Biography of thabo mbeki pdf

Mbeki was a complex figure, full of contradictions and paradoxes: a rural child who became an urban sophisticate; a prophet of Africa’s Renaissance who was also an anglophile; a committed young Marxist who, while in power, embraced conservative economic policies and protected white corporate interests; a rational and dispassionate thinker who was particularly sensitive to criticism and dissent; a champion of African self-reliance who relied excessively on foreign capital and promoted a continental economic plan – NEPAD – that was disproportionately dependent on foreign aid; and a thoughtful intellectual who supported policies on HIV/AIDS that withheld antiretroviral drugs from infected people, resulting in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. Thabo Mbeki is the most important African political figure of his generation and a dominant figure in South African politics for 14 years. A pan-African philosopher-king who spent two decades in exile, as president of Africa’s most industrialised state, he set out a sweeping vision of an African Renaissance. As a key liberation leader in exile, Mbeki was instrumental in his party’s anti-apartheid struggle. During the South African transition, he helped build one of the world’s most respected constitutional democracies. As president, despite some successes, he was unable to overcome South Africa’s inherited socioeconomic challenges, and his disastrous AIDS policies will remain a major blotch in his legacy. He will, however, be remembered more as a foreign policy president for his peacemaking efforts in Africa and in the building of continental institutions such as the African Union and NEPAD. This book seeks to rescue Mbeki from South African parochialism and to restore him to a pan-African pantheon.

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki is often identified as an independent and original thinker. His profile as a policy shaper and mediator in the African National Congress (ANC) has been built up over a lifetime of involvement. "I was born into the struggle," he says. His birth took place in Idutywa, Transkei, on the 18th of June, 1942.

Both his parents were teachers and activists. His father was a university graduate and there were many books in his home which Mbeki read at an early age. Govan Mbeki was a leading figure in ANC activities in the Eastern Cape. Believing that sooner or later they would be arrested, Mbeki's parents decided that family and friends would also be responsible for bringing up the children. Mbeki therefore spent long periods away from home.

He joined the ANC Youth League at 14 and quickly became active in student politics. After his schooling at the Lovedale Missionary Institute was interrupted by a strike in 1959, he completed his school studies at home. Thereafter he moved to Johannesburg where he came under the guidance of ANC heavyweights Walter Sisulu and Duma Nokwe.

While studying for his British A-levels he was elected secretary of the African Students' Association (ASA). He went on to study economics as a correspondence student with London University. The ASA collapsed following the arrest of many of its members, at a time when political movements were coming under increasingly severe attack from the state. Mbeki's father was arrested at Rivonia and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Thabo Mbeki left South Africa in 1962 under orders from the ANC. From Tanzania he moved to Britain where he completed a Masters degree in economics at Sussex University in 1966. Remaining active in student politics, he played a prominent role in building the youth and student sections of the ANC in exile.

Following his studies he worked at the ANC's London office with the late Oliver Tambo and Yusuf Dadoo b

Abstract:

Generally, this study contributes toward efforts to privilege African thinkers and scholars who have been and continue to be the victim of epistemic closure and silencing by Western (Euro-North American) scholarship and epistemic practice. This is framed through the intellectual biography of Thabo Mbeki in order to bring to the fore the evidence that could be used to advance this argument. The engagement with Mbeki's intellectual thought and ideas is approached from four different entry points and perspectives. Firstly, this study traces and locates the historical and intellectual context of Mbeki within the black intellectual tradition finding its roots in the New Africa Movement (1862-1960) of the nineteenth century, consisting of religious leaders, teachers, writers, and graduates who used the acquisition of modern colonial education to identify themselves as New Africans (specifically New African intellectuals). Secondly, it provides that Mbeki’s intellectual thought is a product of the teachings and examples of the liberation movement’s leaders within the ANC, an organisation steeped in rich intellectual tradition and thought leadership. Third is the travel of the world which exposed Mbeki to the Western education and liberal political tradition in Britain, the communist training and Marxist-Lenin political thought in the Soviet Union, as well as African political thought acquired during the period spent in Africa. Finally, this includes a critical analysis of Mbeki’s thoughts and perspectives on politics, ideas, and power, as the three thematic areas of this study in order to understand the thrust of Mbeki’s intellectual thought. Read together, these aspects not only contextualise and position Mbeki as an intellectual that he is, but they also reflect his intellectual dimensions and con