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| Ben Okri |
Molweni! Vice-Chancellor, Max Price, Mr Nkosinathi Biko,
members of the extraordinary Biko family, members of the Board of Trustees, the
Minister of National Planning, Deputy-Minister of Justice and Constitutional
Development, distinguished guests, comrades, ladies and gentlemen - and in
South African parlance, all protocols observed. Preliminaries first: I really
want to thank the Biko family for the magical honour of giving this talk today
and for inviting me to South Africa for my first visit to your really beautiful
country. It's more than an honour to give the 13th Steve Biko Lecture
commemorating the 35th anniversary of his brutal death and transition from
activists against Apartheid to one of the guiding ancestors of justice and
freedom not only in South Africa but all over the world. I want to especially
thank Nkosinathi for the personal invitation as well as to congratulate him for
the extraordinary work they have done in making available to the world the
transfigured meaning of Steve Biko's legacy.
Fifteen years ago Nkosinathi inaugurated the creation of a
Steve Biko memorial, and these memorial lectures have acquired great
significance. I am struck by the richness and variety of the people who have
given the lectures, from the great Nelson Mandela himself to the delightful and
dancing Desmond Tutu, giants of black and African literature like Chinua
Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ndebele, who gave the inaugural lecture and Alice
Walker; formidable presidents like Thabo Mbeki and that legendary Finance Minister,
Trevor Manuel.
As you know, this is the 13th Memorial Lecture, and I happen
to have considered the number 13 to be a very lucky number indeed, combining as
it does the Hebrew letter for 1, which means love - do your research - with the
Hebrew letter for 3, which means unity. Maybe the fusion of love and unity in a
world fatally divided and dangerously unstable, may be one of the secret themes
of my talk this evening: Biko and the Tough Alchemy of Africa. Your great
struggle and your history have been the background music to our lives. We grew
up with a consciousness of your struggle and your suffering, and terrorism that
accompanied us through the years. In a sense your struggle highlighted to us
all over the continent the meaning of justice. As a child growing up just after
independence in Nigeria, one of the first moral questions about the world was
posed to me by your circumstance, that there was a country, that there were
countries in which it was enshrined that one race was inferior to another and
that one race can dehumanise another, posed to me questions that went right to
the root of existence. For many of us it even made us question the existence of
God; such injustice we felt could only exist in a godless universe.
The Sharpeville massacre of 1966 with its unforgettable
images that seared themselves into the consciousness of the world was one of
those world events that awoke us from our moral sleep. I was roughly the same
age as the children being slaughtered in that famous picture and it instantly
made me aware that our fates are one. I don't know how other people in other
continents saw that picture but from that day I too became a black South
African and we suffered with you in your sufferings and willed you on in your
struggles.
You have no idea what you mean in the historic consciousness
of the world. Sometimes it seems that awful things in history happen to compel
us to achieve the impossible, to challenge our idea of humanity. Your struggle
mirrored around the world, is one of the greatest struggles of our times. It
poses and continues to pose the biggest questions facing humanity; massive
philosophical questions that have never really been tackled by the great
thinkers of the human race. These are some of the questions which your history
posed: Are human beings really equal? Is justice fundamental to humanity or is
justice a matter of law? Is there evil? Can different races really live
together? Is love unreal in human affairs? Why is there so much suffering? Why
do some people seem to suffer more than others? Can the will of a people
overcome great injustice? Can a people transform their lives and their society
through the power of a new vision? Does God exist and is God unfair?
All across the continent and everywhere where human love
responds to the suffering of others, these questions were nagging kind of
music. All across Africa these questions troubled us - and among the voices
that articulated a profoundly bold and clear response to these big questions of
fate, injustice and destiny, one big voice pierced our minds was that of Steve
Biko. One of my points of affinity with Biko is with his rigour and his
high-standards of expectation of the human and the African spirit. He asks
fundamental questions like: Who are you? What are you? Are you what others say
you are? What is your selfhood? What makes you a man or a woman? He asks
questions which will be relevant in hundreds of years time, questions which are
an inevitable part of a free society. We need to reincarnate Biko's rigour, his
high-standards and his forensic questioning of society and of all of his
assumptions. We need to keep alive Biko's fierce and compassionate
truthfulness. In fact, we need Biko's spirit now more than ever. If he were
here today he might well ask such questions: Is the society just? Are we being
truthful about one another? Has there been a real change of attitudes and
assumptions on both sides of the racial divide? He might have expressed
concerns about the police reaction to the striking miners of Marikana. He would
have said that it does not need to be said that the murders and the use of
apartheid law to try the miners are shocking to the international community and
that it has disturbing resonances with his own death. He might well ask: Has
there been reconciliation without proper consideration? He might ask whether
the things that he fought against have merely mutated like certain cancerous
cells. It is a strange kind of fate for Biko to have suffered for in being so
unjustly cut down so early, he remains for us perpetually poised in the stance
of his difficult questions.
