Like Mandela, Mbeki was born in the Transkei, one of the most rural and under-developed regions of South Africa.
But Mbeki came from more lowly beginnings. His mother and father were both schoolteachers, and committed communists.
In later years, his father, Govan Mbeki was rarely at home, expending most of his energy in promoting the cause of communism, and the ANC.
Ultimately, Govan's activities in the liberation struggle would lead to his imprisonment for almost three decades on Robben Island, with his fellow freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela.
Little is known of Mbeki’s childhood. He was packed off to boarding school at an early age, returning briefly to his home village at the age of 16 when he fell in love with a daughter of the local headmaster.
She became pregnant and gave birth to an illegitimate son, Kwanda, causing no small amount of scurrilous gossip in the tiny rural community.
The relationship between Mbeki and his childhood sweetheart did not endure.
His son Kwanda disappeared while attempting to leave South Africa in 1970, and is widely believed to have been killed by the apartheid security forces.


Years in exile

In 1962, Mbeki left South Africa and enrolled at Sussex University in Britain.
It was the beginning of an extended exile which took him all over the world.
After his years of study were over, he spent time in Moscow training to be a guerrilla fighter. He then went on to represent the ANC in a number of African countries, ending up in Lusaka in Zambia where the ANC's headquarters in exile were based.
It was here that Mbeki cemented his relationship with the party president, Oliver Tambo.
Tambo, who led the struggle for the ANC in exile had identified leadership qualities in Mbeki from an early age, and there are many within the ANC who believe that the young Mbeki was marked for the highest political post in the party, decades before apartheid was banished from South Africa.
When the apartheid government finally lifted the ban on the ANC in 1990, some political observers were surprised to see Thabo Mbeki taking a back seat to the charismatic former leader of the Miners' Union, Cyril Ramaphosa, who led the team negotiating over the shape of South Africa's first multi-racial government.
In reality, Mbeki was probably confident of his support base, and merely waiting in the wings to ascend to the position of deputy president beneath Mandela.
He was proved right when Mandela's first cabinet was announced.


Ideas man

Colleagues describe Mbeki as an "ideas man" and a consummate politician. Where Mandela devoted much of his energy towards achieving national reconciliation in a racially divided country, Mbeki is concentrating more on raising living standards for the majority black population.
A former member of the South African Communist Party, he is well aware of the social need of the black majority.
But within government he has chosen to champion a policy of free-market economics aimed at attracting foreign investment.
It is a strategy that has led Mbeki into awkward confrontation with his former colleagues in the Communist Party and trade unions.
But even the least charitable critics admit that Mbeki is far too intelligent to allow power to go to his head.


Hard act to follow

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing Mbeki is his ability to pick up where Mandela has left off.
He is following in the footsteps of a man who has become an icon of the 20th century, and he is well aware of the extent of the "Mandela Magic"

Mbeki is notoriously sensitive about questions regarding his ability to succeed Mandela, but he has on occasion found the humour to parry the inevitable questions about his ability to fill Mandela's shoes.
"I don't imagine there's any such requirement," he said to reporters in 1997, " Anyway, he's got very big feet, and I don't think I could grow taller or wear strange shirts."

Mbeki is an eloquent Speaker, writer and poet as demonstrated by his speech to the South African National Assembly in March 1999.

