Three decades on from the year that Bophuthatswana dissolved in an ignominious sputtering of mutiny and revolt, the residues of the old order can be glimpsed in the architectural ossuaries that dot the otherwise featureless landscape of Mmabatho. This Potemkin town served as the seat of Lucas Mangope’s leadership.

Of Mangope himself, fewer traces remain: like his fellow top-hatted homeland grandees (except Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who slipped into post-apartheid civvies and remained around long enough to outlive his ignominy), he was airbrushed out, dismissed as a frowning Quisling. Somewhere, no doubt, there is a stockpile of the portraits from which Mangope’s likeness glowered like some wrathful Old Testament figure: such was the cult of personality over which he presided that his image seemed to loom in every public space. And yet, few historical figures have been as ripe for nostalgic restorying. Such is the emotional temperament of the post-Apartheid South African body-politic—unmoored by the precarities of the present—that anchoring nostalgias of a nationalist flavor are in high demand.

Oupa Segalwe’s assiduously researched biography, Lucas Mangope: A Life, risks being read as a sort of apologia for its subject, but it is an attempt to set the man in context. Running to some 320-odd pages, the book traces the contour of Mangope’s rise and fall. It lines up a series of dramatically narrativized episodes, each chapter assembling a part of the greater story. At its heart, the biography seems to be posing a simple question: was Mangope merely a self-important and self-serving tinpot ethnonationalist, or was he a utopian who dared to dream of uplifting his people’s dignity? The answer is somewhere between the two. Biographies seldom tread the path of newness: their role is to root about in the shipwreck and salvage what is worth saving.

What leaps out at the reader in this not especially vivid reconstruction of Mangope’s formative years is how the newly choreographed national fantasy that was early 20th-century South Africa took the shards of black life it had smashed and reordered them to fit its new mendacities. Chiefs became quasi-administrative functionaries, earning the favor of the authorities when they dutifully ensured the collection of taxes from the hapless people beneath them. Those who refused to be flunkeys were unceremoniously deposed, and it was just such a booting that paved the way for Mangope to be installed as paramount leader. Segalwe’s skilled unpicking of the generational Machiavellianism that paved the way for Mangope to quietly assume chieftaincy when he wasn’t the heir apparent, is perhaps worthy of its own book.

Like Buthelezi and Lennox Sebe (another Bantustan “plant”), Mangope illustrated that the most enthusiastic adherents are those who already know the hymns. Mangope had first excelled as an Afrikaans educator, a role in which he cultivated the air of sententious authority that would characterize his political career. Once so installed, he maintained a peevish recalcitrance, perhaps befitting of someone who constantly feared that someone would come asking for the seat he had usurped. What we learn from the history the biographer supplies is that Mangope’s drive to cement his rule was probably driven by a latent sense of unease about his authority.

Even though Bophuthatswana fell apart before its second decade was out, there’s a lot of material to get through. Segalwe dutifully wades into the rubble, pulling out discordant things and arranging them on the page. He is fond of beginning digressively, holding up a remote fact or anecdote before our notice before connecting it to Mangope’s story. A chapter might begin with an account of Gavin Hood’s 2004 Academy Award win for Tsotsi before winding meanderingly back to the subject (the genesis of the Kraft durch Freude-esque Mmabana cultural academies that dotted Bophuthatswana). We learn, perhaps unwittingly, that Mangope seems to have been a lay-Zionist, who expressed his admiration for Golda Meir and maintained a swish official holiday home in Tel Aviv:

By 1985, 81 people from Israel had visited Bophuthatswana. As many as 50 ‘important’ contacts were established in Israel. These included businesspeople, politicians, parliamentarians, government leaders and banks. Among several business projects that the homeland benefitted from between 1984 and 1985 were irrigation projects, security systems, television programming, aviation, a shoe factory and diamond processing.

By their friends shall ye know them. Even in this, Mangope was simply following on from his fellow despot Sebe’s playbook: Sebe had also courted Zionist Israel, establishing a mock embassy for the Ciskei in Tel Aviv. Mangope fancifully believed that by claiming independence from the Apartheid state, he was lodging a claim for “a place in the sun” for all his people. At the independence shindig that saw in the new homeland, Mangope lambasted Pretoria for its discriminatory practices. Was he being disingenuous? Certainly, Segalwe’s account suggests that Mangope felt that the show house he was being handed the keys to would provide an opportunity for a more moderate kind of self-determination.

Mangope: a Life is at pains to show that its subject often publicly criticized the Apartheid state while allowing it to fill his coffers. When Bophuthatswana’s debt soared to R300million –– much of it gone to opportunist grifters, Mangope’s peculatory tendencies, and vanity projects like the twinned Mmabatho and Odi stadiums that are now derelict –– PW Botha’s government quietly picked up the tab. And when, merely a decade into sham independence, rebellious go-getters in Bop’s army tried to topple Mangope, the SADF was the saber-rattling cavalry that rode in to restore him to his perch.

