Africa Watch

Back to the future: Renaissance and South African domestic policy


Howard Barrell
Political Editor, Mail & Guardian

Published in African Security Review Vol 9 No 2, 2000

The ‘big idea’ has had an indistinguished career in sub-Saharan Africa. Since the onset of decolonisation in the late 1950s, whether deployed as a slogan or as a route map to a better future, it has invariably been applied disingenuously by its originator or failed to achieve its promised outcome in practice. From Kwame Nkrumah’s ‘pan-Africanism’ to various notions of ‘African socialism’, from Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa to Kenneth Kaunda’s ‘humanism’, the attempt to polish a veneer of philosophy into the grubby business of politics and economics has brought little discernible advantage to those Africans said to be the intended beneficiaries. In some instances, arguably, the application of these ideas has measurably worsened Africans’ plight.

Five decades after decolonisation began, the great majority of Africans remain mired in poverty. For the most part, they lack the skills and capital necessary to prosper. Many African cultures lie unrecovered from the colonial past.

The continent’s economic and political marginalisation in world councils appears to be more extreme than at any stage since the 1960s. And the proliferation of recent conflicts — which, in early 2000, involved armed forces from, among other countries, Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Namibia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe — seriously undermined the organs of civil society, infrastructures, systems of exchange and the state itself across broad swathes of the continent.

Thabo Mbeki could therefore have few objections to the scepticism that frequently greeted his talk of a ‘renaissance’ in Africa. Moreover, when he — or the group of intellectual publicists who echoed him1 — spoke of ‘the African renaissance’, there seemed to be ground for concern. The use of the definite article, the, seemed to imply that he believed that Africans were well beyond wanting to achieve a renaissance on their continent. It suggested, instead, that they were already in the midst of a great reawakening. And there was no evidence whatsoever to support such a suggestion.

Mbeki appeared to share a standard view of what the Renaissance meant for Europe. From being a fragmented, church-dominated, feudal society, between the 14th and 17th centuries, Europe became a continent increasingly dominated by central lay political institutions. From being a rural society with a largely agrarian economy, it became one that was increasingly urban and in which commerce predominated. And, from being a continent where culture had been mediated by superstition and by what the church found acceptable, Europe became increasingly excited by an exploration of its classical past and by secular ideas in the arts.

A renaissance was clearly an idea that had long fascinated Mbeki. In the early 1970s, a much younger Thabo Mbeki, then a middle-ranking African National Congress (ANC) official in exile in Botswana, was the crucial influence in persuading a group of pro-ANC activists working inside South Africa under very difficult conditions to hold what was called a Black Renaissance Convention.2 In later years, his use of the phrase ‘African renaissance’ was elastic. This was evident in speeches dealing with the subject between 1997 and early 2000.3 What differences were evident in the way he used the term appeared to result from the different purposes he brought to it. At times, he used ‘African renaissance’ descriptively to evoke and describe a reawakening in Africa analogous to that of Europe. At others, he used the term as a grand slogan under which to mobilise his own project.

This latter usage was much more important and interesting. It rested on a simple device of politics. A leader places before voters a big and evocative social goal (such as a continental renaissance) which is likely to take more than a single lifetime to achieve and which embraces a wide range of ‘goods’ wanted by his voters (prosperity, a vibrant cultural life, and the like). The likelihood that it will take more than one lifetime to achieve, is relevant in that this makes the proper evaluation of progress towards the goal nigh impossible for his voters. As originator of the goal, the leader exercises a significant degree of ‘ownership’ over it. With skill, he can reasonably hope to retain this control and formulate the means by which the goal is to be achieved. The goal becomes, in an important sense, the rubric under which he organises his short-term purposes and policies. To the extent that there appears to be noticeable progress towards the goal — whether or not he had anything to do with securing such success — the leader reaps the electoral advantage. To the extent that no such movement is evident, he has several options: he can blame the failure on obstructive opponents; he can appeal to people’s loyalty to the ultimate goal to divert their attention from the tactical failure — and this may include a failure of his policies; or he can present the seeming failure as an ‘inevitable’ setback on the long road to an ‘inevitable’ positive outcome. A further advantage of this political device is that the leader can label detractors of his policies as opponents of the widely acclaimed goal. And he can extrude from his big idea a moral universe over which he presides: one in which anyone promoting his policies is deemed to be doing his or her duty to achieve the commonly acclaimed good, whereas anyone not doing so is faithless, myopic, unpatriotic and/or plain bad.

