Mark Ashurst

With impeccable timing, Jacob Zuma arrived in London exactly seven years after the charges of a "conspiracy to harm the president" laid against three of Thabo Mbeki’s putative rivals in April 2001. Seven years on, the new ANC leadership — including one of the alleged conspirator Mathews Phosa, as party treasurer — was welcomed warmly in London.

The twilight of Robert Mugabe’s rule offers a lesson in the rules of political succession. As several among the next generation of Southern African leaders have already discovered — from Thabo Mbeki in Pretoria to former president Benjamin Mkapa in Dar es Salaam — it is a rare leader indeed who gets to nominate his replacement.