And to think of Biko is to have these questions always come
alive in our minds. He is like Kafka's axe that can always be used against the
frozen seas of lies and hidden attitudes that fog up the flow of a society's
possibilities. He is a figure of constant truth that will continue to haunt the
history of this nation as it negotiates through time the continued hidden
legacy of Apartheid. It is not surprising that his most famous work is called I
write what I Like. In a sense Biko transcends politics and has in him something
of the terrible integrity of the true artist, one who with hammer-blows will
relentlessly pursue his vision of exalted truth regardless of its consequences.
In that sense Biko is more than just the unfinished conscience of this land; he
is also that finger pointing at the only acceptable future: a life and a
society in which citizens can be proud of what they are. Biko's spirit is
permanently, fantastically set against the humiliation of man and woman. His
spirit is set against the mediocrity of consciousness, the mediocrity of a
consciousness that lives without a sense of what has happened to others. He is
not an easy guy. He does not like laziness or lazy thinking. He has the rigour
of a young man who will not accept that a decent life is impossible for his
people. He will not accept that an agreement has been reached without frank and
exhausted dialogue. He may well think that too much has been given away too
soon. He may even think that the people who have not honestly acknowledged the
death of the injustice they inflicted on others may still in fact harbour
deceits of those injustices.
In many ways Biko reminds me of Nietzsche; he did not trust
pity and he might have thought forgiveness not really forgiving till the fire
of truth has been brought into the consciousness of the one to be forgiven.
Generosity without steel can be a weak thing, just as steel without generosity
can be a cruel thing. This may be one of the real tragedy of Biko's death. The
apartheid struggle needed a dual strand: its hard and is gentle; its sternness
and its compassion; its fire and its water. With the murder of Biko some
tougher questions which would have been insisted upon might have found a more
authentic advocate. The fact is that a nation cannot escape from itself and
from all of its truths and all of its lies. If its lies linger too long in the
unspoken dialogue of a people, sooner or later they will lead to
unpleasantness. Even though Biko be absent, the people in the shanty-towns, the
poor and the hungry feel the shadow of those lies, feel the pointedness in
their lives of the questions that Biko might be asking today. I think I'm going
to have some water.
Great struggles tend to throw up great spirits. Great
suffering tends to throw up great minds who refuse to accept the terms of that
suffering. Something of the spirit of Prometheus breathed in the voice of
people like Steve Biko; voices who refused to accept the definition of his people
by those who define it downwards. Prometheus suffered his incarnation
incarceration on the great rock of Tartarus because he stole fire from the Gods
to give to humanity. One of the recipients of that fire was Steve Biko. I am
aware that there are many recipients of that fire - people like the great man
Nelson Mandela, father of the nation, figures like Chris Hani. But Steve Biko's
fate is one of latest in a long chain of Promethean destinies. Like the phoenix
of classical mythology, his end was his beginning. The power and truth of his
ideas spread with a special brilliance because of the flame of his death. It is
one of the curious things about history that whenever they kill the incarnation
of truth its voice is multiplied a-thousand-fold.
Your history has taught the world a thing or two about the
human spirit. From you we learned that eventually the spirit is unconquerable.
From you we learned that history is not inevitable but must be fought for with
love, with courage and with wisdom. From you we learned that the impossible
belongs to those who have not peered deep into the darkest darkness of the
night and still believe in the cycle of the sun. Forgive this rhapsody, but
often we take history for granted and those who live through it and come through
it take it as a kind of nightmare or a dream and therefore a kind of unreality.
