent our copy to him for final approval. My piece was sent through, and he essentially rewrote it; improving it, not because there was anything wrong with it, but he enhanced the language, the prose and the overall presentation.

Having done a bit of research and moving towards the conclusion of the article, I had a line that referred to a certain commander of the British forces who, after they were defeated at Isandlwana, either ran back to headquarters or sent back a message to report, “the camp is in the hands of the enemy, sir!” So, in my conclusion, I said something like: “It is just a matter of time before we will be able to report that the country is in the hands of the people, comrades!”

I really thought that was very beautiful. Mbeki enhanced the earlier parts of the article to link up with the conclusion.

Afterwards, when the first issue of Mayibuye came out and when OR came to the DIP in Makeni, he came to greet me and commend me on a very beautiful article.

I said Mbeki rewrote it and OR just laughed.

In the debates around the Year of the Spear, we tended to refer to King Cetshwayo’s army, the Zulu army so to speak, as a people’s army; and Mbeki said to us that we needed to have a debate about whether it really was a people’s army; what a people’s army really meant and what it represented; and in what sense even MK could be characterised as such.

These are just instances to illustrate how Mbeki always challenged us to reflect and to ensure that in whatever we presented we should be sure of what we meant and say it clearly.

Later, in interactions with OR, one could see that Mbeki had learned from Tambo himself.

When later we interacted with people like Sizakele Sigxashe, who became the operational head of DIP, they told us about when they returned from universities all over the world where they had been trained in the 1960s and early 1970s. OR tested them on their ability to draft; and Mbeki emerged as the best among them.

But, however well Thabo wrote, OR would still edit. In a sense one could say that there was a kind of transmission of education and a honing of skills, from OR to Thabo, and then from Thabo to us.

We were hardly conscious of the significance of all this, but it is in retrospect that we came to appreciate it fully as being like a little university.

It is difficult to comment on the relationship between OR and Thabo as one was not often able to observe them in the same setting, except perhaps later when I became a member of the ANC’s politico military council (PMC) and attended some of the rare meetings at which both were present.

It is of course a matter of public record that Mbeki contributed to most of the speeches that OR made as president.

Furthermore, he was also responsible for strategising as political secretary in the president’s office, which was responsible for a number of departments, including the DIP and political education.

But the relationship between Mbeki and OR in my view, and I might be wrong, was one of reverence. I saw respect and reverence – and at times even nervousness on the part of “the student”. I suppose OR’s interventions in editing things drafted by Mbeki, or in challenging ideas that were being raised, made sure there would be that appreciation that Tambo, as president of the ANC, was in a different class altogether.

I also think age had something to do with it.

People joke about referring to Mbeki as “Chief”. In fact, members showed their reverence for Tambo in a similar way long before this; and if I’m not mistaken, this may have started with the previous president Albert Luthuli who was an actual traditional chief.

We did not often socialise with Mbeki in Lusaka. But there were instances when we visited his flat and sometimes we would find there Abdullah Ibrahim, who stayed at his place when he was in Lusaka, or you would find Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu and they would be playing music.

He attended some of the parties we had and he would dance with us and have a drink. So Mbeki was able every so often to relax with the crowd.

The sense one had of Mbeki was cool, strategic and measured, but around 1978/1979 – I do not know the actual details – I observed one time when he and Joe Nhlanhla sounded quite agitated as they were photocopying some important document in Makeni.

We later learned there were very intense debates taking place in the NEC about issues of strategy.

There had not been a strategy and tactics document since the Morogoro conference of 1969 and there were all kinds of contestations around, for example, the relationship between mass and armed struggle and the role of the underground. Those who were members of the revolutionary council, especially those who came from MK, were emphasising the supremacy of the military struggle, and Thabo and others from the political side were emphasising the importance of mass action.

This, I think, illustrates how agitated Mbeki could become if he felt, especially at the level of the NEC, that people were not appreciating some of the ideas that he and likeminded people were putting forward.

The Thabo Mbeki I Know edited by Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu and Miranda Strydom is published by Picador Africa, an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa. It is available from leading bookstores at an RRP of R299. Joel Netshitenzhe was head of the policy and coordination advisory unit in the presidency until the end of 2009. He previously served as head of government communication and information systems from 1998 to 2006.