Chairperson,
Esteemed President of the democratic Republic,
Honourable Members of the Constitutional Assembly,
Our distinguished domestic and foreign guests,
Friends,
On an occasion such as this, we should, perhaps, start from
the beginning.
So, let me begin.
I am an African.
I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains
and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and
the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day
snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of
the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by
startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.
The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the
sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.
The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured
waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all
been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish
deeds of the theatre of our day.
At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should
concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the
elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential
mosquito.
A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of
our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I
am an African!
I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls
haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the
most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first
to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and
they who, as a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these
ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former
deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its
remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new
home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of
me.
In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came
from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of
my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave
master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa
and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the
soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of
freedom.
My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the
victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned
from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the
Berbers of the desert.
I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer
graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the
suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed
homesteads, a dream in ruins.
I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to
trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my
stomach yearns.
I come of those who were transported from India and China,
whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide
physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign,
who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary
condition for that human existence.
Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that
none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.
I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom
are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one redress a wrong
that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the
indefensible.
I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of
force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative
even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.
I know what if signifies when race and colour are used to
determine who is human and who, sub-human.
I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the
consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the
benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had ensured that
they enjoy.
I have experience of the situation in which race and colour
is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest.
I have seen the corruption of minds and souls in the pursuit
of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.
I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity
of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic
oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.
There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish
reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek
solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who
have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.
Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those
who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly
proportional to their personal welfare.
And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they
kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the
innocent in the taxi wars.
They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from
the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants
to murder wife and wife, husband.
Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past -
killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute
disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from
the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who
brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.
All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!
Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental
truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines.
I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.
I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death,
torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation
of injustice.
The great masses who are our mother and father will not
permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country
and people as barbaric.
Patient because history is on their side, these masses do
not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist
when, tomorrow, the sun shines.
Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and
because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who
they are and who they should be.
We are assembled here today to mark their victory in
acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what
it means to be African.
The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes and
unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be
defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins.
It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa
belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as
Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.
It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is
both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated
from the material well-being of that individual.
It seeks to create the situation in which all our people
shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national
group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by
another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental
human rights and the fear of tyranny.
It aims to open the doors so that those who were
disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow
human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic
dispersal.
It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to
state their views, promote them, strive for their implementation in the process
of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression.
It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to
arbitrary rule.
It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means
rather than resort to force.
It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the
space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.
As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud,
proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit.
Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the
fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and
African minds.
Bit it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity
that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional
fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind,
to define for ourselves what we want to be.
Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to
pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness.
But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves
and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than
human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to
remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be
sought after!
Today it feels good to be an African.
It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and
as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the African National Congress, to
say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an input into
the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have
presided over the birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted
their wits one against the other, to the unseen stars who shone unseen as the
management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly, the advisers,
experts and publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across
the globe - congratulations and well done!
I am an African.
I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.
The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of
Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear.
The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation
of my continent is a blight that we share.
The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from
our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a
persistent shadow of despair.
This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned.
This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of
a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of
humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the
ashes.
Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us
now!
Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace!
However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will
prosper!
Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however
much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the
fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err
today and say - nothing can stop us now!
Thank you