This was the political device at play in Mbeki’s evocation of an African renaissance. While he was undoubtedly sincere in wanting an African renaissance — who would not have been? — his primary purpose in setting this ultimate goal was to organise and promote his shorter term political purposes. He was particularly offering his own compatriots, but also Africans in general, an ultimate purpose which should colour and calibrate every policy and development between now and its putative achievement. He was asserting his own doctrine of final causes in South African and continental politics. He was asserting his own teleology — over domestic policy as much as over any other area of South African politics.

This made the policies pursued by Mbeki’s government almost indistinguishable from the means he suggested, were necessary to foster or deliver a renaissance in Africa. And it is probably fair to say that this was the case some time before Mbeki formally became president of South Africa in June 1999. In the two final years of Nelson Mandela’s term as president, Mbeki, then the older man’s deputy, became ever more the final arbiter of policy within the South African government.

Whereas the Renaissance in Europe was a process that occurred independent of any programme designed to deliver it, Mbeki suggested that a renaissance could and should be consciously induced in Africa. In the European instance, the term ‘renaissance’ was, in fact, first used only in 1855 to describe the processes said to have marked the continental reawakening between the 14th and 17th centuries. Its originator was the French historian, Jules Michelet. In the African case, however, Mbeki believed a renaissance could come about as the product of a political programme. Speaking at the launch of an African Renaissance Institute in Pretoria towards the end of 1999, he indicated that the end of white rule in South Africa and, with it, the "liquidation of the colonial system in Africa" were changes which meant that the conditions existed for the formulation of "a practical programme of action for revolutionaries", geared to achieve a renaissance in Africa. The other new conditions were "the recognition of the bankruptcy of neo-colonialism by the masses of the people throughout the continent", including the middle classes; "the weakening of the struggle among the major powers for spheres of influence on our continent"; and "the acceleration of the process of globalisation." He even suggested "that there is a critically important and urgent need to develop a Popular Movement for the African Renaissance." He added that:
"political organisations and governments in all African countries should be mobilised to act in furtherance of the objectives of the African Renaissance."4
There was, in the form of his assertion, an echo of Lenin’s historicism when the latter purported to identify the subjective and objective conditions for successful proletarian revolution in Russia — and, for that matter, in any country.5

Between 1997 and 2000, Mbeki provided several accounts of what he believed a renaissance in Africa should entail. The most explicit came in the same speech at the launch of the African Renaissance Institute. The tasks, as they affected domestic policy, included:
  • "the establishment of democratic political systems to ensure ... that ‘the people shall govern’";
  • the form of these democracies should take "into account African specifics" so that they could "ensure that political and, therefore, peaceful means can be used to address the competing interests of different social groups in each country";
  • "achieving sustainable economic develop-ment that results in the continuous improvement of the standards of living and the quality of life of the masses of the people";
  • changing Africa’s place in the world economy so that it was "free of the yoke of the international debt burden and [was] no longer a supplier of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods";
  • "ensuring the emancipation of women";
  • successfully dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic;
  • rediscovering "Africa’s creative past", recovering cultures, encouraging artistic endeavour and "accessing and advancing science and technology"; and
  • advancing the ‘genuine’ independence of African countries and enhancing their role in international forums.6
Each of these objectives resonated through the domestic policies and political choices of Mbeki’s government and that of its predecessor. None of them, however, was exceptional. They amounted to little more than a list of objectives of the kind that any democrat might formulate if he was intent on good governance and sound economic management in order to achieve a better quality of life for his compatriots in an African context. By presenting them as the sufficient conditions for a renaissance in Africa, Mbeki was doing little more than giving a set of fairly ordinary policy objectives the lustre of a grand cause — the better to advance his case.

