Part 38
The second of the three “starstruck” South Africans and the only one of them so far to actually go into space is Mark Shuttleworth. Like Johann Schutte, who grew up in a remote part of the country, Mark was born in Welkom, at the time a small country town in the Orange Free State on 18 September 1973. His father, Richard Dalton Shuttleworth, is a surgeon who now lives in a suburb of Johannesburg with his wife Ronelle, who was a nursery school teacher in the gold-mining town. Welkom suddenly blossomed when vast new deposits of gold were discovered in the region in the 1960s and ‘70s. It is today the second largest city after Bloemfontein in the Free State.
Coincidently, I knew Mark’s uncle, Dennis Shuttleworth, who practiced law in Bloemforntein for many years, as well as his daughter Dr. Mary Shuttleworth, who heads the Youth for Human Rights International which she founded in 2001. I never had the opportunity to meet Dennis’ nephew Mark, but his name keeps cropping up in my life for reasons I shall explain in due course.
Mark was schooled in Cape Town, initially at the Western Province Preparatory School, irreverently nicknamed “Wet Pups.” It is considered to be one the best junior schools in the country. Mark was Head Boy there before going on the Diocesan College also known as “Bishops,” one of the top five private schools in South Africa. He also became Head Boy there in 1991.
He followed this by enrolling at the University of Cape Town, obtaining a Bachelor of Business Science, specializing in Finance and Information Systems.
In 1995, Mark formed Thwawte Consulting which specialized in digital certificates and Internet security, which he sold a few years later to a US corporation called Verisign for $575 million, which made him a South African rand billionaire before he was thirty.
In 2000, he formed a venture capital company called “Here Be Dragons” whose name indicated that Mark was not exactly your typical businessman.
Then, in 2002, he astounded the world by becoming the second self-funded space tourist and the first South African in space. He paid about $20 million to become a passenger aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34, which travelled to the International Space Station, where he spent eight days working on experiments related to AIDS and genome research in a gravity-free environment. In the course of his visit to the space station, he received a call from Nelson Mandela who expressed his appreciation for Mark’s courageous adventure and putting South Africa in the headlines for all the right reasons. He also received a call from a terminally ill teenager, arranged by the “Reach for a Dream” organization, who asked Mark to marry her! Apparently he handled the proposal very diplomatically.
In 2004 he formed Canonical Ltd., for the promotion and commercial support of free software projects, especially the UBUNTU operating systems corporation.
The following year, Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation which gave $10 million to the UBUNTU project. As an indication of his quirky sense of humor he calls himself “Self-appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life.”
Once again, this aroused my interest in the man and his activities. I am currently in the advanced stages of finding funding for a feature movie for the international market. Its title is:
UBUNTU: The Last Warrior
“I am because we are”
UBUNTU is an ancient philosophical concept broadly meaning “Respect for all Humankind.” It is curious that Mark should have labelled one of his companies UBUNTU, but it is an indication of the man’s deep roots in Africa.
It seems as though the Shuttleworth family is descended from the British 1820 settlers who came to the Eastern Cape to bolster the British colony in and around Port Elizabeth, the major city and port between Cape Town in the South and Durban up on the East coast. My grandmother was also descended from 1820 settlers stock and they, as a group, over the past 200 years, have had a major influence on the growth of South Africa.
Mark seems to be a person who does not seek the limelight. He lives with his girlfriend on the Isle of Man and has made it clear that he does not want to have children. He is, however, deeply concerned with the current state of mankind and as a dollar billionaire now, he supports many worthy causes.
In 2012, Mark and Kenneth Rogoff debated Gary Kasparov and Peter Theil at the Oxford Union on the subject of “The Innovation Enigma.”
As I’ve said earlier, I’ve never met the man but he continues to intrigue me. He is the kind of innovator who makes things happen, without necessarily proclaiming himself to be the author of those things. His life revolves around the IT industry and, like Peter Warren and ExoTech, he seems to be constantly looking for better applications of computer technology for the enhancement of mankind rather than the spread of fake news and destructive uses of this great portal into the digital world of communication.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.