Thabo Mbeki Research Articles

A Life Committed

Memoirs are usually one of the best avenues to understand people’s lives. They provide a first-hand account of one’s life from different perspectives. One of the problems with them is that they are expectedly full of biases. It is difficult for a memoirist to criticize herself and reveal everything. Perhaps at first glance, this is what one might expect from a memoir of a person like Essop Pahad (1939-2023). However, it is a marvelous work that offers a reader with great historical accounts of events and life well lived. Pahad served as the Minister in the Presidency from 1999 until 2008 under former President Thabo Mbeki who wrote a foreword to this book, “I am happy to commend this educative tour through many decades of exciting struggles for our liberation and a better world, as contained in this autobiography” (p17). To have served Thabo Mbeki for such a long time and remained his close ally for years is a significant sign that Pahad was a distinguished politician and intellectual in his own right.

Repositioning the concept of Xenophobia in the African context: Why do we allow ourselves to be defined by others?

The main goal of this work is to reposition the concept of xenophobia in the African context. This is to reflect on Thabo Mbeki’s narrative on Xenophobia. Africa continues to remain a pawn due to the Eurocentric ideas that have been forced on the Africans also brought about a foreign concept of xenophobia as if Africans are not brothers in the name of brotherhood. It is incontestable that brothers are, in some cases engage in fight, but there was a laid down rules and norms of resolving such misunderstanding. With the employment of qualitative research methods, complex interdependence theory garnished with Anglo-American conspiracy theory; we argue that, Anglo-American imperialist managed to spread and enforce the usage of English through imposing the concept xenophobia in the continent while failing to capture the essence of sibling fights or fights amongst African brothers and sisters conceptualised by the Batswana speaking people as maragana teng a bana motho. Through acknowledging Mbeki’s narrative and some sampled African languages, we argue that, while there is a word for foreigner in these sampled African languages, there is no direct or indirect translation of xenophobia in African languages. We conclude that the concept xenophobia has its etymological foundations in Greek and is therefore foreign in any of the African and South African indigenous languages.

Public speech as a tool for nation-building: An analysis of Thabo Mbeki’s speeches

This study investigated the discursive strategies used in major speeches in South Africa with distinct socio-political systems, which put nation-building in a central place, making the nation both the context and an analytical unit for the study of nation-building. The research question that needed to be answered was: to what extent does a presidential speech, as a tool, reflect South Africa’s nation-building objectives? This study specifically examined various discursive techniques used in the political language of former President Thabo Mbeki. Two speeches by former President Thabo Mbeki were collected from the GCIS website. A general textual description of the speeches is made in terms of lexis and syntax to uncover the underlying ideology in the speeches. Thematic content analysis was adopted. The analysis was predominantly qualitative, supported by some statistical data, on the assumption that a purely qualitative analysis would not necessarily yield reliable results. The occurrence of linguistic features was presented; each text was transcribed and marked for relevant linguistic features. The critical discourse analysis revealed that, on a macro-level, the text of the speeches can be viewed as a manifestation of larger socio-political processes within the country. The texts illustrate a type of political speech positioned in a society in transition, as there are references to building a cohesive society, policy implementation, new programs of government, job creation, and poverty alleviation. The speeches did serve as a nation-building tool, as they conveyed the steps undertaken by the South African government to strive towards an inclusive and all-encompassing approach in an effort to achieve nation-building.

The Right to Development in Africa: Issues, Constraints, and Prospects by Serges Djoyou Kamga

