21 March 2001
Professor Magubane,
The Trustees of the South African Democratic Education Trust,
Our esteemed Sponsors,
Distinguished Guests,
Comrades,
Ladies and Gentlemen
I am pleased to be here today as we launch this very important project that seeks to record the history of our liberation struggle, to keep track of the road to democracy and celebrate the heroes and heroines who have built and walked along this difficult road. In his novel, To Every Birth Its Blood, published in 1981, Mongane Wally Serote writes the following:
"Like an old tree, the Movement spreads and spreads its roots. It entrenches itself in the soil, issuing root after root, to spread and spread and spread. Some roots end up on rocks, baking in the sun. Some end up in sand. The tall tree, spreading its branches all around, gives shade to the weary.
The Movement is an idea in the mind of the people; a resolve that it will never accept the process of defeat. The Movement, like the sea, is deep, is vast, is reflective. It can be calm. It can be rough and tough. Like the wind, it moves and moves and moves."
I believe that through the Road to Democracy Research Project we shall come closer to identifying "the roots" which Serote describes and "the branches", and capture for posterity this idea in "the mind of the people" that strengthened our resolve towards freedom.
As a result of struggle, South Africans from all walks of life, of all colours, went to the polls in 1994, the majority for the first time in our history.
After many decades of struggle, the success of the Movement for National Liberation in attaining its goals through peaceful means made many believe we had defied the logic of history so that those who had predicted a bloodbath were proved wrong.
Yet up to the present time, almost seven years into our new democracy, a definitive and all-embracing history of our struggle has yet to be written. In endorsing this project, I believe that all of us should stress the importance of history and memory in shaping our new nation and the road ahead.
In the past, the absence of recorded historical memory has meant that we could not fully access our past, nor adequately understand and explain the condition especially of the African people. The recorded history of this country taught in our schools for many years was the history of the white section of our population. It was the history of a people who denied the history of the black majority living in the same country. It was a history in total denial or denigration of the struggles of the liberation movement for freedom for all South Africans.
This unwritten - and to many of our youth unknown South African history - is also important as it is our consciousness of the past that gives us individual and collective identity through which we face our present and our future. It is the legitimate task of history to humanise us, to free our view of the past from prejudice and distortion and thus to reveal that past more clearly with all its great and false values, both the constructive and destructive tendencies of human beings. The generations that grow up during our democratic era dare not be oblivious of where we come from or forget the sacrifices made by those who preceded them and brought us to where we are.
While each generation of young militants celebrates its unique contribution, it does so perhaps without understanding the continuities of our history and that each phase of our struggle is both conditioned and made possible by previous phases. It does so without knowing that the roots and the branches which Serote writes about are still spreading in their midst.
The danger of ignorance and forgetfulness is greatest now that we have won our liberation struggle. However, the sacrifices of those who came before us, of our contemporaries and our youth, in the struggle for liberation, should be a strong motivating factor to commit our people to the struggle to defend and consolidate our democracy.
The very act of writing this road to democracy is in itself a democratic act because it allows many voices to speak and different stories to be told. By implication, we are also saying that as we consolidate our democracy and deepen our democratic practices, as we strive to improve our system of governance and to create democratic systems appropriate to the African reality, the creation of a democratic ethos and the fine-tuning of our democratic character are dependent on our full understanding of the nature of struggle and the nature of power. Within our history are lessons we and future generations must learn so that we are better able to grapple with the challenges of reconstruction and development.
This new history means that our collective and African memory will help us find new foundations on which the future has to be built.
Perhaps equally important is that our history must present us with and project the ongoing, palpable, living histories of our people. Thus our task is not merely to regurgitate the dull and dusty facts of the past. Rather, our task is to show the human faces that made history and thus ensure that the historical account is itself a monumental tribute to those to whom we owe our liberty. This history must also show the threads linking the struggle within our country to the solidarity movement of people throughout the world against apartheid, people from around the globe, who are not South African, but whose activities contributed to bringing us to where we are today. The global anti-apartheid struggle was unprecedented in world history in uniting the peoples of the world around a single cause, drawing in people from all walks of life in every country in the world. To this day, those from the rest of the world who combined with us to defeat the apartheid monster, remain engaged with us in the effort to rebuild our country.
When we speak of a new internationalism, surely this sustained global cohesion around the objective of building a prosperous, non-racial and non-sexist democratic South Africa must stand out as an important example.
There are many who are here today who are among the makers of our history, or who represent countries which have contributed to our democratic victory. We salute all of you and thank you for your heroic contributions! Professor Magubane has pointed out the objectives of the Road to Democracy Research Project, and most of you will have seen the brochure. Now let us get down to writing our own history and let us begin to do so through the participation of each and everyone in this room. The collective memory that we are forging together is after all dependent on the memories of each and everyone of us. I would like to thank all the sponsors for coming on board and showing their commitment to the mammoth task before us by agreeing to fund this project.
Only by telling ourselves and the world who we are, through tracing our long and arduous historic journey to freedom, can we come to understand who we are and what we should do for ourselves, including growing the magnificent and tall tree of democracy which will continue to spread its branches and give a welcoming shade to all people and nations all over the world.
I thank you.