On the occasion of the 72nd anniversary of the ANC, Pallo Jordan commemorates this event with an article on one of his heroes, Dr W B Rubusana, a founder-member of the ANC In the light of the massacres, tortures and arrests in Mdantsane, the tribute is a fitting one.
The 21st September 1910 will long be remembered in the annals of the Cape Provincial Council. On that day, the first and the last African ever to be elected to serve as a member of the Provincial Council won the contest for the Thembuland constituency. The event, which in most other countries would have been unremarkable, caused quite a stir in South Africa,
To the die-hard white bigots it was the realisation of their worst fears. One African in the seats of a legislative body, even on the provincial level, promised hundreds more tomorrow. Ironically, it was precisely the same line of reasoning that excited jubilation among the African communities in all four of the recently unified provinces of South Africa. Newspaper articles celebrated the event in bold-type headlines, lengthy editorials were written either in approbation or disapproval, praise poems were composed to memorialise the name of the successful black candidate—Dr Walter Benson Rubusana, a fifty-two-year-old minister of the Congregational Church, living and working in East London.
Walter Rubusana's candidacy in the Provincial Council elections of 1910 was correctly considered by all observers as a bold step indeed. Two years previously, in an editorial written by John Tengo Jabavu, the African electors of the Cape had assured the white electorate that they felt no need to put forward African candidates in elections because of their faith in the fair-mindedness of their white counterparts. Such faith had been found to be misplaced when the Constitution for the Union of South Africa was drawn up with its notorious 'colour bar' clauses. Rubusana's candidacy was a response to this affront, as well as an act of political self-assertion on the part of the African electorate of the Cape who had too long allowed themselves to live in the shadow of the white liberal political establishment. Rubusana was chosen as the instrument for these purposes because of the prestige he enjoyed within the black community and in recognition of his personal contribution to the political struggles of that community.
Rubusana's Career
Rubusana was born on 21st February 1858 at Mnandi in the Somerset East district of the then Cape Colony. His father, Rubusana kaMbonjana, was a senior councillor (umphakathi) to the Paramount Chief, Sandile kaNggika. Like many of his peers Rubusana kaMbonjana had been influenced by the presence of Christian missionaries in the midst of the Xhosa people. He sent his sons to the nearby mission school, where he hoped they would learn and master the skills which the white colonialists were applying with such great effect against the African people. After acquiring a primary school education, Walter Benson Rubusana was admitted to Lovedale, the Free Church of Scotland mission school on the banks of the Tyhume River. Here, under the tutorship of Dr James Stewart, he studied for the Cape Teachers' Certificate, passing the final examination with a distinction in 1878. Rather than going out to teach, he remained at Lovedale to study theology under the guidance of Dr Stewart and the Reverend Andrew Smith.
In 1880 Walter B. Rubusana left Lovedale to take up a teaching post at the Peelton mission station, where he also worked as assistant pastor. It was at this post, in 1883, that he married Deena Nzanzana, his first wife, who bore him five daughters and a son. He remained at Peelton until his ordination as a minister of the Congregational Church in 1884, at which time he transferred to East London, which was to be his residence for the rest of his life.
The 'Red' and School' People
The decade during which Rubusana was born witnessed the military defeat and economic destruction of the Xhosa kingdom. It was inaugurated with one of the most bitterly fought frontier wars, which coincided with the so-called 'Second Hottentot Rebellion.' The Xhosa kingdom and its allies, the rebels of the Kat River Coloured Settlement, proved no match for the powerful British Empire. After three years of war the Xhosa sued for peace. In 1857 the remnants of the kingdom were convulsed by the Nongqause messianic movement, which irrevocably destroyed the economic base of Xhosa society. In 1858, the year Rubusana was born, more than 5,000 passes were issued to Africans in the Eastern Cape to enter the service of white farmers as labourers. The division between African traditional society and the agrarian capitalism of the Cape Colony was disappearing, and thousands of Africans were being absorbed into the white-controlled economy as a subordinate class of labourers.
Apart from military conquest, other factors conspired to enhance the rapid acculturation of the Africans of the Eastern Cape to the Cape colonial society. Missionaries had been active amongst the Xhosa since the 1790s. A small but growing body of Christian converts living and working amongst their traditionalist brethren were carriers of the ideas, values and skills of 19th century Europe. The traditionalists saw the converts as a potential source of subversion, whom they designated 'amagqoboka' - the penetrable ones. The converts in turn regarded themselves as a community of the elect, calling themselves the 'school people,' as distinct from the 'red people' (derived from the red ochre traditionalists used to decorate their bodies).
State policy during the 1850s and 60s dovetailed well with these divisions amongst the Africans of the Cape. The British governor, George Grey, was intent on destroying the political and moral authority of the traditional Xhosa leaders, who had been the spearhead of anti-colonialist resistance for the past seventy years. One means of achieving this was to sponsor the converts as an alternative 6 centre of moral authority. In terms of the new constitution granting the Cape Colony representative government, all British subjects who fulfilled certain property qualifications were eligible to register as electors. This colour-blind constitution had as its objective the creation of a racially mixed agrarian capitalist society dominated by a class of well-to-do capitalist farmers. Many of the African converts had already been absorbed into this stratum of colonial society, owning extensive farms which produced grain, cattle, wool and other cash crops for the market. Walter Benson Rubusana naturally found his niche in this section of the black community, when he reached maturity.
