Recently a frustrated Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Zimbabwean opposition, wrote to tell the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, that "there will be no country left" in Zimbabwe by the time Mbeki finishes mediating between Robert Mugabe and Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change. Tsvangirai was of course referring to Mbeki's duplicity in his role as the Southern African Development Community's official mediator between the Zimbabwean parties. Mbeki favours Mugabe and the ruing Zanu-PF. When pressed about the letter, Mbeki characteristically insisted that it had never arrived. And rather than replying, Mbeki wrote to the American president, George Bush, instead, telling Bush "in a text packed with exclamation points", that official US government criticisms of Mugabe were off the mark. Mbeki, in what could also be interpreted as his first unambiguous public endorsement of Mugabe's violent regime, charged that the Americans were "disrespecting the views of the Zimbabwean people" and should "butt out, that Africa belongs to [Mbeki]."

Of course, since then Tsvangirai has pulled out of the Zimbabwean elections and Mbeki has been to Zimbabwe again, where he met with Mugabe last week. This visit is in contrast to his behaviour, 10 days into the murderous pogrom against black immigrants to South Africa (among them Zimbabweans fleeing the political and economic crises in their country), when Mbeki could only muster up a rote statement from the air-conditioned comfort of a TV studio. A total of 62 people were murdered and thousands left homeless in the xenophobic violence. And then Mbeki promptly left on a state visit to Japan. Since then Mbeki has not once been out to one of the affected areas. But he found time to visit Mugabe.

Reviewing the events of the last few weeks reminded me of the insights of the Nigerian writer and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, upon meeting Thabo Mbeki.

As Soyinka recounts it in his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn, he first met Mbeki at a dinner in honour of Nelson Mandela – Soyinka's "favourite avatar" – in Paris, right after Mandela was released from an apartheid jail after 27 years. The dinner was the "most expensive" that Soyinka ever attended. The French president François Mitterand played host. A small entourage accompanied Mandela, including the two men jostling to be his presumptive heir – Thabo Mbeki, who in the resistance movement's exile was the right-hand man to Mandela's predecessor Oliver Tambo, and Cyril Ramaphosa, who would lead the ANC in constitutional negotiations with the apartheid government. The events of the dinner would be unremarkable, amounting to nothing more than a color piece, if not for Soyinka's insights of Thabo Mbeki, who is now South Africa's president.

At that time, black townships around Johannesburg and in Kwazulu-Natal province on the country's east coast were engulfed by political violence, the result of a state-sponsored proxy war by Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom party against members of Mandela's African National Congress. Soyinka, while acknowledging that Buthelezi was an unscrupulous and ethically challenged politician, reasoned that that since "the chief" had a large following, he needed to be recognised and engaged with – and that Mandela should personally meet with him. So did Mandela and Ramaphosa (Soyinka describes Ramaphosa's manner as "more accommodating"). The same cannot be said for "an unsmiling" Thabo Mbeki, who said: "It is not possible to hold a dialogue with that kind of person." Mbeki could hardly pronounce Buthelezi's name "without his smallish, nearly triangular face expunging all expression, leaving only the hardness of his eyes." (OK, even I agree that perhaps here Soyinka went a bit over the top with this description.)

Mbeki interjected a few more times, repeating his objections, what Soyinka likened to a "a party-line diktat". As Soyinka left the dinner, he summed up his impressions: "Even the body language of the two – Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela – spoke volumes, and the contrast read out a stark warning."