When South African President Thabo Mbeki stepped down from power just over a year ago, it seemed like his political career was kaput. His decade-long administration, beginning triumphantly in 1999, was ending in shame and failure. His administration was rocked by scandal after scandal, to the point that his party, the African National Congress (ANC), lost faith in Mbeki and finally forced him to hand over the reins to an interim president, Kgalema Motlanthe. Abroad, the news was also rough. Toward the end of his term, Mbeki had worked to broker a power-sharing agreement in next-door Zimbabwe. But he failed by all accounts, and today Zimbabwe's government coalition is still perilously frayed. Mbeki, it seemed, was simply too close to Zimbabwe's strongman, President Robert Mugabe, to stand up to him.
But now just a year after his political exit, Mbeki is back on the diplomatic circuit, working for the African Union (AU) as head of a panel on Sudan. The man who failed in Zimbabwe, who couldn't even keep his own party from ousting him, is now supposedly fixing things in Darfur.
Skepticism naturally abounds. The real surprise, however, is that it may be unwarranted. If Mbeki's first fact-finding mission is any indication, his experience with Africa's big men may be a remarkable asset to the project. The ex-president gained unprecedented access to Khartoum, and the AU is backing his so-called "Mbeki Report" as an "African solution" to the violence that has plagued Sudan. When the ex-president presented his findings to the U.N. Security Council on Dec. 21, he met general approval. Could Mbeki's second act be a complete reversal of his first?
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Mbeki's history of negotiating with tyrannical governments goes back far longer than Zimbabwe. Born in South Africa at the heart of the apartheid era, Mbeki started his career as a freedom fighter. Although he spent most of his young-adult life in exile in Britain, the United States, and other African countries, he still became one of the key players in the negotiations to end apartheid. In the 1980s, when many within the ANC were still advocating armed uprisings against the government, he began a series of dialogues with members of the white South African business community. Four years later, he led the ANC delegation that negotiated with the apartheid government.
Mbeki argued for a peaceful cure to the problems ailing his country. "There is nothing to stop us from placing a bomb in a cinema of 300 white people. But we don't do it," he said in a 1984 interview quoted later in Mark Gevisser's biography. "[W]ith a white population of almost five million, it makes political common sense to win over as many of them as possible." When Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president in 1994, with Mbeki and F.W. de Klerk as his deputies, that "common sense" showed its worth. Mbeki became president himself in 1999, thanks to Mandela's endorsement. (Asked if he would be able to fill his mentor's shoes, he replied, "Why should I wear those big, ugly things?")
While it was his past as a freedom fighter that propelled Mbeki to the presidency, that legacy created problems for him in his dealings with Mugabe. The two men first met in the 1980s, while Mbeki was working to improve relations between the ANC and Harare. Mugabe had just taken over rule of Zimbabwe from the British, and having led his country to independence, Mugabe was naturally a mentor to many in the ANC, including Mbeki.
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