ANTHONY BUTLER: Biographies leave much unsaid over presidential power

Complex interplay of factors that shape a president’s actions are mostly overlooked

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

 28 March 2025

Political biographers — I am a part-time member of this tribe because I once wrote a biography of Cyril Ramaphosa — run into a problem when their subject actually becomes state president.

This predicament is frustrating because the celebrity’s prospective or actual rise to the top job is often the reason the biography was written in the first place. 

Biographies understandably elaborate on personality and formative experiences rather than the actual mechanisms of power in the presidential office. A focus on personal life narratives, influenced by biographical traditions and outmoded Freudian psychology, overlooks the complex interplay of factors that shape a president’s actions. 

In contrast to regular party politicians, presidents occupy a unique position at the pinnacle of state power, navigating complex tensions as head of state and government, party leader and state manager, international representative and domestic politician, and disburser of formal and informal power (and money).

Add to this a labyrinth of classified documents that lie mouldering in databases or the basements of government departments, and inaccessible private interactions with powerful individuals at home and abroad, and it is little wonder few political biographies do more than scratch the surface of presidential power. All we get is the illusion that we have been transported into the mind of the leader as he sat behind the presidential desk and pondered the great decisions of state. 

This challenge is extreme regarding Nelson Mandela. We have now been told an extraordinary range of things that we really do not want to know — about his wives and relationships, Communist Party dalliances, intermittent Methodism and the way he polished his shoes. But little is known about how he actually operated as state president. For that we have to rely on thinly detailed chapters in biographies, and an extremely generous book from Mandla Langa assembled from notes and speeches Mandela left behind. 

This is of some practical importance. As Roger Southall notes in his thought-provoking study Smuts and Mandela, many younger South Africans believe Mandela “sold out” to white monopoly capital, and that “his democracy has proved to be a sham”, in which “the black majority is little better off than it was under apartheid”. 

The instinct of many scholars has been to rally round Mandela, explain the context in which his decisions were taken, and justify the compromises that had to be struck at that time. This defensive approach is a mistake. 

Mandela “improvised a nation”, as one academic brilliantly observed, through simple yet powerful gestures that reached beyond political elites to ordinary people. His primary goal as president was to avoid debilitating racial war and promote racial reconciliation — a commendably coherent and clear objective, but one that may have been entirely misconceived. 

Though Mandela was extraordinarily effective in terms of symbolic leadership, he lacked engagement with the practicalities of governing. He also failed to confront the HIV/Aids crisis effectively — on Langa’s account because of his concern about the electoral costs of speaking out — and instead exercised leadership where it was not needed, for example backing school feeding schemes to which nobody was opposed. 

In resolving the ANC’s funding crisis he tolerated the arms deal, perhaps because of the nominal party funding element it involved, solicited foreign donations from authoritarian countries, and accepted personal favours for himself and his family. In these ways Mandela laid some of the groundwork for the problematic relationship between money, politics and personal gain that became more pronounced under his successors. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town. His new book, ‘Presidential Power’ will be published later this year. Readers who may have personal photographs that reveal the character of any SA president can contact him on anthony.butler@uct.ac.za to discuss their possible inclusion in the book.