Underground activities in Pretoria-Witwatersrand area after ANC banned in 1960; elected secretary of the African Students Association December, 1961; left South Africa on instructions of ANC, 1962; worked for ANC office in London 1967-1970; mtraining in the Soviet Union; Assistant Secretary to the Revolutionary Council of the ANC in Lusaka, 1971; worked in Botswana, 1973, networked with Black Conscious Movement members, some of whom joined ANC; went to Swaziland as representative of the ANC, 1974; member of the ACE's National Executive Committee (NEC) 1975; sent to Nigeria to help ex-South African students relocate, 1976; Political Secretary in the Office of the President of the ANC, 1978; Director of Department of Information 1984-1989; re-elected to the NEC 1985; elected chairperson of the ANC 1993; Deputy President of the ANC, 1994; Chancellor of the University of Transkei, 1995; executive deputy president of South Africa, 1995-99; elected president of South Africa, 1999; elected to second term, 2004--.

"It is imperative that the government empower black people not only just in business but also in spheres of social, political and economic endeavor."

An American civil rights activist speaking? Hardly. These are the words of Thabo Mbeki, at the time Deputy President and currently President of South Africa, who has spent a lifetime hacking a civil rights trail through the thorny apartheid regime that, until 1994, ruled the country of his birth. In the third millennium Mbeki can glance with satisfaction at the burgeoning black middle class life that he helped to carve from what was once a treadmill of black urban poverty and hopelessness. He can also feel gratified at his country's investment potential, which is germinating again after being stripped clean by the economic sanctions of the 1980s which helped to bring the 50-year-old Nationalist government to its knees.

Mbeki had long been tapped as a possible successor to President Mandela, though he once had two serious competitors. Both had impeccable credentials for the job. Cyril Ramaphosa, the favorite of many urbanites, was former Secretary-General of Mbeki's own African National Congress (ANC) and a charismatic labor union organizer with a sizable following. Chris Hani, the other contender, appealed to the more militantly-inclined, since he had once headed ANC's guerilla wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Hani also had a couple of other important drawcards. A major figure in the South African Communist Party, he sat on the ANC executive committee, and was a powerful, militant role model to South Africa's black youth.

In the end, however, neither Hani nor Ramaphosa was destined for the government's top spot. Ramaphosa decided to forsake politics for entrepreneurship, and Hani was gunned down in his driveway in April 1993 by a member of the Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging, the most right-wing group in the country.

Thabo Mbeki's connection with South Africa's government goes back a long way. His grandfather was a chief in the days when tribal authority still counted for something, and his father, Govan, followed the family bent from the time he held his first adolescent job as an interpreter for the Marxist-inclined Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICWU).

While ICWU was an influence powerful enough to sweep Govan Mbeki into Communist Party membership, it was not the factor that caused him to devote his life to fighting South African apartheid. The decisive influence was his first encounter with the South African Police Force, experienced during a raid while he was on a 1929 visit to Johannesburg. While city dwellers of all colors were so accustomed to these maneuvers that they could have recited the usual procedure to him without thinking, Mbeki was outraged by the humiliation to which he was subjected, from the moment the police banged on his host's door in the middle of the night through the routine inspection of the "pass," or travel document assessing his right to be in the city. The whole incident was a nightmare that galvanized him into joining the African National Congress, which had been trying since its 1912 founding to stamp out such indignities.

An industrious man who was well-focused on the common black goal of South African civil rights, Govan Mbeki worked first as a schoolteacher, then as an editor of the liberal paper, New Age. Somehow, he also found time to document the history of the struggle in a book called Time Longer Than Rope, which was eventually published in London.

Govan's son Thabo was six years old in 1948, when the election victory of the white Afrikaner Nationalists brought government service by black South Africans to an abrupt end. The new cabinet ministers, several of whom were devout admirers of Hitler despite their country's staunch World War II support of the Allies, were particularly intent upon making sure that black South Africans had no voice whatsoever in the government of their own country. They achieved this goal in two ways--firstly, by supporting the Afrikaner Broederbond, or Brotherhood, a secret organization devoted to the apartheid ideal, and secondly, by bestowing the influential government position of Native Affairs portfolio upon Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, former editor of the fanatically nationalistic and anti-Semitic newspaper Die Transvaler.

Verwoerd wasted little time in implementing strict new laws that upheld the principles of apartheid, or segregation. There was population registration to sort every ethnic group into its proper designation of "white," "colored," "Indian" or "Bantu." Pass laws were tightened to ensure that no blacks were allowed in cities during evening hours. Also, the so-called scandal of biracial marriages was outlawed. In 1950, the Group Areas Act was enacted. This act allowed the government to uproot blacks from designated white areas and resettle them in "bantustans" or designated homelands, which were frequently rural areas without electricity, roads or sewage facilities.