5 Making the future: Towards Democratic Developmental States in Southern Africa, merging desirability and feasibility André du Pisani “When the tasks of creating a national future and creating a national past are undertaken at the same time, there is always the danger that the present might be caught in between.”(Ali A. Mazrui, On Heroes and Uhuru-Worship, 1967: 151). “Men make their history but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by them, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past”(Karl Marx, 1852, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’, in A Handbook of Marxism, 1935: 116.) Introduction e quotation from Ali A. Mazrui’s book On Heroes and Uhuru­Worship, published during the First Decade of African independence, rings remarkably true in 2019. Mazrui, reminds us that the twin tasks of‘creating a national future’ and‘creating a national past’ is not uniquely African. e author then invokes the experiences of George Washington as the rst president of‘the rst modern nation’, the United States of America(USA), and that of Ghana under the enigmatic Kwame Nkrumah. Mazrui re ects, with commendable insight, on the nexus between iconic leadership and the capacity to organize political life around common values and purposes. He argues that in Africa, as indeed was the case elsewhere, there has since the founding of new states, been a desire and need for‘a splendid past and a splendid future’(Mazrui, 1967: 150). In southern Africa, various scholars have undertaken a critical rethink of the fruits of liberation. One such scholar is John S. Saul(2014), who writes of‘a awed freedom’. In some cases, newly spawned nationhood, while the desire for Mazrui’s‘splendid 105 André du Pisani