It is the summer of '64. In Brighton, amid the rockcandy tat of the boardwalk, notices announcing the Beatles' impending visit to the seaside town vie with election posters bearing the pipe-smoking image of Harold Wilson: "End Thirteen Years of Tory Misrule!" Just up from the seafront, in a grubby flat behind a once-grand Regency facade, three students from nearby Sussex University are planning a march to London, to protest the death sentence about to be imposed on one of their fathers in a faraway place.

Thabo Mbeki, the son of this doomed man, Govan Mbeki, does not reveal much of his personal feeling about his father's impending fate to his friends; about what it might mean for his family and his soul. Instead, he puts his favourite LP onto the gramophone. "My lord!" bellows a fruity voice through the crackle, generating music and rage as only an Irish voice can, "you are impatient for the sacrifice . . ."

Mbeki and his housemates are on their feet, fists to hearts, declaiming along with the record: "The blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which usually surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled through its channels, and in a little time it will go to heaven. Be patient . . . I am going to my cold and silent grave . . ."

These are the words of the great Irish martyr Robert Emmet, just before his hanging in 1803, as performed by the Irish actor Michael MacLiammoir. Mbeki still has the record in his possession, and one can imagine him today, silently citing the speech to his detractors, for its central theme is one of his primary preoccupations: reputation. Emmet rails against the imputation that his actions to liberate Ireland were motivated by ambition and vanity.

Emmet epitomises heroism, as does Nelson Mandela, whose own speech from the dock in 1964 stands with Emmet's as the finest of the genre.

And yet, even though the student Mbeki expressed his emotion through the MacLiammoir recording, he came of age, in Europe, in the era of anti-heroism, of "New Left" rebellion against authority, of miniskirts, existentialism and student uprisings. Whereas Mandela and his own father, Govan Mbeki, understood statesmanship via the political heroes of the war, of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, Thabo Mbeki's models of statesmanship were the decidedly anti-heroic Harold Wilson and Nikita Kruschev.

On the 1994 campaign trail, voters were dazzled speechless by the presence of a hero in their midst; on the 1999 campaign trail, they talk to an anti-hero who listens, carefully, to what they have to say. As we move from the Mandela era into the Mbeki one, Thabo Mbeki would have us believe that we are, once more, shifting from an era of heroism - of grand gestures and stirring rhetoric - into one of anti-heroism, of careful thought rather than populist pronouncement, of the hard slog rather than the captivating moment.

But it is too easy to cast Mbeki as the anti-heroic antidote to the heroic, larger-than-life Nelson Mandela. For there is evidence that within the managerial, technocratic pinstripes of Thabo Mbeki lurks someone who does believe in heroism; who does carry a sneaking desire to be like his father, like Mandela, like Robert Emmet.

When he received his honorary doctorate at Sussex University in 1995, Thabo Mbeki was toasted by the university's chancellor, a personal friend, Lord Richard Attenborough: "Because of his military training there 25 years ago, [Thabo] has been described as 'Moscow-trained'. I beg to differ. We here, I believe, may rightly say 'Move over Moscow'. He was Sussex-trained." If Thabo Mbeki is both hero and anti-hero, then it was Sussex in the '60s that gave him the categories in the first place and introduced him to the dialectic between them.

Visiting Sussex University in the late '90s is not unlike watching a rerun of 2001: A Space Odyssey: you see, from a later vantage point, the gap between the hope it embodied and the reality in which it now exists.

The university, like the film, was a product of the '60s, and there is, now, something both retro and enviable about its vanguardism, its pink brick and concrete arches, its eschewal of straitjacketed curricula, its spirited jab to the guts of Oxbridge, its sheer newness.

"There is no God," declared the iconoclastic philosopher Patrick Corbett to his first-year students in the compulsory "Language and Values" course, demanding that they reassess their belief systems.

There may not have been a God at Sussex, but there were the Beatles and the blues, the Mersey Poets, Becket and Sartre, anti-nuclear marches and the anti-apartheid movement, campaigns against racist landladies and Outspan-peddling grocers, co-ed student digs. "Deliberate sociological experiments are being performed on other people's children!" screamed the Sunday Telegraph.

At Thabo Mbeki's BA graduation in 1965, the actor Albert Finney and the sculptor Henry Moore were awarded honorary doctorates. Sussex graduates, said another honouree, Professor David Reisman, "have something at once Elizabethan and international about them, stylish and 'with it', here and now, but also . . . less snobbish and less inhibited, and more truly introspective and more rightly troubled than earlier generations of undergraduates".