For most of my life it seems that Apartheid could not be overcome. Our rage at
its reality seemed to have collapsed against what seemed like its eternity. It
seemed one of those unacceptable facts etched into the fabric of the world. In
England, where I lived in the latter part my life, it was assumed by many that
Apartheid would be with us for generations. It seemed like one of those
unalterable facts like fate or the moon or like hunger. But a great injustice
rouses something very deep in the human spirit, something deep that goes all
the way back to the Gods. We can almost say that greater justice awakens in us
the same forces that shape the world, a force greater than destiny itself, a
force that comes from the fire of the demiurge a force that tears down
mountains and throws up continents; a force like bursting volcano, a force of
thunder. This is a force slow to arouse but once roused and awoken, hard to
control. Such a force unleashed itself in the French Revolution and gave birth
to one of the great nations of the world and some of the great philosophies of
freedom. Such a forced was aroused in the American Revolution, one of the
Father Revolutions of the human race. But this force does not unleash itself in
revolutions only; it can burn in civil wars, it can implode in gulags and
forced inhuman policies and orgiastic historic rages.
When a people overcome the impossible, they achieve
eventually a kind of evolutionary shift and epistemological break. They
realise, eventually, deep in their souls something powerful about their will:
they are never quite the same people again. They change subtly something in
their DNA. They also experience a state of unreality.
History is like a nightmare we wake up from after a struggle
and blink in stupefaction at the strangeness of daylight. With awakening a
great energy is freed; a new question is posed: the nightmare is over but what
do we do with the day? We do not have enough psychologists of history. Everyone
seems to treat history as if our reaction to it should be logical. The people
have emerged from a mutual nightmare, what should they do upon awakening? What
should anyone do after a long trauma? What can anyone do?
Nations too, like individuals, need to heal. And healing
takes several forms. For some, healing is probing the wounds, seeking causes,
pursuing redress. For others, healing is dreaming, it is an active vision
during which time a future is dreamed of, shaped and put into place. For them
healing is an opportunity to transform themselves out of all that suffering,
all that trauma, and the heroic effort of all that overcoming. The unfortunate
thing about history is that it gives us no rest, no holidays. There are no pauses;
we go from struggle to struggle. The struggle to overcome and then the struggle
to live, to grow, to realise the potential seeded in our bones. We go from
tearing down the unacceptable to building the desirable without much of a break
in the dance.
But how long does this magic period last, the period of
raised consciousness when a people realise that the surging through them of all
the best energies of the human spirit? When they have effected a profound
change in their destiny and feel the euphoria of overcoming? How long does it
last, this sense of having climbed a mountain-top against all the odds and
gazing back down over the journey accomplished and feeling for a long
historical moment the sense that with the will power and the vision clear,
anything is possible?
Historical exaltation is too short. Life comes rushing in.
No one can dwell on a mountain-top long; the air there is too pure and unreal.
The value of mountain-tops is not to live on them but to see from them. To see
into the magic and difficult distances, to see something of the great journey
still ahead; to see, in short, the seven mountains that are hidden when we
climb. It may be only once that a people have such a vision. Maybe very, very
great nations have such a vision a few times, and each time they do they affect
a profound renewal in their history and take a quantum leap in their
development. Most nations never glimpse the mountain-top at all; never sense
the vastness and the greatness of the gritty glory that lies ahead of them in the
seven mountains each concealed behind the other. Maybe Ancient Greece saw such
a vision a few times and dreamed up its notion of a flawed democracy and left
its lasting legacy in its architecture, its literature, but above all in its
political structure for unleashing its genius upon the world. Maybe Ancient
Rome saw such a vision a few times too and built straight roads through
history, wresting with the idea of freedom and tyranny and conquered a sizeable
portion of the known world, and left for us their ambiguous legacy of empire,
literature and might.
But it is not often that a people reach a mountain-top and
descend with a rich vision of a transformed life for all of its people and then
set about realising it. Too often the euphoria gets swept away into an ideology
of state. Too often it is squandered. Too often that great moment is lost and
never to be experienced again and eventually forgotten in the mountainous
pilling up day after day after day after day of ordinary reality; the mire of
history, till disillusion and despair and boredom set in. And a people who
could have given mankind a new reality of how a society can be in a world where
so many good dreams are failing, becomes a society that scrabbles in the sand,
its eyes weep in poverty with division and tribal conflict at its heart and
emptiness in its days, its resources and hopes eaten away by corruption - a
society that faces into the darkness and the dullness with that glimpse of the
mountain-top faded into ordinary sunlight.
