Ex-Presidents fade quickly. It used to be "Mbeki this and Mbeki that" 24/7. But now you don't hear so much as a peep out of him and perhaps it is just as well. "Good riddance to bad governance" I hear some of you say. But if it was only as simple as that. Political legacies, just like your mum and dad, tend in Phillip Larkin's immortal words to "fuck you up".

When you step back and think about it, there can be no doubt that Mbeki was off his rocker. Deluded about Aids, obsessed by The Whites under his non-racist bed, Mbeki's intellectual paranoia is still coming home to roost.

And of course, there was his obsession with the African Renaissance. At school, I had been encouraged to associate The Renaissance with great thinkers and painters. Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci, and closer to where I lived, William Shakespeare. But when I later arrived in Johannesburg, in some way which I could never fully comprehend, Africa was, according to Mbeki, making a similar journey.

Kinshasha, Lagos, Harare, even down-town Johannesburg.. do they really have something in common with Shakespeare's London??

Well.. in London most people died before they reached their 50's and in the poorer areas, most died before they reached 25yrs. Sexual disease (VD in particular) and the plague, just like Aids today, were killing the population early. In Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure", the plot revolves around ridding the city of its whorehouses. Of course, hundreds of years away from "Teazers" and "The Grand"!

During Shakespeare's lifetime, inequalities in wealth and income grew. Bankers were known as financial prostitutes. Queen Elizabeth's court was satirized for its depravity, with aristocrats jostling for power whilst hoping to gain lucrative monopolies. Not much different from The ANC's determination to get rich quick with BEE?

But whilst this was going on, London's population, just like in Africa's cities today, was exploding (200,000 people in 1574 and 400,00 in 1642).

So perhaps Mbeki's allusion to an African Renaissance makes more sense than one might initially imagine?





This Be the Verse
by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.