Reviewed by: The Right to Development in Africa: Issues, Constraints, and Prospects by Serges Djoyou Kamga Chinekwu Obidoa Kamga, Serges Djoyou. The Right to Development in Africa: Issues, Constraints, and Prospects. New York: Routledge, 2020. Countries in Africa have made important and, in many cases, what can be considered context-defying progress in the area of development, but many gaps remain. This text provides a much-needed look at a dimension of the development discourse that has not received sufficient attention, the Right to Development (RTD). RTD is conceptualized as a multidimensional, composite, and intricately interconnected set of rights of which every person and all peoples are entitled. Grounded on the tenets of the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development, RTD is an inalienable human right. The text is an edited volume drawn from papers presented at the International Colloquium on "Actualizing the Right to Development in Africa," organized in 2018 by the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (TMALI) housed in the University of South Africa. The two main goals of this text are (1) to explore the issues and constraints that pose as barriers to RTD in Africa and (2) to examine how the hindrances can be addressed for the actualization of RTD in Africa. The text is divided into five major sections. Part I focuses on governance and RTD. Emphasis is placed on the governance structures (including legal instruments, constitutions, and institutions) required and responsible for achieving RTD. The absence of such elements will undermine the possibility of achieving RTD. The idea that it will take a well-governed society to achieve RTD is evident from the papers discussed in this section. Additionally, the role of international law in supporting governance in African countries is explored. Part II looks at corruption as a major barrier to RTD. A key concept presented and explored here is the role of social and ethical principles in achieving RTD and the implication of corruption on development in Africa. Part III addresses the pertinent issue of the place of African cultures in development in Africa. Emphasis is placed on how the failure to take African worldviews, philosophies, values, ideologies, and cultures into consideration [End Page 213] starting from the partitioning of Africa and the colonial era to the present day has hurt the continent. The marginalization of African cultures in the development process and even in development discourse has had devastating implications. The idea that development cannot occur in a vacuum has been reiterated by development Africanists. Dr. Toyin Falola rightly asserts that development cannot be divorced from culture, and Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu has repeatedly alluded to the fact that "Africa cannot rise with something borrowed." The idea of leveraging the African intellectual capital of Ubuntu and Letsema for RTD was explored. However, the challenge of legitimizing and operationalizing these ideologies remains. I found the issues raised in this chapter most pertinent among the many barriers and constraints of RTD in Africa discussed in this text. The neglect of cultural systems not only has consequences for the development process but may be a major reason for the unsustainability of development in many parts of Africa. The paper on the role of inter-Africa trade in achieving RTD is especially interesting. Central to development is collaboration with your neighbors. The reality that African countries were deprived of the freedom and structures to trade and interact commercially with each other in favor of economic interaction with colonial nations is one of the root factors for the epileptic nature of development on the continent, a clear violation of the right to development. This is aptly captured in the words of the author Siphamandla Zondi: "The inter-African trade illustrates the persisting and hunting demon of coloniality of being, power, and knowledge, and why the decolonization of the African political economy is a precondition for economic renaissance hoped for and the achievement of the right to development as envisaged" (401). Section IV on gender and RTD provided invaluable insight into another critical barrier to RTD. The violation of women's rights to RTD and the exclusion of women in the development process are linked to epileptic and unsustainable development. Some of the authors highlighted the fact...

Thabo Mbeki’s Decolonial Idea of an African in the African Renaissance

In this essay, I deploy a liberation philosophical perspective in order to understand Thabo Mbeki’s decolonial imagining of an African in the African Renaissance. It is my understanding that the African of the African Renaissance is one who has awakened to the task of undoing coloniality in the African postcolony. For instance, that an African has to declare that ‘I am an African’ in Africa, as Mbeki does, reflects the troubled and also troubling idea of being African in the African postcolony. It might seem that being human, and African in Africa, is an idea under question that must still be declared or defended. Whether one is an African or not in the postcolony is not a given, as colonialism succeeded in changing the being and belonging of Africans in Africa. Through colonialism, settlers became local in Africa and Africans became aliens in their own native territories. Colonialism, especially in its apartheid expression in South Africa,questioned the humanity of Black Africans, displaced them, and dispossessed them of their land. It is the uprooted, displaced, and dispossessed African represented in Mbeki who makes the remark that: ‘At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I shouldconcede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.’ This dehumanised African is the subject who travels from the dystopia of colonialism to the utopia of reconciliation and a renaissance of Africa. This is the African who was caught in the tragic optimism of the liberation ‘dreamer’, but was later to concede that after the end of juridical colonialism, South Africa remained ‘two nations’ racially and socially. Even a globally celebrated democratic Constitution did not come close to solving the political and social equation, the paradox, where South Africaremains the ‘most unequal country in the world’. For the African of Mbeki’s representation and observation, the dream of liberation from colonialism collapsed into a nightmare of coloniality, and the starting point of an African renaissance is the decolonial effort todare dream and imagine another Africa and other Africans built from the ashes of the colonisers and the colonised. This essay is also an observation of the dilemma of a philosopher of liberation who was torn in between the necessity of justice for the victims of colonialism and the importance of reconciliation with the colonisers in the African postcolony.

