Thabo Mbeki. Adekeye Adebajo

      Thabo certainly inherited his father’s sense of dress and his eloquence and articulateness, but also his coldness and emotional reserve as well as his singleminded focus on the liberation struggle. At the first meeting between father and son in Lusaka, Zambia, in January 1990 after nearly three decades of not having seen each other, Govan greeted Thabo by formally shaking hands with him, as he did with other comrades lined up to meet the recently released Rivonia trialists, while other families like the Sisulus broke ranks and exchanged warm and joyous embraces. As Govan noted to a reporter at the time: ‘You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade.’⁴ But both Govan and Thabo did later share moments of private affection.

      Thabo was greatly inspired by his father’s example to succeed, and seemed determined to prove himself to Govan by excelling intellectually and politically and carrying on the family’s tradition of noblesse oblige. As Thabo remarked in exile, ‘what I’m doing here, I want to do in the best way I can. I want to excel at it and complete the work of my father.’⁵ The son was also keen to escape his father’s shadow and succeed on his own terms rather than as the scion of a famous struggle family. In the absence of his own father, the ANC would become Thabo’s family for 52 years, and the ANC president Oliver Tambo, with whom Thabo worked closely for 30 years, would become an adopted father and political mentor.

      Like Govan, the young Thabo was – and remains – a voracious reader, consuming the books in the family home: English poetry, Marxist literature (including the Communist Manifesto), James Aggrey, Dostoyevsky, A.C. Jordan’s famous Xhosa novel Ingqumbo yemiNyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors) and even his father’s own volume of critical essays, Transkei in the Making (1939). Govan and Epainette adopted a Socratic method in educating their children, and did not try to indoctrinate them. As Thabo later noted, ‘Our parents never initiated any political discussions at home. It was always up to us to raise matters with them, then they would talk about it.’⁶ From an early age Govan’s eldest son wrote and read letters for illiterate villagers in his community to and from their migrant family members working on the mines and in domestic service across South Africa. Along with his siblings, they were exposed at an early age to the poverty of South Africa’s black majority and the awful conditions of black mineworkers who came back to the village to die of lung disease. As a young boy Thabo attended the local primary school. Though a good student, he did not like maths and played truant to avoid classes until Epainette discovered the problem, and gave him private lessons at home.

      From the age of eight, Thabo was sent away to live with various relatives across the country, as both Govan and Epainette believed it was best that their children should live apart from their politically active parents, who constantly faced the threat of arrest. This nomadic existence created a sense of dislocation even before Thabo left South Africa to go into political exile. Practically orphaned and without a stable family and friends, he became somewhat of an introverted loner. Thabo attended a Moravian school in Queenstown, before going to the famous Scottish Presbyterian missionary secondary school of Lovedale College – the ‘Eton of Africa’ – in 1955. Lovedale was located in Alice on the banks of the Tyhume River in the Eastern Cape. Here, at an institution modelled on British public schools, where the pupils wore blazers, Mbeki became acquainted with the works of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, as well as the Xhosa poetry of S.E.K. Mqhayi, the great ‘poet of the nation’. For more than a century, black students from across southern Africa and latterly from further north, as far as Uganda, had attended the school and been prepared for leadership roles in their own communities and countries. Thabo was thus simultaneously exposed at Lovedale to a pan-African identity and to British traditions, both of which he would later come to embody.

      Thabo entered Lovedale soon after the National Party (NP) came to power in 1948 and started implementing the racist policies of apartheid. In reaction, most students at Lovedale developed a heightened political consciousness. The year he entered, 1955, was the one in which the apartheid government ordered the forced removal of black residents from Sophiatown in Johannesburg. While at Lovedale Mbeki joined the ANC Youth League at the age of 14, learning to sing struggle songs in honour of the ANC president, Albert Luthuli, and the Congolese liberation hero, Patrice Lumumba. With students paid by the security police to spy on each other, the roots of Thabo’s later suspicious nature and obsessive secrecy can perhaps be traced to his early political activism. His education at Lovedale was cut short after his involvement in a student strike – against poor food and the spying on, and expulsion of, students – in 1959. Thabo was expelled from the school and forced to return to his home at Mbewuleni. He took his matriculation exams in Umtata that October, and obtained a disappointing second-class pass, a setback that strengthened his determination in future to achieve academic excellence.