Former President Thabo Mbeki, ever so erudite, squandered an opportunity to educate our nation as well as the diaspora. How unfortunate. Faced with South Africa’s perennial scourge, racial prejudice, during his testimony at the Khampepe Commission of Inquiry into delayed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) prosecutions, Mbeki correctly challenged being scorned by a white lawyer, Adv Paul Hoffman.
Mbeki, the intellectual career politician, successfully challenged the apparent racial prejudice aimed at him, with his supportive wife, Zanele Mbeki, behind him. Disappointingly, though, he held back from tackling democratic South Africa’s enduring spate of racism. No wonder he subsequently trended on social media.
Mbeki’s performance at the Khampepe Commission was a painful watch for more reasons than one. It was painful because the former president did what South Africa’s political elites often do best: they never tell the hard truths, all in pursuit of an endeavour to “build a new society”.
Addressing the commission chair, retired Judge Sisi Khampepe, Mbeki bitterly reflected what many Black South Africans speak about at social gatherings such as braais, family dinners, friends’ nights out and radio talk shows. In taxis and buses, in lift clubs, in villages, townships and suburbs, the issue of white supremacy in the so-called new South Africa is topical. It is made particularly legitimate by the autoethnographic, or lived, experience of too many Black victims of racism.
Mbeki’s pointed complaint against Adv Hoffman, who had earlier quizzed him aggressively about his role in the past, served in my book as a microcosm of South Africa’s imperfect race relations, which linger more than 30 years into our nascent democracy.
Mbeki said Adv Hoffman’s line of questioning was conducted in an utterly “condescending manner”. He said the white lawyer displayed what I would call characteristics of white supremacy. These are Mbeki’s words about Adv Hoffman: “He’s very superior… I’m raising this, Chairperson, I don’t know what can be done about it. Perhaps there’s no way to change Mr Hoffman. He’s got a particular attitude, very superior, very condescending, and says all of these insulting things. I do hope that we should all of us understand that we are trying to do something about building a new society. And maybe we’ll have to make a special effort to take out of our bloodstream things that have become ingrained.”
Mbeki’s exasperated tone and irritated posture were unmistakable in his attempted admonition of Adv Hoffman. I say “attempted” because the former president did not go full steam, nor all the way, to address the single most important factor that continues to hold back South Africa’s progress towards an ideal future of social cohesion and the harmonious coexistence of all races. Where I take umbrage with the former president, whom I must confess I hold in high esteem, was when he told the commission chair: “I don’t know what can be done about it.”
Surely, of all people, Mbeki should know that racism, outlawed with the demise of apartheid in the early 1990s, is punishable by law. Mbeki and the multitude of comrades from across the liberation movement spent decades in exile and on Robben Island fighting to establish a racism-free South Africa. In April 1994, we all thought they had succeeded when Mandela became the first democratically elected president. Mbeki succeeded Mandela in 1999 and, under his stewardship, for nearly two terms of office, the economy flourished.
Despite the economic good times, something about South Africa’s structural issues and complex challenges continued to rear its ugly head: the rich became richer and the poor poorer.
This was Mbeki’s economic conundrum. How does a Black majority government pull the previously disadvantaged majority out of the morass of abject poverty and create better life chances for them, the poorest of the poor in particular?
Until the end of his incumbency, Mbeki was consistent in his complaint about a South Africa that appeared to have two different economies: one white and affluent, the other Black and sluggish.
Mbeki should have judged Adv Hoffman against this backdrop, which he knows and understands too well. He needed not to play the man, but the ball. He should have reminded Adv Hoffman to know better. Whereas Mbeki was born and bred under apartheid, Adv Hoffman is fully aware of the white privileges he enjoyed during apartheid, a form of political governance based on the oppression of one race by another because of the colour of one’s skin. There can be no worse form of hatred. And this is why Mbeki ought to have reminded Adv Hoffman to know better. The pain of oppression never goes away completely. It simply lies low and is too quick to jump at the slightest provocation.
In addressing the commission chair, Mbeki should never have said “I don’t know what can be done”. As a former president, he knows all the spheres of government and should have recommended what needs to be done. This penchant among our leaders for beating around the bush instead of calling a spade a spade inadvertently perpetuates the attitude of racial prejudice among some of the previously, and still, advantaged members of our “most unequal society in the world”.
At a human level, Mbeki deserves great praise for showing genuine compassion towards a teary Adv Hoffman after he revealed that he had lost his 34-year-old daughter to suicide. Mbeki displayed Ubuntu-Botho, a core characteristic of what makes us a special nation, and features of what we all need as we continue to strive for a new society premised on equality not only on paper, but in practice. I don’t know Adv Hoffman, nor have I ever met him. However, I offer him and his family my deepest sympathy over their tragic loss. As a practising Christian, I pray for strength for the entire Hoffman family. No amount of setback, though, should bring out the worst in us. The truth shall set us all free.
* Abbey Makoe is founder and editor-in-chief of Global South Media Network (gsmn.co.za). Views expressed are personal.
** The views expressed do not represent those of IOL