SENIOR POLITICAL PERSONALITIES’ IMPACTS ON PUBLIC SECTOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP PERCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES

The concept of ethical leadership in the public sector is an intriguing and puzzling endeavor. It is assumed that political leaders, among other things, are first unable to distinguish between their personal and professional moral and ethical leadership dilemmas, and second, they are, either not acutely aware of, or ignorant of the effects that their personal ethical posture while in office has on the perceptions and practice of ethical behavior throughout the public sector and, thus, on the provision of the public goods and services. Leadership, who work for the government, in the public sector has a significant impact on their immediate reports and on the collective conscience of the country. Senior public sector executives naturally establish norms and values that go beyond current regulations and guide moral behavior inside and outside government. By evaluating the influences of the private and public personas of three previous South African state presidents, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and Jacob Zuma, this essay discusses the theories on which leadership is based. The conceptual basis of the research includes material that was studied from a range of sources, including scholarly publications, popular media pronouncements, and policies. The results imply that a leader’s ethical standing, conduct materialize in people’s beliefs and actions, and impact the provision of services.

Africana Intellectual/Pedagogical Work: Teaching to Answer the Call to the African Renaissance in the African Diaspora Context

In this article we examine what selected online audiovisual and text resources teach about Africa using Africana/Black Studies scholarship to interrogate and assess opportunities such educational materials provide for African American students to identify with Africa and the African Renaissance concept. Popularized by Cheikh Anta Diop and promoted by Thabo Mbeki, the African Renaissance envisions the transformation of Africa’s future and how Africa’s histories, peoples, and contributions to the world are understood. Using the Afrocentric method of duo autoAfronography, we suggest ways educational resources can promote identify affirming African diaspora literacy consciousness and connectedness to Africa and the idea of the African Renaissance.

A pandemic of inequality: reflections on AIDS and COVID-19 in the southern African context

In 2020, COVID-19 started spreading from Wuhan in China to the USA, the UK and Europe and then to the rest of the world. In Africa, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Egypt on 14 February, while South Africa’s first case was identified on 5 March. On 11 March, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. At the time, it was said that COVID-19 would become the great equaliser because the virus made no distinction between first and third world countries, between the rich and the poor, and nor was it influenced by gender, sexual orientation or race. When someone contracted SARS-CoV-2, no guarantee could be given that the patient would survive, regardless of who they were or their status in the community. This stood in contrast to the early experience of AIDS before antiretrovirals existed and when HIV was spreading like wildfire in sub-Saharan Africa and other countries with low or lower-middle-income status. It seemed as if these countries were doubly cursed — by poverty and the AIDS pandemic that was causing as many as 6 000 mortalities per day in sub-Saharan Africa. This led to the South African president at the time, Thabo Mbeki, to assert that poverty was an even greater problem than HIV and AIDS. It did not take long to see that COVID-19 was not the anticipated equaliser. As lockdowns were enforced within most countries across the globe and resulting in economic slumps, differences between rich and poorer countries and their respective citizens were thrown into sharp relief once again. This article reports how both AIDS and COVID-19 adversely affected women, the impoverished and those without access to sustainable souces of food and medicine.

Presidential communication approaches and the impact on public health: a comparative analysis of three South African presidents’ communication on AIDS and COVID-19

The HIV response in the African continent over past decades demonstrates the potency that the words and actions of political leaders have in either expediting or impeding the implementation and adoption of preventive measures at the individual and community levels. The article explores the health communication approaches employed by two South African past presidents (Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma) in responding to the HIV epidemic, and contrasts these with the communicative approach of President Cyril Ramaphosa during the COVID-19 pandemic. Approached from this understanding, this article provides a comparative analysis of the communication approaches of these three presidencies across the two pandemics, and considers the variously trusted sources of top-down, government-driven and bottom-up, community-informed approaches to health communication. Critical lessons that emerged in South Africa during the HIV epidemic regarding the need to include communities in communicating about risks and behaviour change have not been adopted into the COVID-19 response. Political leaders are not best placed to communicate about these issues, and, in the context of pandemics, there is a clear need to reconsider top-down communication approaches that are designed without the participation of communities and ignore the interconnected nature of health and other social determinants of health.

My Own Liberator: A South African Story

Abstract Dikgang Moseneke was born in Pretoria, South Africa in December 1947. He was imprisoned on Robben Island, where most political prisoners were kept, off the coast of Cape Town for 10 years as a young man for his political activity. While in prison, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Political Science and later completed a Bachelor of Laws degree. After his release from prison, he was admitted as an attorney in 1978 and in 1983 was called to the Pretoria Bar as a Senior Counsel. During the 1980s he worked underground for the Pan-African Congress and became its deputy president when it was unbanned in 1990. Moseneke also served on the technical committee that drafted the interim South African constitution of 1993. After a corporate career between 1995 and 2001, President Thabo Mbeki appointed him to the High Court in Pretoria and in 2002 as a judge in the Constitutional Court. In June 2005, he became the Court’s Deputy Chief Justice, a position from which he retired in May 2016. In this essay, he chronicles his years of protest, political activity, and imprisonment as a young man. The essay is an excerpt from his memoir, My Own Liberator, which is published by Picador Africa (2018), and is available online and at all good bookstores.

