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.

... contd.