"You have walked along the road of the heroes and the heroines.
You have born the pain of those who have known fear and learnt to conquer it.
You have marched in front when comfort was in the midst of the ranks
You have laughed to contend against a river of tears.
You have cried to broadcast a story of joy.
And now you leave this hallowed place to continue to march in front of a different detachment of the same army of the sun.
Not the comfort of the fond superintendence of the growing stalks of the maize plant or of the Ngunki herd with its milk, its flesh or its hide.
Nor the pleasant chatter of your grand-children with mountains to climb which are but little mounds.
Not the pensive silence of the elderly, whose burdened minds cascade backwards because to look too much into the future is to impose a burden on bones that have grown old.
You leave us here not because you have to stop.
You leave us here because you have to start again.
The accident of your birth should have condemned you to a village.
Circumstances you did not choose should have confined you to a district.
Your sight, your heart and your mind could have reached no further than the horizon of the natural eye.
But you have been where you should not have been.
You have faced death and said - do your worst!
You have inhabited the dark, dark dungeons of freedom denied, itself a denial to live in a society where freedom was denied.
You have looked at the faces of some of those who were your comrades, who turned their eyes away from you because somewhere in their mortal being there lingered the remnants of a sense of shame, always and for ever whispering softly - no to treachery! a thing in the shadows, present at every dawn, repeating, repeating, repeating - I am Conscience, to whom you have denied a home.
You have not asked - who indeed are these for whose lives I was prepared to die!
You have asked who am I, that I too did not falter, so that I too could turn my own eyes away from myself and another, who was a comrade.
You have stood at the brink, when you had to appeal to the goods about whether to win a dishonourable peace or to lose the lives of your people, and decided that none among these would exchange their lives for an existence without honour.
You have been where nobody should be asked to be.
You have carried burdens heavier than those who felt it their responsibility and right to proclaim you an enemy of the state.
You have to convince your enemies to believe a story difficult to believe, because it was true, that your burnished spear glittered in the rays of the sun, not to speak of hatred and death from them, but because you prayed that its blinding brilliance would tell them, whose ears would not hear, that you loved them as your own kith and kin.
You have had to bear the mantle of sainthood when all you sought was pride in the knowledge that you were a good foot soldier for justice and freedom.
But despite it all and because of it all, we are blessed.
We are blessed because you have walked along the road of our heroes and heroines.
For centuries our own African sky has been dark with suffering and foreboding.
But because we have never surrendered, for centuries the menace in our African sky has been brightened by the light of our stars.
In the darkness of our night, the victory of the Khoikhoi in 1510 here in Table Bay, when they defeated and killed the belligerent Portuguese admiral and aristocrat, Dom Franscisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy in India, has lit our skies for ever.
In the darkness of our night, Autshumato, the Khoikhoi leader who was the first political prisoner on Robben Island, shone on our firmament as our star of hope.
And so these and other since, the kings and queens and generals and warriors who resisted Africa's colonisation, the leaders who, and the movements which fought for African emancipation - these who are, permanently, our heroes and heroines - have come and gone, over the generations, one after the other, each to take his or her place as a star in the African sky.
Among them are our own, whose names we recite to tell ourselves that we are - black liberators, white liberators, human beings, whose only fault has been to strive to live as human beings.
Among these, Madiba, we recite you name, because your fault too, for which your have paid your price, was that yours strove so that you, together with us, could live as a human being.
As these human beings, we have, for five years, traversed the rooms and passages that surround us and occupied this theatre of drama and farce and the birth of the new, carrying on our foreheads the title - the law makers!
The sense of wonder still pervades our ranks that out of the turmoil and the babble of tongues, the veiled enmities and the bloodless wars, there could have arisen over our devastated land, out of this house, with its own history, the sun of hope.
Though standing like little giants, because we stand on your shoulders and others of your generation, we must proclaim it to the world that here, in these houses of the law-givers, we have striven to do the right things, because to have done otherwise would have been to condemn ourselves to carry, for all time, the burden of having insulted all the sacrifices you made.
Others, before us, who also had the power to decide how each and all shall behave, according to such rules and regulations they were empowered to set, arrived from Europe at the Cape of Good Hope on the 23rd of December, 1802.
These were the representatives of the Batavian Republic of the Netherlands.
As they landed on the shores of our oceans, only a heckler's shout from where you sit, Madiba, they carried in their heads the lesson they had been taught, on "Methods to Follow when Attending Savage Peoples". And here is an example of their lessons:
Convey to them our arts,
but not our corruption,
the code of our morals,
and not the example of our vices,
our sciences and not our dogmas,
the advantages of civilisation,
and not their abuses,
conceal from them how the people
in our more enlightened countries,
defame one another, and degrade
themselves by their passions.
On the 10th of May, five years ago, you stood in front of the Union Buildings in Pretoria to proclaim to the universe that the sun could never set on so glorious a human achievement as was celebrated that day.
Black and white South Africans had, at last, arrived at the point when, together, they could say:
Let us nurture our arts, and not our corruption.
Let us communicate morality, and not our vices.
Let us advance science, and not our dogmas.
Let us advance civilisation, and not abuse.
After a long walk, we too have arrived at the starting point of a new journey.
We have you, Madiba, as our nearest and brightest star to guide us on our way.
We will not get lost. "

