The chances of his turning out to be a gentle and tolerant president a la Mandela do not look good, at least on past form.So Mr Mandela’s optimism must be hedged round, again and again. Only a few years ago, after all, Tony Blair’s predecessor-but-one in Downing Street argued that anybody who believed that the ANC would soon become the government of South Africa was “living in cloud-cuckoo-land”.One apparent boost for Mr Mandela’s optimism was the collapse of the Mobutu regime in Zaire. Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique … all have been scarred by civil war, and the misery of millions that it causes.
Not, then, a time for much optimism about the continent. And yet, President Nelson Mandela chose this week to speak of an African renaissance.

He was, he said, “convinced that our region and our continent have set out along the new road of lasting peace, democracy, social and economic development”.Dream on, many might say – with some considerable justice. But it would be dangerous to dismiss this as the mere wishful thinking of an old man. Mr Mandela, perhaps more than anybody else, has the moral right to be at odds with conventional wisdom about his continent. After the great wave of independence, one-party socialist regimes promised a utopia which never arrived in much of the continent, while capitalist- friendly dictators ruled and plundered the rest. The Cold War was fought by proxy between the allies of Washington and Moscow – sometimes just with money, sometimes with guns The continent was marked by famine, corruption, and chaos.

In the past three years, there has been bloodshed on an unimaginable scale, where the world looked on in apparent helplessness. Renaissance is not a word that we have come to associate with the African continent in recent years Bloodshed and catastrophe, more often. Three decades after the end of the colonial era, the legacy has seemed bitter and poisoned. His ecumenical beliefs were expressed through his work for the Nottingham Council of Churches and the Nottingham Committee of the Council of Christians and Jews.Dorothy died in 1982 and in 1988 Lawson married another Quaker, Eva Koch. Together they found what they referred to as an “unexpected and unsought love” late in life and spent two happy years together before Eva’s death in 1991. Hugh Lawson planted a wood in their memory – the “Two Wives Plantation” – at Newstead Abbey.Richard Lawson and Doug LawsonHugh McDowall Lawson, engineer and politician: born Leeds 13 February 1912; MP (Common Wealth) for Skipton 1944-45; Deputy City Engineer, Nottingham 1948-73; Director of Leisure Services, Nottingham City Council 1973-76; married 1937 Dorothy Mallinson (died 1982; two sons), 1988 Eva Koch (nee Holde, died 1991); died Nottingham 23 March 1997..