A birthday tribute can easily become a mere list of achievements or polite praise. But that approach would not suit President Thabo Mbeki, who turned 84 on 18 June. His life has not been about applause. It has been about thinking and doing the work of returning African people to the centre of their own history. I write this from memory rather than distance. In my chapter in The Thabo Mbeki I Know, the oral-history collection assembled by Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu and Miranda Strydom, I
describe a leader whose seriousness was never a performance. What stayed with me about President Mbeki was not theatrical leadership. It was discipline, precision, and an almost stubborn insistence that ideas be matched by work. Marking his birthday with a Tiyo Soga tribute concert is fitting, and it tells you something about the man. To celebrate President Mbeki is not simply to speak about him. It is to recover African voices that colonialism diminished, distorted or tried to erase. Tiyo Soga, born in 1829, was
among the first modern African intellectuals. Minister, translator, journalist, hymnodist. His life is a reminder that African modernity did not begin yesterday. It was argued, sung, translated and defended long before most of our present institutions existed. Soga’s hymn, Lizalis’ idinga lakho, still carries that inheritance. It is prayer, memory and longing at once. It belongs to a tradition in which African people used music not only to worship but to think, to endure, and to assert their humanity. This is the deeper meaning of
the concert at the Wits Great Hall on 20 June. It is an act of intellectual reclamation. In honouring Soga we honour the long African tradition of thought, faith, and self-definition that made later generations possible. President Mbeki has always understood that nations are not built through policy alone. They are built through historical consciousness. A people who do not know the names of their own thinkers are easy prey for the lie that civilisation arrived from elsewhere. A people who forget their intellectual ancestors
are easily convinced that they hold no inheritance worth defending. That understanding shaped the defining moments of his public life. In 1996, at the adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, he gave voice to a national identity that was neither narrow nor tribal nor defensive. His “I am an African” address set South Africa within the continent and placed our young democracy inside a wider human and African story. Two years later, at Gallagher Estate, he called for an African Renaissance built on renewal, responsibility
and resistance to corruption, dictatorship, poverty, ignorance and the theft of Africa’s future. Rebirth, he argued, required the continent to recover its soul, its creativity and its intellectual inheritance. Those ideas did not stay on the page. They shaped the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which placed the continent’s development agenda in African hands and insisted that Africa could define its own future through governance, accountability, infrastructure, investment and partnership. The same current ran through the launch of the African Union in Durban in 2002.
The move from the Organisation of African Unity to the African Union gave continental renewal a durable institutional home. In President Mbeki’s hands, recovering Africa’s inheritance and building African institutions were never separate tasks. They were one task. I saw the method behind the ideas. I never worked for him formally, which I count as a lasting regret, but I watched him closely in places where excellence and national purpose mattered. At Transnet, where I served through a hard period, the problems were large. Debt.
Restructuring. The pension fund. Years of underinvestment. The weight of running a state-owned enterprise at the centre of the economy. From that work I learnt that President Mbeki treated government as serious work. He wanted competence, not slogans, and he expected institutions to function, because he knew that ordinary people and the economy depended on them. The same seriousness shaped how he worked with women’s organisations. I remember the Presidential Working Group on Women. It was not a symbolic platform. It brought women from business,
labour, civil society, the churches, professional bodies and communities into direct conversation with government about the things that shaped women’s lives. Those meetings were demanding. They asked for preparation and clarity. They forced us to ask what could be done, who would do it, and how progress would be measured. That was his way. He respected people enough to take their ideas seriously, and he expected those ideas to be worked through. The work produced concrete things. Water and sanitation. Attention to rural communities. Support
for domestic workers who had spent their lives caring for other people’s homes and faced old age without protection. These were matters of dignity in its most ordinary and most important form. This is why I have long regarded cultural and intellectual patronage as part of nation-building. Supporting lecture platforms, including through partnerships with institutions such as Old Mutual and Nedbank, was never simply sponsorship. It built spaces where African thought could be preserved, debated and handed on, so that our intellectual traditions were not
left to chance. President Mbeki’s legacy holds many things, but the heart of it is his insistence that Africa must think for itself. He has challenged us to honour the intellectual labour of those who came before, and reminded us that African renewal cannot be built on forgetting. To place Tiyo Soga at the centre of this celebration is not to turn away from President Mbeki. It is to understand him more clearly. His project has always been larger than himself. It is about recovering
a continent’s voice, restoring the dignity of its thinkers, and building the confidence Africans need to narrate their own place in the world. At a time when South Africa is so often overwhelmed by noise, anger and short memory, this work is necessary. We need fewer empty tributes and more acts of remembrance. We must teach the young that they come from a tradition of thought, and that African history is not a museum of suffering but an archive of imagination, argument, music, faith and
courage. In The Thabo Mbeki I Know I write that my privilege, through the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, is to help preserve his legacy. That legacy belongs to no single man. It is the unfinished work of giving Africa back to itself. Tiyo Soga’s life tells us that identity is not a prison but a foundation. President Mbeki’s life reminds us that leadership is not the holding of office but the patient work of enlarging a people’s inheritance. That is why this tribute is worthy of
him. It honours him by doing what his life has asked of us. To remember Africa seriously, to listen for its buried voices, and to build a future from the dignity they left behind. Serobe is a trustee of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and a contributor to The Thabo Mbeki I Know.
Thabo Mbeki, Tiyo Soga, Lizalis’ idinga lakho, Wits Great Hall, 18 June, 20 June, Thabo Mbeki I Know, Thabo Mbeki Foundation, African Renaissance, New Partnership for Africa’s Development, African Union