Redbrick memories of Thabo Mbeki

Thabo Mbeki (pictured), who stepped down today as President of South Africa, may have turned up to hard-partying Sussex University in the 1960s "wearing tweed jackets and smoking a pipe", as described in today’s cover story on The First Post, but according to journalist and author Lesley Garner – a fellow student at the time - he adapted to "normal student life" quickly. “He partied, he didn’t hide in his room,” says Garner. “He had plenty of girlfriends and I remember that he was always down the pub - he liked his beer.”
 
Sussex in the Sixties was the most famous of the new redbrick universities, with a reputation for radical student politics and a glamorous spirit embodied by the Jay twins, Catherine and Helen, the blonde mini-skirted daughters of Labour minister Douglas Jay, who chose to go to Sussex rather than a stuffy Oxbridge college. Among the students were a large number of ANC members, exiled from South Africa, but Thabo was “the one”, according to Garner.

“He was marked even that young - we knew he was a future leader”. When students staged a two-day march from Brighton to the House of Commons to protest against the death sentence hanging over 10 ANC leaders in South Africa, it was the 22-year-old Mbeki who led the proceedings. As a result the 10 ANC leaders, including Mbeki’s father Govan and Nelson Mandela, were spared the death penalty and instead given life sentences.
 
Mbeki became something of a celebrity around the campus. “The anti-apartheid movement was very big at the time, and Mbeki was the nucleus”, says Garner. “He was always surrounded by people.”
 
Although Mbeki was known for being “engaging and flirtatious“, he was also capable of being deadly serious. A campus joke at the time was that if you were in Africa and you were kidnapped and you could either be handed over to a tribal chief or Thabo Mbeki: choose the tribal chief. “Mbeki was steely”, says Garner.
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