A classmate of Mbeki's, the journalist Lesley Garner, wrote after attending her class's 30th reunion that "we were the epitome of everything the '60s stood for: youth, glamour, right-on political correctness, educational experiment. We inhabited our brave new world by the sea wearing the first miniskirts and microscopic dresses bought from our very own branch of Biba up by the station."

At the reunion, "we all remembered Thabo, and those of us who'd thought his cause the most hopeless were the most thrilled to be proved wrong. Something had worked, something we'd done had made a difference."

The "something" they had done was to follow the youthful Mbeki for 80km from Brighton to London, that June night in 1964, beneath a banner proclaiming "Brighton Students Against Apartheid". They were marching to 10 Downing Street to hand a petition to the prime minister, demanding that he lobby South Africa to refrain from imposing the death penalty.

The Rivonia trialists were spared the hangman's noose. Four months later, Harold Wilson's election victory signalled a new era of possibility; Sussex students played a critical role in winning the first-ever Brighton seat for the Labour party. In 1964, Thabo Mbeki's peers at Sussex felt that they could make a difference.

For many of them, those few months, when they were double-touched by history, remain the most important of their lives.

Derek Gunby, an organiser of the Rivonia march and one of Mbeki's closest friends at Sussex, recalls that his generation's parents had, in the boom following the war, consolidated their middle-class solidity.

"It all seemed rather empty, with no vision beyond moving to a semi-detached and polishing the car on Sundays. A certain meanness of spirit. We felt there should be more. That's what got us angry, what led us into politics."

Into this agitated, questing environment was dropped a young man from another continent. He was the child of African communists, born in the rural Transkei, reared in a mission school, fighting an anti-colonial struggle rather than his parents. His style was somewhat anachronistic; considered and mature rather than youthful and exuberant.

Whereas his peers read the Manchester Guardian as an article of faith, he took the establishment Times. Whereas they wore jeans and donkey jackets, he chose to affect an image that was quintessential Sussex "county" - tweed cloth caps and a pipe. Thabo Mbeki was 20 years old. He, too, was searching for an identity.

When he arrived in London, he was put up at the Catholic Community of Resurrection for a few days before going down to Sussex.

The first night at dinner, he recalls, "they were discussing pornography! I had never been exposed to a discussion like this, very explicit language, but very serious in the sense of a debate, that these are human activities that have to be looked at. So different from our discourse back home. Open, unrestricted. Among priests!"

This was to be a model for the opening up he experienced in England during the six years he was there.

Mbeki was the only black student in his year; in 1964, the only other black undergraduate was crowned rag queen. Rod Kedward, now a professor of history at the university, makes the point that "given the spirit of the times, any black student immediately became iconic . . . The very presence of Thabo Mbeki at a pub meant there'd always be several people who'd want to drink with him."

Mbeki might have been considered something of a fetish, but, says his younger brother Moeletsi, who also studied in Britain in the '60s, "we really weren't that different from our peers. We were also middle-class, brought up in an Anglophilic environment."

Despite his "Tory" look, Thabo Mbeki did appear to slip right into Sussex student life. He says he had "no difficulty in settling in, no sense of alienation. It couldn't quite be home, but it was not a place that repelled me. I never felt a stranger."

Meg Pahad - who was to meet her future husband, Essop, when he came to Sussex later - was in the class below Mbeki's.

"When I arrived, Thabo was already very well known; he went with a crowd who were dramatic, successful and good-looking; experimental, intellectual." She remembers going to a jazz evening at the university, "and while we were dancing, my bloke pointed him out to me. 'You'd never believe it,' he said, 'but that man's Thabo Mbeki. His dad, like, is in danger of being sentenced to death this very minute. And yet he looks so relaxed, he gets on with everyone . . .' "

His British friends got to know the SA exile community through him; they make the point that he did not succumb to the despair and dissipation that so many of the others did. He might have listened to kwela, but he did not do so drowning his sorrows in drink, longing for a country he could not return to. He did not appear to be in exile.

And yet there was a disjuncture; evidence that Mbeki did not capitulate entirely to his new world. In the summer of '63, living in London and working for the ANC after his first few months at Sussex, he wrote a letter to Derek Gunby: "I won't be returning to Sussex . . . I am going home . . . This is decided and final, and I won't pursue it any further. When South Africa becomes free, contact the embassy here and ask about me, they'll probably know where I am."