We invest great hopes in people who manage a great
overcoming. Maybe because of a certain nostalgia for our lost moment when we
too could have been a light to the world, or maybe for a nostalgia for what can
be the hope that we too can affect our own modest daily overcoming against
destiny. We like to believe that those who suffered can show us the true
meaning of that suffering, which is the point anyway for humanity to be. There
is no greater value to suffering than in having the authority to create a
better, fairer, truer and more beautiful life for its people. There are those
who think that suffering brutalises and dehumanises and turns men and women
into animals. There are those who see in Africa's troubles, nothing but what
they unintelligibly call 'African nihilism'. There are, to be sure, many cracks
and fissures in the human spirit and unimaginable horrors have been unleashed
in Europe and Asia and America; history shows no one to have completely pure
hands. But those who have had injustice perpetrated on them, who have suffered
unbelievable variations of humiliation and brutality, ought to have a special
light and vision on the nature of justice. This will be true of course but for
what Hamlet calls "bad dreams". Hence the necessity of that unique
kind of feeling.
Personally I favour healing as dreaming. A society comes
through fire a nightmare and it ought to heal through dreaming; not a dream of
sleep but the dream of vision. In some ways unreality is easier than reality.
And the reality of freedom demands more consistency, vision, courage and
practical love than was suspected in the unreality of injustice. And what
defines a society is not how it overcomes its night but what it does with the
long ever-after days of sunlight. Some will say that re-emerged from the night
with our hands tied and that the sunlight still has a lot of night in it and
that the terms of our freedom and the context of our independence put led
weights on our feet in a field where others have been running with free feet
and machine-assisted feet for hundreds of years before we entered the strange
game.
Some will even say that at every stage of our emergence into
sunlight we were hassled, sabotaged, undermined and the terms of our
participation fixed and limited - and that we are being judged in a game in
which the terms and conditions are twisted and lopsided in ways so subtle that
no one notices how they've done our participation before we begin. Some will
say many such things - how we play not our game but the game of others, and how
our leaders are confused and our participants corrupted, and the people cheated
and betrayed and left behind in hunger and poverty in the long after-years of
sunlight.
These things may or may not be true. What is true is that no
one will hand us the destiny that we want. No one will carry us to the future
that our bones and our history crave for. We must do it ourselves. It seems
that the courage and the ingenuity, and the toughness required for getting us
out of the night are indeed required much, much more for the ever-after day of
the long after-years of sunlight. Freedom was just the overture. Indeed,
freedom may just turn out to be a very small part of the true story of a
people. The real story begins with what they did with that freedom.
Part 2:
This has been the real challenge of Africa. This has been the
real challenge of our times. Can we make something worthwhile of our freedom?
Can we be fruitful and workable nations? Can we create a good life for our
people? But more crucially, can we make sustained and important contributions
to the world and help in our own way to take forward human civilisation? On the
whole it can be said that African nations began with hope, fell in chaos and
staggered into dependency. Or to take another variation it can be said that
African nations began in unity, collapsed into multiplicity and stumble in
division. Or to weave one more jazz note of history; that African nations began
in dreams, were overwhelmed by reality and stumble about in nightmare. Or to
take a classical turn, African nations came, saw and squandered.
All across the world in the late fifties and sixties could
be heard what Byron once called the First Dance of Freedom. Not long afterwards
came the cry of failure as civil wars, tribalism, coups and corruption
descended on the recent freedom dances. Then came the long decades of animi,
that was such a feast of gloating and salivation for western observers. People
emerged from the African world into a European-shaped reality in two or three
generations and no one wonders that there would be some confusion. People
entered an arena in which others have been shaping themselves as nation states
over hundreds of year and no one wonders that they would at first seem
inadequate. The fact is we might have lost control of our self-perception. We
might have lost control of how we see ourselves in the modern world. We see
ourselves and measure ourselves with outwardly determined standards. We don't
play our game.
We don't choose our values; but more seriously, emerging
from African reality into modern reality has had one major effect: time has
gotten speeded up for us. We are having to accomplish in 10 years what it took
European nations 2000 years to accomplish. Africa is having to compress in a
short time her own equivalent of the Roman Conquest, the Viking marauders, the Black
Death, feudalism, Civil War, the Industrial Revolution with its dark satanic
mills, capitalism, the poverty act, the union of the four warring nations and
the unholy spoils of colonialism - all into a few solitary decades.
There is however another way to read history. It could be
said that African nations have emerged from the long reality of their selfhood
into a different time and are engaged in a complex historical adjustment. We
need to define history more accurately, and the history of African people, the
Bantu, the Zulu, the Yarubas, to give a tiny example, is long, unique and needs
to be written and studied. History is not the story of the impact of the
western world on the African world; that is a small part of our history.
