Jonny Steinberg, Steve Biko and Thabo Mbeki

Jonny Steinberg's column in yesterday's Business Day, present a more eloquent version of my post on this Blog last week in which I suggested Presindet Thabo Mbeki should read more Biko. Money Quote:

[Mbeki's] broadsides against white racism and his penchant for incarcerating black men are, I think, symptoms of the same dispiritedness. They are the thoughts and actions of an odd and unheralded figure — the black Afro-pessimist.

When one looks at institutions such as our police force and our health system, when one witnesses their degree of paralysis, one wonders whether one of the maladies from which they are suffering is not the president’s disenchantment and his pessimism. Come 2009, I hope we are blessed with a president who still believes in the art of the possible. For I suspect that the one we have now no longer does.