Joseph Lelyfeld, writing in The New York Review of Books, cannot help but notice that Mark Gevisser labored for 8 years to write a biography of “the life of the chief architect of the new South Africa,” only to see the publication of the 892-page book coincide with the former South African President’s dramatic fall from power in December 2007. To help things along, Gevisser “drenches his subjectives in adjectives like ‘guarded,’ ‘paranoid’ and ‘repressed‘ and “struggles mightily” to reconcile his subject’s split political personalities. Because of Mbeki’s difficult personality (and through no fault of Gevisser’s), what we are left with instead are lingering “ambiguities.” So we will have to wait for Mbeki (whom Lelyfeld at one points calls “thick-skinned”) to write his own biography some day.
The review, otherwise, covers familiar ground, but also includes these insights about Mbeki’s supposed “race politics”:
“… Antiapartheid whites found there was even less use for them in the emerging power structure. Gevisser is the kind of writer who can’t help squeezing a metaphor dry through constant repetition. When it comes to Mbeki’s relations with well-meaning whites, he finds the metaphor of seduction irresistible. Of course, in this portrayal, the whites end up feeling jilted and ill-used.
Most prominent among these was Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, a brainy, telegenic former leader of the liberal opposition in the white Parliament who organized the earliest “safaris” to bring influential whites into contact with the outlawed movement. For a period of months and years, he and Mbeki were warm friends and drinking buddies. Then, as in a Nadine Gordimer story, the powerful black, with huge demands on his time, had little to spare for the white friend. When Slabbert made the faux pas of suggesting to Mbeki that he might consider setting up panels of experts to advise him on thorny issues, he faced a sudden and permanent chill. Mbeki, he later wrote, “is the only person I know who demonstrated to me that my friendship was expendable.”[2]
It’s easy to read this as a racial incident, to imagine that Mbeki shut Slabbert out because he took him to be saying that he couldn’t expect to govern effectively without leaning on a coterie of white experts. But it could also be that Mbeki understood better than his erstwhile friend ever could how unwelcome such appointments would be to his suspicious, patronage-hungry supporters …”
