5 - The Ambiguous Role of the Intellectual as Statesman

Abstract

The book under review is a pocket-sized but thoughtful and closely argued political biography of Thabo Mbeki, the former President of the Republic of South Africa, whose presidency of his country served more or less as the denouement of his apprenticeship and later frontline role in the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa and the broader liberation movement in Southern Africa. A major objective of the book, we are told, is ‘to rescue Mbeki from the parochialism of South African perspectives and restore him to his rightful stature as an important pan-African political figure.