Yet, however conventional the constituent elements of Mbeki’s putative renaissance were, his call was evocative. And it was perhaps understandable that a South African should turn out to be the one to deliver it. For, in the late 1990s, the experience of most black people in post-apartheid South Africa represented, in many respects, a microcosm of the experience of Africans across the continent. Black South Africans were formally free after 1994, but a centuries-long historical injustice kept many of them still chained in poverty and ignorance. South Africa had formally rid itself of what the ANC had referred to as the ‘internal colonialism’ under which the colonial power (whites) had kept the colonised (blacks) — by and large poor, ill-educated and living in squalor. But the poverty and backwardness remained — just as it did in almost all African countries that had formally achieved their independence from foreign colonial powers since the 1960s. Just so, the struggle in South Africa after 1994 to give black people the advantages and stimulation so long denied them was analogous to the struggle of the people on the continent as a whole to rouse themselves, to recover what was rightfully their own, and to realise their economic and cultural potential.

Mbeki declared in 1999 that the ‘first contribution’ South Africans could make towards realising a continental renaissance was to establish within their own country "a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist, prosperous and peaceful African country."7 The form of democracy he supported, was evidently liberal democratic8 — even if, within South Africa, those most suspicious of his democratic credentials were liberal democrats grouped mainly within the Democratic Party. African renaissance man, for Mbeki, was someone who was a "rebel against tyrants and dictators", among others9 — even if, as a leader, he himself showed extreme sensitivity to criticism and opposition from others. Mbeki believed that Africans had learned the lesson that "one-party states and military governments will not work"10 — even if it was a realisation few Africans elsewhere on the continent felt secure enough to voice. And he believed that democracy was intrinsic to African cultures, making the remarkable claim that it was "common to all African traditions that the people must govern."11 Other elements of Mbeki’s view of democracy, which he offered as necessary parts of, or conditions for a renaissance in Africa, included good governance, the development of a culture of human rights, and the promotion of cultural and language rights in multicultural societies.12
Mbeki clearly intended that South Africa’s liberal democratic Constitution — and the process of negotiation and compromise that created it13 — should serve as an example to the rest of Africa, where arbitrarily drawn borders often exacerbated ancient ethnic rivalries. The Constitution took into account South Africa’s ‘specifics’ and sought, as he suggested democracy should across the entire African continent, to:
"ensure that political and, therefore, peaceful means can be used to address the competing interests of different social groups in each country."
In the South African case, the political settlement of conflicts of interests was catered for, in the first instance, by the exceptionally inclusive system of proportional representation that applied in elections to parliament. There was no vote threshold above which a party had to qualify when parliamentary seats were being apportioned – which meant that very small minority parties, some with potentially troublesome support bases, were drawn into the central legislative process. A range of other institutions — including the Human Rights Commission and the Constitutional Court — were also potentially powerful guardians of democratic pluralism.

The other, central theme of the process of democratisation in South Africa was a drive for greater equality. For both Mbeki and the ANC, on one hand, and mainstream liberal democrats, on the other, greater equality — social and, particularly, economic – was necessary for democracy to function meaningfully, or to survive in South Africa. They differed, however, over the best way to achieve it. Mbeki and the ANC believed that the mechanisms to achieve equality should include affirmative action. The intention in this case was to achieve racial representivity in institutions — in other words, equality of outcomes.14 This kind of ‘emergency measure’, in the ANC’s view, was necessary to bring about ‘fundamental transformation’ in South Africa and to correct the wrongs of the past speedily.15

Mainstream liberal democrats, however, favoured the creation of equality of opportunity and de-emphasising race. To the ANC, the rejection of affirmative action amounted to a belief that "the Bantus are not yet ready to govern."16

