The reasons for Mbeki’s unwillingness to do so have puzzled most observers. Initially it seemed that he was merely reflecting the popular attitude in Africa; for the first few years of Mugabe’s farcical ‘land reform’, there was little sympathy for the white farmers being dispossessed by supposed veterans of the war of independence. It was only when the suspicious youthfulness of the ‘veterans’ became known, as well as the ruinous effects on Zimbabwe’s agriculture and people, that opinion swung towards Morgan Tsangivirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Yet Mbeki stood firm in Mugabe’s defence. This could not be due to domestic South African pressures; in fact, his behaviour has cost him dearly. Mugabe’s misrule has created a refugee crisis that has strained the South African economy, and led to xenophobic riots. Worst of all, it may have cost Mbeki the leadership of the African National Congress, and damaged his reputation irreparably.

For in its last fractious conclave held in the university town of Polokwane, the ANC voted overwhelmingly to vote to replace Mbeki with Jacob Zuma, in almost every way his opposite: where Mbeki is reserved, an academic with a fussy goatee, and liberal in orientation, Zuma is a former militant whose theme song is an ode to his AK-47, a man of prodigious appetites who has throughout his career been an opportunistic populist. Mbeki’s loss to Zuma was humiliating; further, it led him to fear that Zuma would reverse South Africa’s cautious pro-market tilt, which he viewed as his legacy.

Zuma, supported by the left wing of the ANC’s coalition, had campaigned against Mbeki on widening inequality; but one of the most emotive issues was Mugabe, whom he repeatedly accused Mbeki of favouring. This might appear strange: after all, Zuma, in terms of personality and politics, might be seen as closer to Mugabe than Mbeki — and Zuma had in fact spoken well of his fellow-guerrilla earlier, excusing his policy of land seizures and blaming it on Britain. But his subsequent metamorphosis into Mugabe’s first and harshest critic in the ANC is actually unsurprising.

While Zuma and the ANC’s left might appear to be of the same ideological stamp as ‘Comrade Bob’, the ANC and Robert Mugabe’s ZANU were actually on opposite sides of some nasty internecine warfare. In the serpentine twists of Cold War politics, forgotten now everywhere but Southern Africa and Kolkata, the ANC was pro-Moscow, and believed in urban revolution; ZANU, however, was funded by Beijing, and believed in arming the peasantry. When Mugabe came to power, he decimated the ANC’s ally in Zimbabwe - known as ZAPU, or the Popular Front - and then, its leaders exiled or dead, he forced what remained into his own party, renamed the ZANU-PF. The ANC’s left has never really forgiven him: Mbeki’s support of Mugabe was, paradoxically, an attack on his own party’s radicals. The fact that the MDC in Zimbabwe is based around trade unions, and South Africa’s trade unions are solidly behind Zuma, only made the decision easier.

Those are sound political reasons as far as they go; but they are not personal enough to satisfy. Rumours abound in Africa that the two men are related; more subtly, observers suggest that Mbeki is bound to Mugabe because of class — they are both British-educated, upper-class men under siege from working-class rivals — or that the older man is serving as a replacement for Mbeki’s father, a much-revered communist and anti-apartheid activist who died in 1999.

The truth is probably less Freudian than that. When a Kalashnikov-toting Jacob Zuma was leading the ANC’s military wing, Thabo Mbeki was their diplomat. Sipping beer in dozens of African capitals, stinging at being excluded from the rough-and-tumble of the fight, he was nowhere received more warmly than in Harare: a Harare newly-liberated, the capital of the only state in Africa where colonialism had been overthrown by force of arms, and where a genuine war-hero president paid him flattering attention. Mbeki has often misjudged those who welcomed him during that period — Mandela is said to have never quite gotten over being led to believe that Mbeki’s Nigerian friends would not execute the activist-poet Ken Saro-Wiwa. Mugabe, however, seemed to have viewed Mbeki as a future leader right from the start and schooled him in how liberators should rule, thus creating a relationship that he is now mining for all that it is worth.

Whatever the truth, it is unlikely that Mugabe will retain South Africa’s tacit support beyond that country’s next presidential election, early next year. Mbeki’s apparent blind spot and public intransigence have already harmed Zimbabwe and his own reputation dearly; it is to be hoped that the consequences, for South Africa, of the resultant Zuma presidency are not equally dire.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com