His Royal Highness Prince Harry
Mama Graça Machel
Other Madiba Family Members
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Good evening!
Thank you for joining us this evening to mark the second anniversary of our Founder’s passing. Since we gathered in December 2013 to bid Madiba farewell, a great deal has happened in our country and around the world.
I’ll refer to three events by way of example. As we speak, waves of people continue to migrate to Europe or North America away from wars, famine, poverty, and endless political instability. Racism in law enforcement in the United States attracts global attention. Perhaps what has captured national attention the most in South Africa must be the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall student campaigns. Much of the world has followed with great interest our student activism aspects of which are the focus of my reflections tonight.
Indeed, tonight, as we recall the memory of Nelson Mandela, is not the time for sentimentality. The memory of Madiba enjoins us to face history squarely with rigour, particularly in the face of increasing assaults on his legacy only twenty-one years after a free and democratic South Africa came into being, against a background of over a hundred years of what Oliver Tambo, back in the early 1960s while in exile in Dar Es Salaam, described as "the most profitable system of oppression on the African continent". The effects of that system today are persistent despite the political and constitutional efforts to change them since 1994. The global foundations of that system are more than three hundred years old. We aught to know history rigorously; more so our own history.
Two months ago, in this auditorium, we hosted a dialogue with youth leaders from universities across South Africa. Many of them expressed the view that Madiba sold out black South Africans in the negotiations which enabled a transition to democracy in our country. More recently we have heard the same view expressed by others – from the desperate caught in the crushing nexus of poverty and inequality, to the populist opportunists who exploit desperation.
Allow me a moment to recall.
Allister Sparks takes time in his book Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Negotiated Revolution to describe a meeting that took place in a ‘private house in Johannesburg’s affluent suburb of Houghton' between three generals: Constant Viljoen, Tienie Groenewald and Kobus Visser, who represented the Volksfront, and the ANC represented by Mandela, struggle tested commander of the ANC’s guerrilla force, Joe Modise, and chief of staff Joe Nhlanhla. The meeting took place at a particularly dangerous phase of the negotiated transition. At that time elements of the South African Defense Force seemed dangerously poised to begin an armed intervention.
Mandela, with his characteristic candour when the stakes were high, is reported to have given the generals his frank appraisal of the situation everyone faced.
"If you go to war," he told the generals, "I must be honest and admit that we cannot stand up to you on the battlefield. We don’t have the resources. It will be a long and bitter struggle, many people will die and the country may be reduced to ashes. But you must remember two things. You cannot win because of our numbers: you cannot kill us all. And you cannot win because of the international community. They will rally to our support and they will stand with us." General Viljoen was forced to agree. The two men looked at each other … and faced the truth of their mutual dependency.[1]
“Nothing could be clearer; nothing more devastating in its logic and the clarity of inevitable implications. Mandela’s technique is to concede to the relative strength of an adversary, a concession which buttresses the latter’s self-confidence. But the implications that follow the logic of the battlefield are devastating. They promise a low-value outcome too stark to disregard. They guarantee a pyrrhic victory of little worth to both sides. It is at that point that mutual interest emerges and its further affirmed by an agreement to explore a different path.”[2]
It is should be clear from this that much more is at stake here than the often assumed sentimentality of “rainbowism” or that which is also often attached to “reconciliation”, a concept accorded parliamentary status through an act of parliament taken by the rational collective of a legislative body.[3]
The lives of millions of South African people were at stake. So also was the future of an entire nation. It was a moment of difficult decisions. The moment required proven leadership, character, honour, intellectual and moral rectitude of the highest order. The one entrusted by his political party with the responsibility to lead in this critical moment carried a mandate of his party and was able to convince opponents whose standing he respected, to see his and his party’s point of view. He carried out his responsibility with sincerity and conviction that were selfless and whose historical value is recognized at home and globally.
These qualities did not spring out of the blue. They developed over time in an individual, within an organizational and national contexts. They were to be observed and recognised with admiration by the oppressed and grudgingly by the oppressors who knew how formidable they were, even in an adversary.
This is how Oliver Tambo, a close associate of Madiba, described him: “As a man Nelson is passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage. He has a natural air of authority. He cannot help magnetizing a crowd: he is commanding with a tall, handsome bearing; trusts and is trusted by the youth, for their impatience reflects his own; appealing to the women. He is dedicated and fearless. He is the born mass leader.”[4]
It strikes me that if, as Tambo intimates, there was mutual trust between Nelson Mandela and the youth of his time as a result of a shared impatience, then Madiba's relationship with today's youth may be expected to be different. The youth of today are mostly presented with Mandela as a leader whose thinking and general sensibility had matured through years of incarceration. He developed an integrative, real-life orientated vision of the kind he displayed at his meeting with the generals. Some of the contemporary impatience of today's youth with Madiba's maturity may be indicative of intergenerational relationships which, being out of synchrony are not necessarily incompatible.