“I am an African”: A Philosophical Enquiry of Identity and Culture

With the public frenzy over Thabo Mbeki’s speech, “I am an African” that was delivered in 1996, South Africa has since become a subject of debate as to who is an African and what constitutes as African. This has been going on for almost two decades and a half now. Mbeki’s speech appears to have evoked solemn questions relating to the issues of identity and culture. Subsequent to that speech, the South African public began to question what it meant to be African. The central point of enquiry was: what makes one an African? Is it the color of their skin? Their citizenship? Or is one merely an African because others regard him or her as such? These and many other questions arise when one touches upon the subject of Africans. These perplexing questions, however, are not only unique to the South African context; they apply, to some extent, to the general continent of Africa. With talks and debates about African renaissance, decoloniality, and indigenization, the question of African identity and culture resurfaces. Here, the discussion hubs around the issue of African persona and what it means to be authentically African. By means of document analysis, this paper critically employs a philosophical approach in order to grapple with the subject of identity and culture. This is done through a systematic discussion of the following facets: (a) history, (b) identity, and (c) culture. These three facets are therefore critically engaged in order to establish what constitute an African and what can be characterized as an African identity.

Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ Speech: Mobilising Psycho-Political Resources for Political Reconstitution of Post-Apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT We offer a critical reading of Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech to illustrate how he foregrounded humaning, namely onto-epistemological recovery, as a key dimension of psycho-political reconstruction. Mbeki’s speech, delivered on the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, was inherent to the larger quest to (re)imagine South Africa and (South)Africanness and assert independent Black intellectual thought. Positioning himself as an epistemic agent, Mbeki historicised that moment of adopting the Constitution and attempted to raise critical consciousness about the protracted struggle for democracy. He mobilised marginalised knowledge about the anti-colonial struggle to challenge forgetfulness and limited interpretations of South Africa’s negotiated settlement. Mbeki also invoked the idea of a relational ontology and hermeneutic love to effect an inclusive Africanity constituted of multiple histories and ‘races’. Mbeki, resisting Afro-pessimism, referenced the making of an inclusive Africanity against Africa as a generative place despite the colonial encounter, African humanism and South Africa’s aspirations for reconciliation as articulated by the ANC and the Constitution. Notwithstanding the psycho-political import of Mbeki’s speech, the process of humaning remains incomplete.

THE QUESTION OF INTERPRETATION IN THE NICHOLSON JUDGMENT Jacob Zuma v The National Director of Public Prosecutions [2009] I AII SA 54 N

It is interesting that prior to Nicholson J’s judgment in the matter of Jacob Zuma v The National Director of Public Prosecutions, that Judge President Tshabalala stated quite categorically that he did not want the judge who was to preside over the corruption trial of Jacob Zuma to be placed under scrutiny (see “Zuma Judge Gets Legal Professional’s Approval” 31 July 2008 Business Day 3). However, since Nicholson J’s decision of the Jacob Zuma trial, both the judge and his judgment have invariably become the subject of intense scrutiny. Nicholson J’s judgment is fraught with inconsistencies, incongruities and controversy. Nevertheless, no matter what the views are regarding the findings of Nicholson J, it has to be conceded that it resulted in one of the most far reaching political decisions in South African legal history, which resulted in the ousting of the country’s president (Thabo Mbeki). While the judgment raises a plethora of both political and legal issues, it is not the intention of the author to venture into the political arena; rather an analysis ofthe approach adopted to statutory interpretation which influenced the court’s decision, is considered.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la mȇme chose: foreign policy of new regimes and their leaders -a systemist exposition

ABSTRACT This article portrays and diagrammatically analyzes the foreign policies of three different new regimes and their respective leaders. In each instance, the leader enunciated a foreign policy designed to promote not only the interests of the state but also its identity. The article focuses on Vladimir Lenin and Soviet Russia, Konrad Adenauer and the Federal Republic of Germany, and Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki in South Africa. Starting with the objectives of the former regime, the article outlines how the foreign policy of each new regime and the respective leader(s) led to both a divergence and a continuation of that policy. Systemist graphics are used to carry out a systematic synthesis of what can be learned from the three preceding studies in combination with each other. The study unfolds in six sections. The first section provides an overview of the project. Sections two through four focus respectively on the South African, Russian/Soviet, and German cases. The fifth section initiates a systematic synthesis that is based on the preceding set of studies. Sixth, and finally, the concluding section sums up what has been accomplished and says a bit about possible future research.