It is a rare moment where we see the heart of the hero break through its anti-heroic cladding; the impetuousness of youth, the flare of militancy. The whole letter is fanciful because Oliver Tambo was, in fact, to veto Mbeki's request to be released from study and to join Umkhonto weSizwe.

Perhaps he got over his desire to leave Sussex and settled in; perhaps, now that he had demonstrated the requisite militancy, he could amble back to anti-heroic student life. More likely, though, he found himself strung between the two powerful and contradictory urges.

On the one hand, there was the impulse to grow, intellectually and emotionally, among his new-found soul mates in Britain; a growth that could not but unhinge him from the single-mindedness of the liberation struggle. On the other, there was the impulse to follow his destiny, even to the death; to prove himself a worthy fighter and son of Govan Mbeki.

His friend Veronica Linklater, a peer in the House of Lords, remembers him as "calm and gentle but also elusive; he must have had to be very chameleon-like, really, straddling different worlds the way he did. One got the sense he kept his worlds in different compartments, and that they never really met."

Being uprooted, she says, meant that he did "not have a core, a centre from which everything else could radiate. He didn't have anywhere to go home to, and this I think forced him to compartmentalise."

For many of Thabo Mbeki's comrades and friends, the clearest image of this disjuncture (or perhaps, paradoxically, its reconciliation) was presented at the ceremony, a decade later in 1974, in which he married Zanele Dlamini.

Although he now lived in Africa, he came back to Britain for the wedding: if he had a "home" in exile, this was it. Dlamini's sister, Edith, was married to Wilfred Grenville-Grey, the Earl of March's brother-in-law, who lived and worked at Farnham Castle, a grand estate in Surrey. Although there was a party at the Tambos' house in London, the formal wedding took place in Farnham's magnificent bijou chapel.

"It was wonderful but bizarre," recalls Veronica Linklater. "We arrived late, and we found the ceremony by following the sound of African voices singing. There it was, an African wedding in an English castle!" As with the rituals, the guests, too, were a concoction only someone like Mbeki could conjure: ANC comrades; unkempt (and not entirely approving) lefties from his Sussex days; British upper-class types.

If his SA comrades felt they didn't quite get this man who was marrying amidst all this English pomp, then his British friends felt they no longer had a handle on him either.

The British guests will never forget the moment when Adelaide Tambo decided to disrupt the dulcet Anglican tones of the ceremony with a booming ululation; as if his ancestors were rattling the stained-glass windows of England, windows that could no longer encase him.

But there was a bridge between his African and his European identities: politics. At Sussex he was most active in anti-apartheid politics, and although many of his classmates remember him as someone who "kept out" of British issues, he signed petitions relating to nuclear disarmament and wrote a piece for a student magazine, just before the Wilson victory, urging socialists to support the Labour Party despite the fact that it was lukewarm on nationalisation!

At the university's Socialist Club he was resident sage: his training at Lovedale and in Johannesburg in the early '60s put him streets ahead of his contemporaries in political thinking. His intellect was matched only by the leader of the Trotskyist faction in the Socialist Club, Alan Woods, with whom he had heated debates, the "Trots" often disparaging him as "the black bourgeoisie".

Later in the decade, Mbeki joined the massive Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, but he would have dismissed the budding women's movement and green movement, the later efflorescence of flower-power culture, anarchism, free love and all other libertarian causes as "bourgeois deviations" from the real struggle, which was about race and about class.

His orthodoxy was at odds with the "New Left" revision of Marxism that was beginning to happen at places like Sussex in the mid-'60s, and that exploded into the 1968 uprisings. He was to meet the leaders of these uprisings, in his capacity as ANC youth leader, but he was fiercely critical of them - not least for their anti-communist stance.

These were the dog days of the Cold War, and in the internecine wars of the Left over the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Mbeki came across as a hard-core loyalist.

In this, he was very much a product of his times and his movement. The ANC and the SA Communist Party - to which he belonged - had supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and were to support, unequivocally, the Soviet crushing of the "Prague Spring" in 1968. The anti-Soviet socialists called those who supported the tank invasion of Czechoslovakia "Tankies".