The use of South Africa’s new democratic institutions after 1994 to achieve greater equality was the major form of the struggle for a microcosmic ‘black renaissance’. It was the main feature of policy and legislative changes, and it resulted in changes across every facet of government and society in South Africa between 1994 and 2000. Affirmative action and political appointments radically altered the colour and political complexion of every arm of the public service, the security forces, quasi-governmental bodies and parastatals. In business and industry, legislation was introduced that made equity in employment practices a legal requirement, with the workforce having to be broadly representative of the demographics of the country. Industrial relations legislation established significant institutions and procedures for arbitration and raised the level of protection enjoyed by employees in any confrontation with employers. Pensions and disability grants received by members of the different races were equalised.

Spending on education — identified as the key determinant of the life chances of young South Africans, and obviously a crucial requirement of a renaissance of the kind outlined by Mbeki — became and remained the largest single item in the government budget after 1994, regularly exceeding 20% of the total. The primary objective was the significant improvement of young blacks’ access to quality education. But, the government found itself facing other serious, and largely inherited structural problems in education. Among the most problematic was the fact that some 89% of the total education expenditure went to personnel costs, which meant substantially higher government spending was necessary to ensure the availability of books for all students and to address the backlog in infrastructure and capital spending, particularly in black schools. These additional funds were seldom available. The Department of Education estimated in 1998 that an annual real increase of 4% in educational expenditure was required to overcome, by 2008, the gross racially designated inequalities in the education system bequeathed by apartheid.

Post-1994 governments also significantly redirected resources towards the provision of services to millions of black South Africans who had been obliged to do without them under apartheid. Social spending on the poor increased by 34% in the four years between 1994 and 1997. By 2000, more than 57% of social spending by the government went to the poorest 40% of South Africans, whereas only 9% went to the wealthiest 20% — a radical departure from the apartheid past.17 Some 3.5 million people were provided with running water in the period between March 1994 and March 1999. But, this left more than a quarter of black households still relying on public taps, while 17% relied on dams, rivers or springs.18 Electricity connections to households by the parastatal electricity supplier, Eskom, were proceeding at a rate of more than 1 200 a day in 1996 and 1997, and some 59% of all households in South Africa had electricity.19 Between April 1994 to May 1999, a total of 777 591 houses were built or under construction in terms of the government’s low-cost housing delivery programme. Its programme of land restitution to those who lost it under apartheid, however, was considerably less successful. Between May 1995 and September 1998, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights received 63 455 land claims countrywide but, by October 1999, only 264 had been resolved.20

Health services underwent a substantial reorientation towards the provision of primary care to communities, invariably black, in outlying areas whose access had been minimal in the past. A total of 495 new clinics were built between September 1995 and December 1998, a further 249 clinics underwent major structural upgrading, and some 215 new mobile clinics were bought.21 But, the government’s achievements in providing health care to the previously marginalised were overshadowed by the incoherence of its programme to combat the HIV/Aids pandemic which was poised to wreak havoc among the population and threatened to make a nonsense of the statistical projections on which a government must rely for planning purposes. Certainly, the pandemic threatened the achievement of a renaissance within the microcosm of South Africa — as, indeed, it did across vast areas of Southern and East Africa. An estimated 3.6 million South Africans were HIV-positive by the end of 1998. Moreover, the rate of new infections was rising: in 1998, the prevalence rate among HIV-positive women attending antenatal clinics, for example, increased by 43% nationally since 1997. It was also estimated that some six million people in South Africa would be HIV-positive, with more than 18% of the workforce infected by 2005. And, the average life expectancy in South Africa was likely to fall from 60 years to 40 by 2008.22