The youth of today may need to retrace the steps of South African and world history to understand better the context of Madiba's period of impatience and determine what similarities and differences there might be between then and now. They might then be able to discern and even develop a social understanding with a concomitant political programme and rules of engagement best suited to the times. They might even fruitfully ask what might be done with the combination of their impatience and Madiba's maturity in his later years. It could just make for a most creative, activist resourcefulness.
One of the most forthright commentators on Madiba, Malaika wa Azania, makes precisely this point about the importance of a rigorous knowledge of history: "The narrative that Mandela is the liberator rather than one of the many contributors to our Struggle is vulgar. It is vulgar not only because it is rooted in falsification, but because it threatens to rewrite history. No greater injustice can be committed than to deny future generations the right to learn about their true history – a weapon needed for their own liberation.”[5]
But at the heart of her article, Malaika cautions against the cult of personality and deification of leaders. When such deification occurs even political parties can deify their own leaders to the extent that they abrogate their responsibility to hold those leaders to account.
But there is much to indicate that older generations of South Africans also need to retrace their own steps of history with rigour. Then intergenerational contact may take place within a context of greater shared knowledge. It is also about the power of experience and example in the flows of interaction between generations.
In this connection we have to ask: when a senior citizen, a leader of the stature of a head of state is perceived not abide by the requirements of state institutions he is joined by law to protect and advance, and thus by his own actions, undermines the constitution and the rule of law, is it Nelson Mandela who taught him to cut the vital transmission of high value to future generations?
Do such actions not lead to the despair of the young and the disappointment and deep sense of betrayal among those who have walked the difficult journey up this point?
We want to observe further that there is no society in the world that does not function according to some system of law or customary conduct tested over generations of social practice and as a result perceived to have resulted in sustainable benefits to the social order; and that these societal codes of law and conduct cannot be changed or altered at the whims of leaders. Otherwise a dangerous arbitrariness is introduced into the workings of the social order
Does such arbitrariness and the lawlessness engendered not lead to frustration and insecurity in the among citizens?
It needs to be stated that the constitution, reconstructive policies, radical legislation, and a host of institutions of democracy diligently put in place in the first ten years of our democracy represent collectively a radical edifice of hope and aspiration. They are not to be trifled with at our whims.
Indeed, it is not the institutions or Madiba that have failed us, but our human capacity to achieve the solemn goals for which the institutions were created, whenever we fail to abide by legally and morally constituted norms.
It is by our rededication to the solemn aspirations of 1994 that will help us get beyond the invidious moment in which all of us South Africans are still trapped in a present, with deep roots in the past, in which some of us perceive themselves to be trapped in the impersonal logic of what they own, despite their best intentions, while others are trapped in the logic of what has been kept away from them, despite their best aspirations.
It is the challenge of public discussion what and how much to give away, and what and how much to receive. But there is another, even more critical part of the discussion: what will be done with what has been given; and what will be done with what is received? What partnerships of restructuring economic life will be forged for stronger bonds of citizenship? This is part of the discussion of equity in the future that Thomas Piketty so eloquently spoke to at this year's Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture. We have the responsibility to succeed to the highest levels where public interest invests its collective intelligence in public good for the greatest good.
That way we may yet deal with embedded structures of dominance of over one hundred years, which constrain our efforts, oftentimes severely, and which make us both resentful of such inherited structures at the same time as we are dependent on them.
If there are any sell-outs in South Africa and everywhere in the world, they are the ones who have stopped dreaming. Stopped working. Stopped elevating the needs of the wretched of the earth above their own need for power, privilege and self-enrichment. Stopped walking the journey whose historic prospects energize at the same time as they may seem daunting.
It is about this walk that Madiba said: “The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road … The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”
The resilience of his legacy keeps saying, as he did repeatedly in the last years of his life: “it is in your hands now.” It is our hands that must do the talking, as we keep walking.
Finally, it is the mandate and duty of the Nelson Mandela Foundation to promote Nelson Mandela's legacy. But we do not expect that that legacy will always be praised. What we do think and deeply believe is that his legacy does play a vital and fundamental role in unfolding of South Africa's future. We do believe that our deep respect for it is shared by many in his country and in the world over.
Njabulo S Ndebele
Chairman: Nelson Mandela Foundation
[1] Allister Sparks, Tomorrow is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Negotiated Revolution. (Sandton: Struik, 1994). pp. 202-4.
[2] Njabulo S Ndebele. Introduction. In Kader Asmal, David Chidester, Wilmot James eds. South Africa’s Nobel Laureates. (Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2004
[3] Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995,
[4] Oliver Tambo. Introduction. In Nelson Mandela. No Easy Walk to Freedom. UK: Heinemann African Writers Series, 1965.
[5] Sunday Independant / 19 July 2015