Indeed, the Apartheid state seems to have had a great deal of tolerance for Mangope. Said state seemed to regard him as something of a useful idiot, a buffer between white South Africa and the ANC-supporting Botswana. Mangope encouraged the establishment of casinos and resorts including white South Africa’s favorite gaudy getaway, Sun City. For 17 years, he was abetted in his authoritarian doings by the Apartheid state, and it comes as little surprise that when that institution itself began to falter, the homelands— houses of cards to the last—fell in swift succession. 

The details of Bophuthatswana’s ending—complete with right-wing AWB buffoons being gunned down before the eyes of the world, and Pik Botha, then the Apartheid state’s minister of foreign affairs, helicoptering in to tell a defiant Mangope that things were over—frame Mangope’s contradictions aptly:

He had been deposed for the second time in six years, except this time there were no SADF commandos coming to foil the overthrow and restore him to power. The man he had called a friend, Botha, had thrust a bayonet in his back and left him for dead, in political ruin.

Segalwe, ever fond of melodrama, frames Mangope’s final moments like a Greek tragedy. The reality is that it would have been impossible for Bophuthatswana to continue: circumstances had overtaken it so rapidly that Mangope, slow to see the end approaching, had acted too late.

The strain of necro-nostalgia that would resurrect Mangope and his homeland is, of course, deeply ahistorical. South Africa has always nurtured, at the level of its people, a profound mistrust of the complex truth, and so Bophuthatswana has been sentimentalized in the minds of credulous people who are desperate to hold close some tangible part of the fantasy it represented. This is the same strain of fact-divergent cultishness that afflicts those who think Ian Smith’s Rhodesia was an idyll of good-old-days social order. In uncertain times, many people are ready to buy into the shouty simplicity of Big Man politics, which is why a few years ago you could have witnessed former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba declaring that Lucas Mangope was not, in fact, an Apartheid stooge, but a visionary figure.

Bophuthatswana was a convenient fiction, a geographical mendacity confected with zeal by Apartheid South Africa’s cack-handed functionaries. Its capital, Segalwe tells us in one of the more interesting parts of this sprawling narrative, was constructed in only six months. Walking around Mmabatho today, the incongruity is stark: legislative buildings and council offices borrow the style of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, suggesting that, more than simply being a vanity project, the sense of utopian aspiration was more than vaguely present.  The university echoes this architectural wishfulness, suggesting a civic vision that deserves greater scrutiny than this book grants it.

Those citizens of the imagined country who were not part of the middle-class black coterie Mangope’s project created would probably have different feelings about the legacy of the homeland leader. Those still subsisting in abject conditions might justly feel that “Bop” (as it was colloquially referred) and its champion should remain in obloquy: there are no “good old days” worth harking back to.  

The position of a biographer regarding his subject matters a great deal. Here, Segalwe seems at times to have succumbed to the temptation to craft a heroic epic from the facts he has gathered. Mangope is presented as a man of action, “throwing down the gauntlet,” always presented in assertive terms. And yet for all of this, we don’t come much closer to learning who he was. In this sense, the book is more a catalog of actions, overspilling with detail but rarely bringing him to life in any tangible sense. For someone lauded by many as a gifted orator, Mangope is consigned to the stillness of passive voice.

A good biography should do more than arrange the actions of its subject into a neat chronology. It should present the individual in all their human complexity. Here, Segalwe’s biography is a curious mix of the surprisingly compelling and the leadenly formulaic. The treatment of Mangope’s early years is a bit of an untidy flail, padded out in improvisational style by chunks of Peter Abrahams meant to supply ambience and cover over the paucity of information.

Many South African biographies are kneecapped by an inability to discern the thread of story that makes a subject fascinating. Here, the prose is too often diverted down offramps that spawn other side-roads. Segalwe tends to reach for the lore that is close at hand, with pedestrian results. Do we need a repeat of Verwoerd’s desiccated quote about Africans and education? Perhaps not. Elsewhere, a comparison between Mangope’s alma mater and Eton is invoked, unleavened by any sense that comparing Mangope to the porcine dullards David Cameron and Boris Johnson is not flattering.

Occasionally, a sentence catches with an uncomfortable bump and scrape, not quite clearing credibility: “Darius, who, according to family tradition, was blind, was a devoted Christian and lay-priest.” Not only is this a structurally poor sentence (all those commas?), but it unwittingly implies a rather horrible family ritual. This sort of thing rankles because it suggests a laissez-faire editing process. Unsurprisingly, the book is at its strongest in the mid-section: of Mangope’s post-Apartheid decline, little of real interest emerges.

As a documentary of a strange time, Lucas Mangope: a Life is an interesting project that too often falls back on the general and the non-committal. One senses that, having failed to extract much from the primary source, the biographer might have been better off releasing the book from the constraints of the genre. A project like Milisuthando Bongela’s self-titled documentary has shown us that delving into the very strangeness of the homeland idea produces a much more interesting work. As Mangope’s legacy—best symbolized in those gaunt, dilapidating stadiums that are slowly being reclaimed by the elements—sinks into the ash heap of history, this book neither damns nor rehabilitates him. As a result, it doesn’t quite do enough to justify itself.