Government policy on HIV/AIDS resisted the best scientific advice and was at odds with the views of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and health activists working on the problem both at home and abroad. Mbeki allowed himself to be associated with a smaal group of dissident scientists based in the United States who argued that there was no link between HIV and AIDS. And the government largely eschewed the use of anti-retroviral drugs that had achieved ascertained success elsewhere in containing the syndrome in many HIV-positive people and in reducing the frequency of its spread from HIV-positive mothers to their newborn babies. Various reasons were given for rejecting the drugs. One was their cost — even though pharmaceutical companies were willing to provide them to the government at a considerable discount. Other reasons were slight variations on, or combinations of the following:
  • that drug companies’ claims on behalf of their drugs were fraudulent, and companies were merely seeking to make a profit;
  • that the side-effects of these drugs were more harmful than HIV/AIDS itself — even though the syndrome itself was guaranteed to be fatal; and
  • that drug companies were unscrupulous in wanting to test their dangerous drugs on vulnerable Africans.
Whatever the truth or disingenuousness of these arguments, the South African government had devised no credible policy to counter the spread of a disease which, more than any other foreseeable event, could undo its efforts to secure a black renaissance in South Africa and would damage the country’s ability to play a leading role in achieving a continental renaissance.

The most significant potential contribution to a renaissance at home and abroad made by Mbeki and the South African government was in economic policy. Mbeki’s individual role on economic policy was significant. A trained economist, he provided most of the political ballast within the ruling party and government for policies that put in place and enforced quasi-conservative fiscal and monetary controls. These policies saw economic growth as the prerequisite for a significant redistribution of wealth and services. They sought to unlock value domestically and ease fiscal pressures via a programme to privatise a number of state-owned enterprises. They opened up the economy increasingly to competition from abroad. And they sought to increase the proportion of exports that was consisted of competitive, value-added manufactured goods, as opposed to commodities.

Mbeki’s economic policies — and those generated by his finance minister, Trevor Manuel — amounted to a self-imposed structural adjustment programme. Unlike most other such programmes imposed on African countries — usually in response to a demand from abroad by the International Monetary Fund — the South African programme was fairly ruthlessly applied. And Mbeki faced down opposition to them, mainly from the ANC’s two allies in the government, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).23

Mbeki explicitly related the market-friendly character of his economic policies to the objective of a renaissance in Africa in a number of speeches on the latter topic:
"[D]riven by our own painful experience," he said in 1998 in reference to Africa’s economic failure after independence, "many on our continent have introduced new economic policies which seek to create conditions that are attractive for domestic and foreign investors, encourage the growth of the private sector, reduce the participation of the state in the ownership of the economy and, in other ways, seek to build modern economies."24
This was, in part, the result of his recognition that South Africa — like all other African countries — was incapable of generating domestically the scale of investment and quality of technology necessary to grow its economy rapidly, eradicate much of its unemployment and social disadvantage and, at the same time, to become a significant, even if quite small, and competitive player in the international economy. A major challenge in economic policy was therefore to enable the needed inflows of capital and technology.
"Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the continent," he declared perhaps a little generously in 1997, "have ... embarked on a process of economic reform, which is necessary and vital, if the continent is to succeed in attracting a growing slice of foreign investment. We want to move beyond the current situation where Africa accounts for a small portion of all foreign capital flows to emerging markets ... [N]one of us should be satisfied with an average growth rate of less than 10% for the continent as a whole."25
A significant side-effect of Mbeki’s and Manuel’s economic policies was to signal to the first world investor community that an altogether more realistic outlook on economics might be taking root in Africa. Here was Africa’s largest and most advanced economy, South Africa, intent on marching in step with prevailing international economic orthodoxies and firmly rejecting old ‘statist’ prescriptions that had not worked.

By early 2000, the economic policies advanced by Mbeki and Manuel, however, had not delivered the much-needed and anticipated high rates of growth. Nor had these policies led to the hundreds of thousands of jobs they had promised, or to the millions of employment opportunities that were needed. Arguments raged over the reasons. Apologists of the approach could and did argue quite credibly that, in the first instance, political uncertainties about South Africa’s stability after 1994, and then the East Asian emerging markets crisis in 1998-1999, seriously undermined the South African economy’s capacity to grow at the rates projected and in a way that would have led to job creation on the scale forecast. Both sets of difficulties had prompted the significantly autonomous central bank — the South African Reserve Bank — to impose high interest rates which strangled expansion by smaller and medium-sized businesses and companies — the sectors to which governments usually look for the creation of new jobs. Although the government’s policy on Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) failed to achieve its stated objective, the disciplined profile that the policy gave to the South African economy among the ranks of emerging markets helped the country to weather the 1998-1999 crisis much better than most.