Thabo Mbeki was a "Tankie", but -- true to form - a rather non-doctrinaire one. His teachers at Sussex had imbued in him a healthy disdain for Soviet-style centralised planning. Fascinatingly, his MA dissertation, "Location of Industry in Ghana and Nigeria", does not contain a single citation to either Marxist or anti-colonial literature, or the slightest hint that its author is an active member of an African liberation movement. It is hard to believe that this rather plodding exposition was penned by the same ideologue who wrote so headily for the student press; another example, perhaps, of Thabo Mbeki's adeptness at compartmentalisation.

Meg Pahad, a sheltered middle-class girl who arrived at Sussex politically illiterate, remembers how, unlike the other lefties on campus, "Thabo didn't make you feel stupid and ridicule you and call you bourgeois and all that. He would listen to what you had to say, where you were coming from, and try and edge you towards his point of view. He never saw anyone as a lost cause, which is why he had so many friends across the conventional lines."

Perhaps more importantly, he was willing - even then - to engage the other side in the SA conflict.

His friend Peter Lawrence remembers accompanying him to a debate with a representative from the SA embassy, held at Lansing, a public school in Sussex, shortly after the Rivonia trial ended. "At the end of the debate," recalls Lawrence, now an economics lecturer at Keele University, "he actually went and shook this guy's hand. I was quite shocked!" Twenty years before Thabo Mbeki was to lead the process, within the ANC, of talking to the other side, he was testing his skills as a negotiator while still a student at Sussex.

Kenny Parker, a former Nusas leader from Cape Town who shared a flat with Essop Pahad in Brighton, remembers the anti-Rhodesian UDI demonstration they held at the town's Clock Tower in 1965.

"Essop was in charge of keeping the Trotskyists at bay, and when one of them was disrupting things, yelling 'Arm the workers!', Essop just floored him. But afterwards, the police came up to Thabo, who was the organiser, and said in that polite English way, 'Thank you very much, Mr Mbeki. That was very well done. Any time you want to hold a demonstration, please feel free' . . ."

Mbeki never misbehaved. "He was very conscious of the fact," says Parker, "that he was representing South Africa, and his motto seemed to be, 'Don't let the side down in public', as if to say, 'Look how good we are; look how civilised we are. How can people like us be discriminated against back home?' "

Despite his protestations to the contrary, image then - as now - was very important.

In 1969, three years after he received his MA from Sussex, Thabo Mbeki was selected by the SA Communist Party for prestigious ideological training at the Lenin International School in Moscow.

In a letter to his Sussex friend Rhiannon Gooding, he mused on heroism: "We tend to denigrate," he wrote, qualities such as "truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice, absence of self-seeking, brotherliness, heroism, optimism"; "we shrink at hero-worship. But to think of revolutionary struggle is to think of heroic feats by individuals who, at least at particular moments, carry all the qualities above." Such people "are infinitely preferable to the existential non-hero" and are "represented by the revolutionary in politics ('Che Guevara'). In times of intense struggle, such figures are born, and not unnaturally . . ."

Perhaps Mbeki was rediscovering revolutionary heroism in Moscow after his few years in the bourgeois, decadent West. More likely, though, he has always carried the conflict within him, a conflict between the soldier and the diplomat, the doer and the questioner, the prophet and the quester, between Govan Mbeki and Oliver Tambo, Moscow and Sussex, between bell-bottoms and camouflage fatigues, the hero and the anti-hero.

The hero in Thabo Mbeki told the world that MK would defeat the armies of apartheid; the anti-hero questioned from early on the ANC's gospel of a military overthrow. The hero now vows to stamp out corruption and careerism; the anti-hero's ability to see all sides of an argument sometimes renders him indecisive. The anti-hero stays up all night in his study searching for the right word; the hero seems to be taking unexpected pleasure in the campaign hustings, trudging through South Africa and meeting its citizens.

Of course, the categories sometimes blur and become interchangeable: not all soldiers are heroes, and not all diplomats anti-heroes.

Mbeki may well have seen himself as heroic as he almost single-handedly led South Africa, against all odds, towards a peaceful settlement in the late '80s.

The hero in Thabo Mbeki cares about image; the anti-hero scoffs at it. A hero tends to go it alone; an anti-hero tends to consult too widely. Adulation and mythologisation often cause a hero to become contemptuous of his followers; a true anti-hero does not have followers because he sees himself as everyone's equal. Heroes supply vision, anti-heroes get on with the job. Heroes talk, anti-heroes listen.

The success of Thabo Mbeki's presidency rides on his ability to reconcile the two.

With acknowledgements to Mark Gevisser and the Sunday Times.