Word: mbeki
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Mark Gevisser's 935-page biography, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, addresses that mystery with comprehensive authority. Gevisser, a South African journalist, began researching his subject in 1999 and has consulted hundreds of Mbeki's friends and acquaintances, studied thousands of documents and interviewed the President himself six times. His book traces Mbeki's life from his birth in 1942 as the son of communist pioneers in the Transkei, through his 28 years in exile in London and Moscow, to his two terms in office. It also illuminates the strange mix of economic liberalism and headstrong ideology that permeates...
...critics, Mbeki is aloof, arrogant and prickly. Gevisser does not dispute that judgment, but he says those traits are grounded in conviction and circumstance. "If Mbeki has been driven by one overarching dream, it is that of self-determination," writes Gevisser. It began, he thinks, with Mbeki's embrace of exile as a new beginning. "Of all Thabo Mbeki's friends from exile I met during the research for this book not one recalled him, ever, talking about his childhood, or even mentioning the place of his birth," says Gevisser...
...been most harshly criticized: his refusal to condemn Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, and his skepticism, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, that hiv is the principal cause of aids. Granted, his behind-the-scenes diplomacy has shown some success in forging a compromise between Mugabe and the opposition. Mbeki also has a point that some foreign activists assume a patrician, even racist, tone toward Africa's aids problem, and that factors such as poverty also contribute to the spread of the disease. But independent-minded stubbornness can look like callousness when millions of lives are at stake. Mbeki compounded...
...Gevisser's treatment, Mbeki emerges as a tragic figure. The book's title refers to a Langston Hughes poem that Mbeki, warning of growing popular anger at persistent inequalities in postapartheid South Africa, quoted before Parliament in 1998: "What happens to a dream deferred? It explodes." But Mbeki has been unable to bridge the divide, and that failure has bolstered support for the earthy populist Zuma...
Gevisser documents how Mbeki's personal dreams are on hold too. The South Africa he returned to never matched the hopes he had nourished in exile. After so many years in Europe spent sublimating his life to the struggle, Gevisser writes, Mbeki felt a "disconnect" to his homeland once he arrived there. And he soon realized he would be forever in Mandela's shadow. For Mbeki, faced with crises of Zulu-ANC violence, crime, aids and poverty, the homecoming triumph never happened...