The emerging markets crisis also seriously undermined the government’s attempts to encourage the development of a powerful black business class of significant players in the hitherto almost entirely white-controlled commanding heights of the South African economy. Earlier, in 1997, Mbeki had spoken of the need to:
"recognise the importance of our own, African business sector, which has a critical role in continuing the African renaissance into the 21st century, capable of both acting on its own and in partnership with international investors."26
Mbeki was to become increasingly explicit on this in reference to his own country:
"As part of our continuing struggle to wipe out the legacy of racism," he said in 1999, "we must work to ensure that there emerges a black bourgeoisie, whose presence within our economy and society will be part of the process of the deracialisation of the economy and society."
But, this thrust received a setback in 1998-1999. Before the emerging markets crisis, a number of black businessmen and consortia had taken loans to buy companies in deals in which the shares they had purchased, were used as collateral. As long as share prices remained above a certain threshold, the loans were safe. When the emerging markets crisis sent the Johannesburg Stock Exchange into a spin, however, black stakes in a number of companies became unsustainable and the shares reverted to the sources of these loans. BusinessMap, a South African consultancy, said in September 1999 that the share of market capitalisation accounted for by black-controlled companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange dropped from 6% in November 1998, to 4.2% in July 1999. The consultancy estimated that the figure could drop further.27

Government policy also sought to foster the development of an entrepreneurial culture and class, particularly among the black poor and small business sector. There were two central aims. One was to bring black people into ownership of a greater segment of the economy. But at least as significant was the government’s recognition that self-employment schemes and micro-businesses had a large part to play in bringing down South Africa’s dangerously high unemployment rate — about 34% in the latter part of the 1990s.28 The government set up a variety of bodies to support small business development. These included a wholesale lender, Khula Enterprise Finance, which made funds available to commercial banks and other intermediaries for onward lending to small business borrowers. After a slow start — apparently caused by the reluctance among commercial banks to carry the relatively high bureaucratic costs of issuing Khula loans — the rate of lending surged in 1999/2000. A second body, Ntsika, was established to set up a network of support services for small businesses. After a series of internal administrative and other problems, its future appeared to be in doubt in 2000, and it seemed likely that the Department of Trade and Industry would take over its functions.

Mbeki appeared to structure the morality he required of South Africans in the service of a domestic and continental renaissance around his own and Mandela’s earlier call for ‘a new patriotism’. The term’s intended meaning was left usefully vague. It was:
"that common psychological mould which would enable all of us to understand the common good in the same way and to celebrate it together."
Developing that ‘common patriotism’ also required South Africans to examine themselves and their thought processes for vestiges of mistrust and racism, and to "lay bare the extent of" and to combat "the widespread malaise of the corruption of public and private morality which infects the entirety of our society."29 Not least among the symptoms of this malaise was the high frequency of violent crime, felt most acutely by black South Africans — a problem which neither the Mandela nor the Mbeki government had come to grips with by 2000.

Yet, the achievements of Mandela’s and Mbeki’s governments were, by 2000, considerable — a point even their sharpest critics in the liberal opposition felt constrained at times to concede. Their governments had begun a far-reaching transformation of South African society which, if events abroad allowed their policy prescriptions to work through at home, might very well deliver a range of ‘goods’ to ordinary people on a scale sufficient to engender a domestic ‘renaissance’.

The drive to this renaissance was not, however, significantly different from what had lain behind most other African nationalist projects since the 1950s. It was redolent with the impulses that had driven Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism, Kaunda’s quest for a humane society, and Nyerere’s and other African socialists’ professed concern for the poor and the marginalised. But, there was one singularly important difference between the approach taken by Africa’s old heroes and Mbeki. Whereas previous generations of African leaders had argued, no one more explicitly than Nkrumah, that the key to the political kingdom opened the way to provide common people with social ‘goods’, Mbeki’s focus fell elsewhere. He appeared to believe, in the manner of Bill Clinton’s presidential election campaign manager in 1992, "It’s the economy, stupid!"

