In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, Zimbabwean filmmaker and columnist Farai Sevenzo considers our obsession with anniversaries.
It's strange, isn't it, to be of a certain generation and be watching your teenage children studying the days of your political awakening as history lessons?
The Cold War, apartheid - have all moved effortlessly into the history syllabus of many schools around the world and those of us who were young, dumb and full of political slogans then may bore our kids now with the details of obscure anti-apartheid movements.
The pop songs, the T-shirts of our age, the great concerts fuelled by teen spirit and young love, the jazz, the shock, the awe at the sight of a tall man leaving Victor-Verster Prison to lead a country too long steeped in the stupidity of colour politics.
Will Ugandans mark Idi Amin's rise to power next year?
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And this being a year with a zero at the end of it, do we Africans join the endless navel-gazing at what happened this time 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago just to be sure we don't miss the chance to remember, that we take the opportunity to reflect? Of course we do.
We have already had 40 years of the Brother Leader's Libyan Revolution, marked 15 years of Rwanda's genocide, and on 25 January 2011 Ugandans may recall four decades since the assent to power of a Field Marshall born near Koboko called Idi Amin Dada.
But why stop there?
Come April we may all feel the urge to mark the peerless survival instincts of Zimbabwe's first Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe, as we mark 30 years of independence for that southern African country.
As long as we have time and calendars, we shall have anniversaries.
And over the next few days we may read and hear the phrase "Where were you when Mandela was released?" and old hacks will dust off their notebooks and their memories and tell us of an impossible time when South Africa seemed to be heading to bloodshed and not a watershed of change, when the aura of a man, fashioned from royal birth and captivity, steered a nation to hope and forgiveness, when some people's terrorist became everyone's freedom fighter.
John Lennon's cool protest
Of course before that moment on that February afternoon, our African leaders had held up the savagery of Pretoria's governance as our last great hurdle.
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At the back of our collective head is the dreaded feeling that the sun is setting on a great African life
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And so obvious was the injustice of apartheid, the whole world was behind Nelson Mandela's short walk from Victor-Verster Prison.
There were marches and boycotts arguments and prayers, teargas and toil and a few more shocking assassinations.
On 11 February 1970, 20 years before the man walked free, a pop star called John Lennon paid £1,344 in fines for 96 people who had been arrested for protesting at the South African rugby team playing in Scotland.
And imagine - 20 years later Mandela walked free, 25 years after Lennon's cool protest, Mandela lifted the Rugby World Cup with his victorious national team.
History is all numbers if you like adding things up, and nothing stays the same.
But this particular anniversary is about more than numbers isn't it?
A man may come out alive out of the rubble of an earthquake after 11 days and we cheer - another human being has beaten the odds. But 27 years in an apartheid jail?
And to emerge with your dignity intact, your humanity enhanced?
We look back on Mandela's walk out of prison because it was the last great individual survival story of our age.
South Africa has many heroes, many iconic images of a great struggle, many unsung forgotten names who were surely all encompassed in an old man's steps on the tarmac.
Mandela's release encompassed many unsung anti-apartheid fighters
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The analyst will tell you that apartheid was never about people's skins, but about their minds; that for every Nelson Mandela we need a FW de Klerk; that the thousands of words you will read from embittered old crocodiles who chose exile from South Africa after that moment are the ideas Mandela killed with every step of that walk, that singing "Free Nelson Mandela" was the last kick of a libertine naive world and nothing much has changed; that the money is still with the few; that the revolution is on pause.
But at the back of our collective head is the dreaded feeling that the sun is setting on a great African life.
And when the children read history lessons, they will learn of a nation of great music and sport, of Nobel laureates for peace and literature, and they would do well to take in a little Shakespeare too:
"The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."
And remember some days not every 20 years, but as the beginning of their lives.
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