In a key speech at the opening of Parliament in Cape Town South African President Thabo Mbeki pledged that his government would make a contribution to the construction of a new world order that will be responsive to the needs of the poor of the world.
Mbeki, who was addressing both Houses of Parliament in Cape Town, said he would call on his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, and other African statesmen, including Botswana's former president Ketumile Masire, to assist in promoting Africa's rebirth.
Mbeki, who has adopted the African Renaissance as a key element of his presidency, said his government would ensure that the next century evolved as ''the African century.''
"We will therefore contribute whatever we can towards the resolution of conflicts on our continent. We cannot accept that war, violent conflict and rape are a permanent condition of existence for us as Africans. Nor can we accept that our continent, endowed with enormous human and natural resources, is incapable of achieving sustained development," he said.
Mbeki said that Africa will work its way toward the resumption of its rightful place among the continents of the world.
"For us to succeed in our work, both as a government and a people, will require that we approach the tasks ahead with all due seriousness and a sense of discipline which recognises the fact that all rights are accompanied by obligations. It will require that all of us defend the freedoms and the system of governance guaranteed and created by our Constitution, underpinned by the understanding that the people are the final guarantors of our democracy, the subject of all government policies and their own liberators," he said.
Mbeki said South Africa had demonstrated its commitment to helping less fortunate countries by forgiving the debts of some of its neighbours. It expected that ''those who are a thousand times wealthier than we are will not seek to help us Africans by rendering us less capable of standing on our own feet.''
His comments were made in the light of plans by the G-7 industrialised countries to cancel 70 billion US dollars of Third World debt.
Mbeki also committed the government to building a partnership with business, labour and civil society, aimed at building a better life for all.
He announced that Swissair will acquire a 20-percent stake in the national airline, South African Airways, at a cost of 240 million dollars.
"We are very satisfied with this result, convinced that it will bring maximum benefits to our country, further strengthen our relations with the Confederation of Switzerland and again demonstrate in practical terms the importance of a measured approach towards the important issue of the restructuring of our public assets," he said.
Mbeki, who started a five-year term on June 16, 1999, following the June 2 elections, promised to crackdown on crime, which he said, "is costing the country billions of dollars each year in foreign investments."
He said tougher gun laws will be introduced, the overstretched police services will receive "a better deal" and a special investigation unit to deal urgently with crime will be formed.
He also promised amendments to the Prevention of Organised Crime Act and legislation against money laundering.
"Acting together with the people, we will heighten our efforts radically to improve the safety and security of all our citizens," he said.
Overall, Mbeki's speech was uplifting and gave a clear indication that the Mandela-era is now over and the government is determined to get down to business.
"Steadily, the dark clouds of despair are lifting, giving way to our season of hope. Our country which, for centuries, has bled from a thousand wounds is progressing towards its healing.
The continuing process of social and national emancipation, to which we are all subject, constitutes an evolving act of self-definition. At the dawn of a new life, our practical actions must ensure that none can challenge us when we say: We are a nation at work to build a better life," Mbeki emphasised.


Abuja Treaty Key To Africa's Renaissance

President Thabo Mbeki sees the African Economic Community Treaty as a vehicle to counter the so-called globalisation which is threatening to economically marginalise the continent.
Mbeki has suggested the mobilisation of Africa's brains to provide the answers to what "we should do practically to achieve the economic objectives we have already stated" in the treaty.
He urged leaders to discourage the practice of alienating "our intelligentsia," who constitute an important resource in the economic development of Africa, by seeking to suppress independent opinions.
The treaty was formulated in Abuja in 1991, in order to uplift the living conditions of Africans.
For this to happen, he said, there was a need to set up a "functioning mechanism to enable us to act on this issue at all five levels - the national, bilateral, regional, continental and global."
The "mechanism" in question would report to the summit as the highest organ of the OAU, he added.
He noted that the worsening relative and absolute poverty of the continent's peoples could never serve as assurance that the prosperity of a few was forever guaranteed.
"We must again become our own liberators. Thus will we turn the century that will soon be upon us into an African century and realise the objectives of an African renaissance," Mbeki says.

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