From Offline to Online Imagined Community: Recuperating Asante Culture and History for Development in Ghana

Since the advent of social media, mediated through smartphones, about a decade ago in Ghana, West Africa, many of the youths have appropriated this modern communicative technology to rejuvenate indigenous cultures as important models for fashioning the pathways of development. About half a decade ago, some young men and women of Asante origin in Ghana embarked on a project of recuperating Asante cultures. These youths saw themselves as responding to the national call, since the mid-2000s, for re-traditionalisation. It was also partly a response to the United Nations’ call for alternative development narrative, framed around cultural revivalism, since the 1990s. It equally dovetails with the call of Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, for African Renaissance. Given this continental and trans-continental contexts and the recent coronavirus protocol of social distancing, a group of Asante youth aligned themselves with their chiefs and cultural historians to establish an online community on WhatsApp. Their aim was/is to recuperate the Asante Kotoko Society, which was first established as an offline Society in 1916, to support Asanteman’s progress. Thus, this online imagined community has been established to serve as a point of confluence for the teaching, researching, and promoting “relevant” Asante cultures to ensure the socio-economic development of Asanteman and Ghana. Using critical discourse analysis and ethnographic technique of in-depth interviews with key respondents of the Society, I contribute to the discourse on community as I analyse the question: How relevant is online community to offline development?

A pandemic anniversary: 40 years of HIV/AIDS

A pandemic anniversary: 40 years of HIV/AIDS

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

Irony of Development Agendas: Perspectives on APRM under Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo

ABSTRACT The attainment of development is largely consequent upon the throes of political governance as a fragment of public administration. In truth, the nexus between political governance and development is crucial to the advancement of social justice. The quest to reverse Africa’s underdevelopment and de-democratisation instigated its political leaders to initiate, formalise, and adopt the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). The APRM is expected to promote good governance, transparency, democracy, political accountability, and other indicators of development, thereby entrenching developmentalism. Based on Gerry Stoker’s new governance theory, the paper examines the Country Self-Assessment Report (CSAR) of South Africa and Nigeria under the administrations of Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo based on the four theoretical pillars of the APRM. It finds that successive regimes after Mbeki and Obasanjo exhibited poor commitment to implement the ideals of the APRM to further the gains made by the understudied regimes and thereby weakened the developmentalism push of the countries.

A reflection on moments that tested the effectiveness of South Africa’s constitutional democracy

This paper reflects on some of the effects of the factional battles inside post-apartheid South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), to highlight the resilience and effectiveness of the country’s constitutional democracy. The paper commences by discussing the entrenchment of democratic rule during Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki’s presidencies. It proceeds to deliberate on the divisive factional rivalry between Mbeki and Jacob Zuma’s supporters that ensued inside the ANC during Mbeki’s second term, a development that came to threaten the country’s very constitutionalism as it morphed into another rivalry between Zuma and his successor, Cyril Ramaphosa. The article concludes that through democracy under Ramaphosa’s presidency still faces grave challenges, it has actually been strengthened and will likely endure for the foreseeable future.

Reminisces of Participants in the Struggle against Apartheid about Studying in the USSR (1960s–1980s)

This article is a review of South African cadets’ and students’ memoirs that received political or/and military education in the Soviet Union as a part of Soviet assistance in solidarity against the apartheid. Most of them were fighters of the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) “Umkhonto we Sizwe”. This paper examines and cites the curious aspects of Soviet life noted by the arriving students, among whom was the ex-President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki, as well as many former and current high-ranking authorities of this country. It is worth saying that the authors of the published recollections highlighted not only the positive aspects of their stay in the Soviet Union, but also did mentioned some negative sides, thus providing a more “complete” picture. However, one should not forget that in many ways the description of certain events was directly related to the student’s outlook and could differ from the real state of affairs. The authors of this article were especially interested in what trainees expected to see in the USSR, how their relations with Soviet citizens were built, and what experience they kept in mind at the end of their studies. The authors tried, partially quoting the memoirs of some freedom fighters, to answer these questions. It is worth pointing out that as one of the main results of cooperation Soviet officers and other instructors, by their own example, were able to change the racial perceptions of South Africans by showing how “white” people could be.