NOTES


Howard Barrell is the Political Editor of the Mail & Guardian based at the South African parliament in Cape Town. A member of the African National Congress in the 1980s, he has written extensively on the affairs and perspectives of South Africa’s former liberation movement. He was awarded a D Phil by the Oxford University in 1994 for his thesis entitled ‘Conscripts to their Age’: African National Congress operational strategy, 1976-1986.
  1. Such as journalist turned businessman Thami Mazwai.
  2. Interview with Mac Maharaj, National Executive Committee member of the ANC, Johannesburg, 1990.
  3. See, for example, T Mbeki, The African Renaissance, South Africa and the World, address at the United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan, 9 April 1998; Address to the 2nd Southern Africa International Dialogue on Smart Partnership for the Generation of Wealth, Swakopmund, Namibia, 27 July 1998; The African Renaissance: Statement of Deputy President, Gallagher Estate, Johannesburg, 13 August 1998; Address by Executive Deputy President to the summit of the Corporate Council of Africa entitled Attracting capital to Africa, Chantilly, Virginia, US, 19-22 April 1997.
  4. T Mbeki, Speech at the launch of the African Renaissance Institute, Pretoria, 11 October 1999.
  5. V I Lenin, Left-wing communism — An infantile disorder, in VILenin, Selected works, volume 3, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p 343.
  6. Mbeki, op cit.
  7. T Mbeki, Speech at the gala dinner of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues, 27 January 1999.
  8. This is evident in various speeches by Mbeki, among others, Address to Corporate Council on Africa, op cit; The African Renaissance, South Africa and the World, op cit The African Renaissance Statement, op cit; Speech at the launch of the African Renaissance Institute, op cit.
  9. Mbeki, The African Renaissance Statement, ibid.
  10. Mbeki, Address to Corporate Council on Africa, op cit.
  11. Ibid.
  12. Mbeki, The African Renaissance, South Africa and the World, op cit.
  13. See H Ebrahim, The soul of a nation: Constitution-making in South Africa, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1998.
  14. Implied in his vision of renaissance in T Mbeki, Statement on Behalf of the African National Congress, on the Occasion of the Adoption by the Constitutional Assembly of The Republic of South Africa Constitution Bill 1996, Cape Town, 8 May 1996; Address to the Corporate Council on Africa, op cit; Speech at the National Assembly During the Debate on Budget Vote No 2, 10 June 1997; and Speech at the South African Property Owners Association (SAPOA) Convention, Durban, 24 May 1998.
  15. T Mbeki, Speech at the National Assembly during the Debate on Budget Vote No 2, ibid.
  16. Ibid.
  17. T Manuel, Budget speech of the Minister of Finance, 23 February 2000.
  18. HForgey, A Jeffery, E Sidiropoulos, C Smith, T Coorigan, T Mophuthing, A Helman, J Redpath, T Dimant, South African survey 1999/2000, millennium edition, South African Institute for Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1999.
  19. Ibid.
  20. Ibid.
  21. Ibid.
  22. Ibid.
  23. See, for example, T Mbeki, Statement of the President of the African National Congress at the Meeting of the Central Committee of Cosatu, Johannesburg, 22 June 1998; Statement of the President of the African National Congress at the 10th Congress of the SACP, Johannesburg, 2 July 1998.
  24. Mbeki, The African Renaissance, South Africa and the World, op cit.
  25. Mbeki, Address to Corporate Council on Africa, op cit.
  26. Ibid.
  27. Forgey et al, op cit.
  28. Ibid.
  29. T Mbeki, Speech at the National Assembly on the Occasion of the Debate on the Budget Vote of the Deputy President, Cape Town, 17 May 1996.