African Renaissance Man: Former president Thabo Mbeki during the groundbreaking for the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Centre at the TM Foundation’s Killarney headquarters in Johannesburg. Photo: Thabo Mbeki Foundation
When the Thabo Mbeki Foundation marked its 15th anniversary on 11 October, the date was not incidental. Exactly 15 years earlier, on the same day and at the same venue, the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, Thabo Mbeki had formally launched the institution that would give structure to his African Renaissance vision, beyond political office.
The symmetry between the 2010 launch and the 2025 banquet underscored what the foundation has become — not a monument to Mbeki’s presidency but an attempt to sustain the ideals he believed could still define the continent. The evening’s guest list reflected that ambition, with diplomats, academics, business leaders and students gathered beneath a looping montage of Mbeki through the decades, from his years in government to the quieter diplomacy that has shaped his legacy since.
Lukhanyo Neer, the foundation’s chief of operations, said Mbeki had to be persuaded to create the institution.
“He hadn’t been interested,” Neer recalled. “If it was up to him, he would have read, written and occasionally taught. It took colleagues from Algeria, Nigeria and elsewhere to convince him that he couldn’t simply retire. They told him he needed an institution that would continue the work he’d devoted his life to — the African Renaissance.”
When it was launched on 11 October 2010, the foundation defined its purpose as “catalysing Africa’s Renaissance” through five interlinked forms of renewal: political, economic, social, cultural and technological. Fifteen years later, those pillars still underpin everything it does.
The anniversary week opened with a small but powerful exhibition at Sandton City, on display until 27 October. Fifteen objects from Africa’s pre-colonial past, including trade beads, iron tools and fragments of early manuscripts, form part of what the foundation calls its cultural renaissance work. The aim is to remind South Africans that Africa’s story began long before colonial borders and Western scholarship.
“The idea,” Neer said, “was to challenge this notion that civilisation was imported. We wanted people to see evidence of complex economies, writing systems and metallurgy, proof that African societies were developing in sophisticated ways long before conquest.”
Understated in design and free to the public, the exhibition set the tone for what followed. Whereas the banquet that closed the week celebrated continuity, this opening gesture grounded the foundation’s mission in recovery of memory, knowledge and confidence. Visitors moved quietly through the display, pausing over artefacts from Mali, Zimbabwe and Sudan, before stepping back into the noise of the mall.
From there, the week moved to the foundation’s first charity golf day, “a chance for new and old partners to meet”, Neer said, before culminating in the groundbreaking for the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Centre at the foundation’s Killarney headquarters. The ceremony took place almost to the day of the 2010 launch, linking origin and renewal. The new centre will rise on land that has expanded with the foundation’s ambitions. The City of Johannesburg originally donated two adjoining plots, including a 1905 Herbert Baker house that will be preserved.
“We’re not renovating,” Neer explained. “We’re building an entirely new structure on the same site but on a greater scale.”
Construction has begun and will unfold in phases, as funds are raised, with completion targeted for 2028. The design includes a 500-seat auditorium, an archival building for collections from across Africa and an 80-room hotel and conference facility. “The auditorium and archive are the heart of it,” Neer said. “That’s the part we’re raising funds for now.”
He is careful to emphasise that this is not a memorial project.
“President Mbeki isn’t interested in monuments. The question is how to use his name and work to open a door, to the past and into the future.”
The Presidential Centre will curate Africa’s political and intellectual history through its own voices, assembling material from figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda and Amílcar Cabral alongside collections from the wider diaspora. It will host exhibitions, residencies and programmes linked to the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs.
“We want it to be a living space, part museum, part campus, part civic square,” Neer said. “A place where Africans engage with their own story.”
The 15th anniversary gala dinner mirrored that ambition. Returning to the Sandton Convention Centre, Mbeki spoke to an audience that included several who had stood beside him 15 years earlier. His tone was restrained but urgent. He warned against the drift toward xenophobia and the political smallness that continues to erode the idea of African unity. “If we can’t get the people of the continent working together,” he said, “then the renaissance will remain an unfulfilled dream.”
The foundation’s work gives that idea tangible form. Its educational arm, the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, began as the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute in 2010. It has since trained more than 3 000 students through short learning programmes and now offers master’s, doctoral and post-doctoral degrees through Unisa. The school’s focus is on equipping emerging leaders across the continent to diagnose Africa’s challenges and design homegrown solutions.
The Road to Democracy Project, another flagship, has produced 17 volumes tracing South Africa’s democratic transition and mapping patterns of pre-colonial migration and trade across Africa. “We wanted to show that Africans have always interacted and traded,” Neer said. “This dislike or hatred among Africans is a modern construct.” One volume explores women’s leadership before colonisation, “to show that the idea of women as perpetual victims is also modern”.
The Peace-Making and Economic Development programme grew from the foundation’s support for Mbeki’s mediation efforts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Côte d’Ivoire. It now draws on a network of retired ambassadors and scholars analysing instability in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. “Many of these coups are reactions to neo-colonial relationships, particularly with France,” Neer said. “We’re engaging governments on the transition back to civilian rule.”
The Presidential Centre, the fourth flagship, will bring these efforts together under one roof. “It’s where the intellectual, historical and peace-building strands intersect,” Neer explained. “It’s the future home of everything we’ve been building.”
Beyond these programmes, the foundation’s calendar is anchored by recurring events: International Women’s Day in March; the Africa Day Lecture in May, which rotates between capitals from Conakry to Dar es Salaam, with Algiers next year; the African Peace and Security Dialogue each September and the Cape Town Conversation in November, a Global South policy forum aligned with the G20.
“We always say we’re Pan-African, simply based in South Africa,” Neer said. Funding for this work remains diverse but steady. The first donation came from Algeria’s late president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, one of Mbeki’s earliest supporters. Subsequent support has come from Anglo American, AngloGold Ashanti, Sibanye-Stillwater, the Swedish International Development Agency and several Indian and African think tank partnerships.
“Funding is project-based,” Neer said. “We rely largely on African corporates, with development agencies backing specific initiatives.”
The foundation’s structure reflects its intellectual character: a board of trustees drawn from across Africa, a small team of researchers and organisers and a network of collaborators linking policy, history and civic education. Neer describes it less as an organisation than as an ongoing commitment to record, convene and imagine.
“There’s an obligation on the current generation to leave a better continent for those who come after,” he said. “If we can’t unify and work together, the Renaissance stays a concept instead of becoming reality.”
Fifteen years on, the Thabo Mbeki Foundation stands as a disciplined reminder that ideas still matter. Its archive work ties memory to identity; its graduate school links leadership to ethics; its mediation efforts translate diplomacy into institution-building. The Presidential Centre will give those ideals a home, a physical space for the slow, demanding work of reflection that has always defined Mbeki’s politics.
For Mbeki, who once needed convincing to create it, the foundation now proves that ideas, once institutionalised, can outlast their founders. For South Africa — still searching for its moral and intellectual centre — it remains one of the few places where thinking itself is treated as a public duty.
Hasina Kathrada is a South African journalist and media consultant.