Installing Mapnik is hard. Use this Dockerfile to automate Mapnik installation on the latest Ubuntu system, 16.04. Or, just pull and run the container directly from Docker. The container comes with Mapnik installed with python bindings so you don't have to waste your time figuring out how to install it from source. For more detailed information about the installation, see the Github repository. For more information about Docker, see their website.
To run the server with Mapnik installed and ready to go, run the following:
docker run -itd graham3333/mapnik-python