The Incredible Shrinking President.(South African president Thabo Mbeki)(Brief Article)

Once famous for his serial seduction of western diplomats, white businessmen, Zulu chieftains and khaki-clad racists, Thabo Mbeki's tenure as South African president has been marred by a string of public-relations gaffes. His comments on AIDS, perceived coddling of strongman Robert Mugabe and attacks on potential rivals have squandered the favorable image he enjoyed on taking office two years ago. In the run-up to his first state visit to the United Kingdom last week, the British press summed it up: has thabo mbeki lost the plot? asked The Guardian. is this the face of tomorrow's dictator? inquired The Times. Mbeki's mission was clear: he had a reputation to save.

His job was never going to be easy. Asked how it felt to step into Mandela's shoes, Mbeki joked that the old man "has much bigger feet than me" and his "shoes are very ugly." It was a telling joke. Mbeki had grown impatient with the sunny rhetoric of Mandela's Rainbow Nation and anxious that the benefits of democracy could be jeopardized if South Africa failed to create a genuinely nonracial society. "When the poor rise, they will rise against us all," he warned. That acid message and a preoccupation with issues of race have done little to win supporters in the media. Mbeki disdains sound bites, appears aloof in a crowd and operates best behind closed doors. And he is a maverick. Contemporaries from Britain's Sussex University, where he studied economics in the early 1960s, recall that while girls were discovering miniskirts, Mbeki favored tweed suits, smoked a pipe and developed a lifelong habit of quoting Shakespeare. He wanted to study at Oxford, but fretted that an English education was a distraction from "the struggle" at home.

The end of that struggle opened a door to cynicism in the developed world. Robbed of its unique place in the canon of liberal fantasy, South Africa confronted a more brutal and racially charged realpolitik. Seven years into democracy, it is portrayed in most of the British media as a beautiful country in peril. It has become synonymous with AIDS, crime and racial invective. The crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe, where marauding squatters have maimed and killed white farmers, has simply reinforced the pessimism. "Zimbabwe today, South Africa tomorrow," editors brood.

Mbeki's lieutenants rightly recoil at the comparison. The dynamism of the young democracy is worlds apart from Zimbabwe--and, indeed, any other country. But Mbeki's ill-judged comments on AIDS, and the friendly greetings that framed his encounters with Mugabe, have confused even sympathetic observers. And that was before he upstaged Mandela's celebrity appearance at a free concert in Trafalgar Square last month with news that three potential rivals faced investigation for allegedly conspiring against him.

Mbeki has defended his stances, but his case is undermined by the ease with which his actions fit into the old African caricatures of creeping autocracy and paranoia. Most of what is written ...