History is not objective. The meaning of history keeps on
revealing itself through time. Like a text of infinite interpretability,
history yields new meanings in relation to the eyes that behold it and the
pressures of the times. History may be memory, history may be vengeance,
history may be redemption - but whatever history is, it is too soon to
extrapolate the meaning of our recent histories. Those who write about history
in haste and fall into quick judgements, find that the long unfolding of events
change the meaning of the facts upon which they base their judgements. Time is
a great ironist. The historian who makes a quick judgement again the United
States of America right in the middle of her apocalyptic Civil War, would be
made fooling by the unfolding destiny of that nation.
History may be fact, history may be a dream, history may be
revelation. It is not how things are that count, it's what you do with them,
what vision you have and with what strength you march towards that vision. We
need a new consciousness. History is always responsive to a new consciousness.
Part 3:
Do you want me to keep going? I'm just trying to make sure
I'm not talking to myself. They say the greater the mistakes the greater the
lessons that can be learned. Africa has surely made enough mistakes for us to
learn about. Among other things we are rich in mistakes. Some nations in the
world make their mistakes over thousands of years, we made ours over decades.
We have made enough mistakes to become nations of genius if we had that
inclination. Maybe that is why there is the beginnings of a new consciousness,
a new stirring of national success slowly creeping across the continent. But
what are some of these mistakes: the slide towards dictatorship and tyranny,
corruption becoming a 'natural' part of the national fabric, the depletion of
national resources by ruling elite, the erosion of civil liberties, the failure
to realise that nations can die just like businesses, companies or individuals.
You do not need me to tell you that if Biko were alive today, his cry to Africa
would be to put its house in order. He would be appalled at the civil wars, the
failure to feed and educate the people, the greed of government officials, and
the general failure to live up to the promise of the great struggles for
liberation. He would be harder on us than our critics because he would expect
from us the highest standards of national life.
I interpret Black Consciousness not only in relation to the
history of oppression; I interpret it also as an injunction to the highest
fulfilment of a people's possibilities. Black Consciousness means nothing if it
does not also mean the best flowering of our reality. To me Black Consciousness
means equality, freedom, community, grassroot transformation, but it also means
excellence, humanity, foresight, wisdom, and a transcendence of our weakness
and our flaws. Stripped of its specific context of Apartheid the core of Black
Consciousness does not seem to me a polarising message. Rather it is a call for
the awakening of the spirit, a call such as the ancestors might have made.
Wherever a people are oppressed, the first thing they must remember is who they
are. But once liberation has been achieved, the first thing they must remember
is who they want to be. The heart of Black Consciousness is a message of
'becoming'; it's goal is not limited, it hints as a continuing journey of
self-discovery and self-realisation. This can be as wide and as expansive as
the mind that interprets it. There can be no end to a self-realisation. Every
day we discover more and more who we can be - this is what Black Consciousness
says to me: become who you are, and also, become what you truly can be. It is
an injunction of greatness. In fact, it is an injunction to leadership. It says
in effect that black people because of their history and all that they have
learned, should show the world a new way of being - to paraphrase, a better way
of being human. I'm coming to the end, slowly.
Part 4:
There are three kinds of leaders. There are the ones who
make, there are the ones who bring meaningful change. There are the ones who
make change real. And then there are those who squander the possibilities of
their times. The challenge of our times has always been the challenge of
leadership. It is not the only challenge but it is the most symbolic. Black
Consciousness is an injunction to leadership because the people can only be as
liberated as its leaders are - in that sense Black Consciousness says that to
liberate in your mind and freeing your consciousness, you should be your own
leader. Everyone therefore carries the burden of leadership. To that degree,
the leaders that you have says something about the kind of people that you are.
Previously leadership was considered on its own as an
isolated event of responsibility. We tended to blame our leaders for our
failings. The micro responsibility of Black Consciousness implies that we
should blame or praise ourselves for our leaders for they are what we have
enabled them to become. To me Black Consciousness suggests that the people take
the responsibilities for their lives, their societies, and their destiny. This
is not a textual but an intuitive reading of Black Consciousness. I am not
advocating civil unrest but. I am not advocating civil unrest but that the
people are complicit in how their societies are run, how their history turns
out. The people cannot be passive about the single most important thing that
affects them, which is the running of their lives. In that sense there is a
micro and a macro dimension of Black Consciousness, but its core is that of
liberating for time and in all historical circumstances the consciousness, the
conscience and the spirit of a people. After all, the people cannot come away
in their oppression and fall right asleep after their liberation. A continued
wakefulness is the burden of Black Consciousness, a continued vigilance is its
responsibility. More than that, an ever-higher refinement of the possibilities
of the people, an ever-higher reach in its potential and the realisation ought
to be its goal.
