Former President of the Republic of South Africa and Patron of theThabo Mbeki Foundation

This very interesting book is being published when we, South Africans, have recently celebrated an eventful thirty years of democracy - Democracy@30! It is natural that a significant part of our celebration or observance of this important anniversary will be a critical or analytical assessment of our relatively new democracy, its strengths and weaknesses, its successes and failures. Happily, there will be many and varied voices that will be involved in this process of a collective assessment of where we have been and how we got to be where we are today. Necessarily such reflection will also be about our future because each one of us entertains the hope to be at a better place tomorrow.

The processes visualised in the succeeding paragraphs are about the important matter of knowledge. Some time ago I had an interesting occasion to address the challenging question of the ‘Democratisation of Knowledge and its Role in the Betterment of Society’. As part of the process of addressing this question, I cited two quotations. One of these was written by the eminent but self-taught 19th century English biologist and anthropologist, iiiThomas Huxley, who said: “The known is finite, the unknown infinite, - intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.”