E M Forster once wrote that one tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it. Yet high praise is due to Mark Gevisser for his finely textured and well-paced biography of our sometimes misunderstood, but - it must be said - hard-to-like president.
Eight years in the writing, and lengthy though it is, this monumental study of the Mbeki family is difficult to put down, so absorbed does one become in the travails of the perplexing figure at its centre, so familiar to us yet so personally remote from all but close colleagues.
THABO MBEKI - The Dream Deferred
 By Mark Gevisser. 892 pages. Jonathan Ball, R229
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As the author demonstrates with rare sensitivity, Mbeki betrays the scars of a difficult upbringing. The precocious descendant of two once-prosperous, educated and politically aware families, whose fortunes and relationships foundered on the twin rocks of apartheid and communist activism, the young Thabo grew up in an environment where familial emotions and desires were regarded as "bourgeois attachments", to be sublimated to the demands of the liberation struggle. From an early age he was driven, not by ambition, but by a desire to fulfil what was expected of him.
"Disconnected" is the word Mbeki himself uses to describe his virtually parentless childhood, an alienation made more acute by his distance from the mainstays of African rural life - traditional culture and the church - and later by many years in exile. Gevisser avers that Mbeki's entire African renaissance project, initiated shortly after his return from exile, stems from a longing to be "reconnected" to his roots. Most of his chief preoccupations - BEE, Nepad, as well as his defiant attitudes over Aids and Mugabe's Zimbabwe - can be traced to this desire for self-definition and "reconnection".
Sent by the ANC into exile, and then to the University of Sussex, where his Marxist leanings first came under challenge, Mbeki completed studies at the Lenin Institute in Moscow. The latter seems to have imbued in him a belief in "vanguardism" (leadership of the masses by a group of elite cadres), on one hand, but a loss of faith in economic central planning on the other. As Gevisser observes, the twin educations he received in the 1960s - complicated by other ideologies such as Sweden's Third Way - have competed for prominence throughout his career. In the ANC over which he presides, the conflict between the principles of Western-style liberalism and those of "vanguardist", democratic centralism remains unresolved today.
Like his favourite Shakespearian figure Coriolanus, Mbeki, in his role as a modern revolutionary, has always been guided by the lodestar of self-determination - personal, political and psychological. "I play the man I am." That is why, the author intuits, he refuses to woo the media or abandon positions founded on "principle" - there was no condemnation of Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, no support for Zimbabwe's expulsion from the Commonwealth, and no deference to expert medical opinion on Aids. It also helps to explain why he has bristled so much at being advised what to do, particularly by white politicians, from Tony Blair to Tony Leon, and why this country's "non aligned" foreign policy - under his leadership - is so erratic and difficult to comprehend. Yet, as Gevisser points out, Mbeki seems unaware that it was Coriolanus's self-pride, his bloody-minded determination to change his people rather than himself, which eventually brought about his demise.
By going to exceptional lengths to account for Mbeki's thinking, the author has laid himself open to charges that he has become too close to his subject, and is not judgmental enough. That strikes me as unfair. Gevisser empathises rather than sympathises with Mbeki, aiming to "sit on his shoulder and see the world the way he did". There is plenty of time for dispassionate judgment once Mbeki's presidency has run its course. One senses the author's disapproval, however, of many of his subject's positions - notably those on Zimbabwe and Aids.
The book is not without factual errors. Danie Craven was never a Broederbonder, let alone a senior one, and Lord Carrington's first name is Peter, not David. And, inevitably, there are gaps, one being any discussion of Mbeki's extraordinary method (unique among world leaders) of communicating with the nation via a frequently splenetic weekly column on the Internet. But these are minor quibbles about a biography that ranks among the finest ever written by a local author.
Let us not forget, too, that SA has much to thank Mbeki for - it was he who steered the ANC away from communism, who kept faith in negotiations rather than armed struggle throughout the political transition, who "seduced" business and the white Right into accepting that SA's destiny was safe in his hands, and who managed the country while Mandela went about forging racial reconciliation.
After nearly two terms of his presidency, however, the question that cries out for an answer is the one posed by Xolele Mangcu at the public launch of this book. If Mbeki's political career has been one long journey of personal "reconnection", is it right that Aids orphans, Zimbabwean peasants and victims of his government's lax approach to crime and corruption, among others, should be obliged to pay for the trip? That is a matter which Gevisser will address, I imagine, in a future edition of this seminal book, which is required reading for every politically interested South African.