The renewal of a people of continent is a miraculous thing.
And it happens when a great new idea takes root in a people; when they see the
image of themselves not as they were but as they can be. It is a renewed
self-vision. Its source is a potent and enchanted vision; it is conveyed
through inspiration and sustained by example. Through the undercurrents of our
minds, the idea is passed along that we can have good houses, good roads,
decent education, fulfilling jobs. The idea is passed along in the undercurrent
of our minds that we can stand tall and be fruitful under the sun. The idea is
passed along that no one needs to starve and that everyone can have access to
health services. The idea is passed along that we can question many of our
beliefs, we can apply reason to our inherited notions that we can transfigure
our superstitions. The idea is passed along that we can transcend our tribalism
without losing our roots; that we can transcend our religion without losing our
faith. The idea is passed along that we can transcend our race without losing
its uniqueness; that we can transcend our past without losing our identity. It
is passed along that we can only look forward and that has been done many times
in history all over the world and is being done slowly today in Asia and places
like Brazil - that we can remake our societies closer to our heart's desire.
The idea starts along that now is the time to show the true greatness on the
part of your liberation. Now is the time to create a society commensurate to
the ideals which the people fought for and for which so many died.
That the fire of your history is a refining fire, producing
from the blood of martyrs the goal of a new civilization.
Part 5:
In alchemy there are two ways to accomplish what is known as
a great work. They are called the dry way and the wet way. The dry way is short
and dangerous. The wet way is long and safe. In political terms the short way
requires a certain kind of dictatorship, thoroughly unified people and highly
focussed vision - Japan, the Soviet Union and China in some ways exemplify
this; they try to bring about fantastic transformation in society in a very
short time. The results are often ambivalent. With Stalin and [indistinct] Mao
millions died in the spectre of the gulags haunt success experiments. Only
Japan uniquely showed the fruitfulness of this difficult way. But for national
of diversity involved in a land of many tribes and many races, the ideal seems
to be the wet way. Europe took time to arrive at its current stability. America
needed 200 years and a civil war to become itself.
We must measure time differently. Our history began long
before the history of others. We must measure time not in the length of
oppression but by the persistence of our dreams - and our dreams go back a long
way, way beyond the fall of Carthage, which Mandela says we are to rebuild, and
way beyond the first imperfect Egyptian pyramids. The cycles of time, like the
inundation of the Nile, have the deposited on us the immeasurable silt of human
experiences. We have great wealth in all that is at the root of humanity. If
there is a correlation between experience and wisdom, between suffering and
understanding, Africa is the riches delta of possible transformation. The dream
of our ancestors nestles in the Rift Valley, when the greatest enemy of man was
not man but night itself. Our ancestors battled with all manner of monsters and
evils within and without - and this long period of time and long march to
civilisation must have forged in them some unconquerable sense of a human
spirit. Just as rocks bear the strata of the ages they have witnessed, so deep
inside us are the strata of unmeasured overcoming.
Let us be tempered. May the fire of history burn us into a
new consciousness. Let the white learn from the black and the black learn from
the white. I'm quoting Taoism here. Different histories come together in one
great sea. Let us raise one another. You have something special to give the
world, and the gift of your genius, our genius will be revealed not long after
we claim the right to be ourselves. We can be no one else. We must therefore
accept as history, we must therefore accept our history with all of its flaws.
We should hide nothing from ourselves about who we have been. We can only
transform that which we face. What we are now is only the present slice of a
picture of ourselves; there can be no final definition of what we are. We grow
and change in accordance with necessity and vision, and yet in some mysterious
way will become more and more ourselves.
Thirty-five years ago a visionary son of the soil who was
going to become a doctor, was slain. From his grave may a thousand dreams of
freedom rise. May the vengeance for his torture and his slaughter be the
constant coming into being, of a beautiful South Africa. A beautiful South
Africa where the frisson between the races be always creative and compel them
towards dynamic harmony, and where the intelligence in the rich nurturing of
citizenship is nourished by the dragon's blood of his and other martyrs'
immolation. Pass the word on. Pass the word along the five great rivers of
Africa - from the Cape of Wise Hope to the sinuous mountains and the tranquil
savannah. Pass on the word that there are three Africas. The one that we see
every day; the one that they write about and the real magical Africa that we
don't see unfolding through all the difficulties of our time, like a quiet
miracle. Effect the world with your light. Press forward the human genius. Our
future is greater than our past. Bless you all.
