Viva the youth

Praising the ingenuity of Africans, Bill Gates says we have the bravery, passion and stamina to overcome our challenges

Microsoft founder Bill Gates may have made his billions from software, but he will leave his mark as one of the greatest philanthropists the world has seen.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he formed with his wife in 2000, has invested US$9bn in Africa in the past 15 years; and he announced this week a further $5bn in funding over the next five years.

This will go towards health research, especially for HIV/Aids, malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition.

The world’s richest man has also convinced several other wealthy people, including Warren Buffett, to donate vast chunks of their wealth to the foundation, which has an endowment of $39.6bn and has paid out grants of $36.7bn.

Gates was in SA this week for the 21st International Aids Conference, held in Durban. He also delivered the 14th annual Nelson Mandela lecture at the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi campus on Sunday.

Honorary lectures in such esteem are a powerful statement about the world. They are designed to provide a mission statement for how to make the planet a better place and, in this case, celebrate the life and work of the icon after whom it is named.

These lectures hark back to a time before the global village that is the TV networks, the Internet and Twitter — a time when there wasn’t a way to broadcast a new idea, or a scientific discovery, into the homes of billions.

British organisation the Royal Institution was famous for its high-profile lectures on science, and legend has it (okay Wikipedia, but sometimes that’s the same) that Sir Humphry Davy’s lectures were so popular that the number of horse-drawn carriages making their way down Albemarle Street resulted in it becoming London’s first oneway avenue.

Perhaps lectures of this magnitude have been replaced by the publishing of a book, followed by the author’s appearance on TV shows and the book circuit; or the concise joy that is a TED talk.

There has been some derision about the short, sometimes epigrammatic format of these wildly popular talks, which range