Imbumba Yama Nyama
Rubusana began his professional life during a period of intense political activity. In 1882 the South African Aborigines' Association, known in Xhosa as Imumba Yama Nyama, was founded by a group of African peasants. 1884 saw the inauguration of two more significant movements, the Native Electoral Association, led by John Tengo Jabavu, and the Native Education Association, led by Elijah Makiwane. In November of that year the first issue of Imvo Zabantsundu, the first independent African newspaper, rolled off the presses in King William's Town.
Imbumba, the Native Electoral Association, the Native Education Association and Imvo were all the creations and institutions of the growing Christian African elite, made up of a few rich farmers, hundreds of small property owners, a sprinkling of professional men and a number of skilled craftsmen, Most of them regarded the institutions of the Cape Colony as a sound foundation on which to build a common society embracing black and white. like the liberal white politicians of the Cape they spoke in terms of 'equal rights for all civilised men,' and had formed political organisations to secure and extend their political rights. During the 1880sevents beyond their control were destined to reverse their political fortunes.
Gold Mines and Mass Labour Force
The opening of the Witwatersrand goldfields in 1885 was the critical watershed of South African economic history in the 19th century. Within a few months what had formerly been bare veld was transformed into a teeming boom town named Johannesburg. Fortune hunters from all over the world swarmed into the Rand, capital from South Africa and abroad flowed in to exploit the new-found wealth. After a few years of unrestrained outcrop mining, the seams close to the surface had been exhausted, and deep level mining had to be pursued to get at the rich seams of gold-bearing rock locked beneath the ground. In this situation the small scale operator was unable to compete with the big mining companies that had made their fortunes in diamond mining. Consequently, within a decade, gold mining was virtually monopolised by a handful of big mining corporations capitalised by local and international bankers.
The mining industry's primary requirement was a mass labour force which could be had by the expropriation of the African peasant from the land. The precepts of 'Cape liberalism,' elaborated in the context of the Cape's agrarian capitalism, had to be replaced with a comprehensive programme to separate the African peasants from their land, shackle them with poll taxes and pass laws, so that they could be herded in droves to minister to the ever-growing needs of the gold mining industry. To achieve this, the African peasant had first to be politically disarmed by dilution
The first major step was taken in 1887, when the Parliamentary Voters' Registration Bill was placed before parliament, ostensibly with a view to preventing 'uncivilised' blacks from acquiring the franchise. The annexation of the Transkei to the Cape Colony that year would have added some 30,000 Africans to the electoral register of the Cape. The 1887 Act, by excluding communally-held land from the terms of qualification for the franchise, was clearly aimed at holding down the numbers of African voters. Five years later, in 1892. the Franchise and Ballot Act imposed a literacy test on all prospective black voters. In 1894 the Glen Grey Act established the Bhunga, or council, system of indirect rule over Africans in the reserves. The Glen Grey Act sounded the death knell of Cape liberalism and shut the door against the ideal of a common society, by setting up a special body of laws exclusively applicable to the African people.
Jabavu and the Liberals
Up until this time the African electors in the Cape had employed a simple but apparently effective strategy devised by John Tengo Jabavu and other leaders of the Native Electoral Association. They realised that, being few in numbers and being concentrated in a few pockets of the Eastern Cape, their best hope was to utilise a strategy of en bloc voting to support one parliamentary candidate.
In 1883 Jabavu had formed a close association with three of the Cape's leading liberal politicians: James Rose Innes, John X Merriman and J W Sauer. He acted as Rose Innes' election agent in 1884, securing the bloc vote of the African constituents. Rose Innes and his friends realised that they owed these Africans voters a debt of gratitude, and were therefore amenable to political pressures from that quarter. The leaders of the Native Electoral Association (NEA) in turn hoped to use the African bloc vote to keep liberal politicians in parliament as a means of resisting the racist pressures of the Afrikaner Bond. Jabavu personally tried to convince the Coloured political leaders to join in such efforts because he realised that the Bond's Policies would result in the disfranchisement of all blacks.
The NEA strategy was viable so long as their aims did not conflict with the commitments the liberal politicians had incurred in other quarters. Once having elected a liberal to office, there was little the African voters could in fact do to hold him to his promises. A case in point was James Rose Innes. In 1894 Rose Innes supported the Glen Grey Bill in the full knowledge that its provisions seriously compromised the interests of his African constituents.
These experiences had a profoundly disillusioning effect on Rubusana and his peers. They began to question the wisdom of Jabavu's strategy of alliance with the liberal politicians, and sought to devise a new one based on independent African organisations. This group coalesced around Nathaniel Cyril Mhala, and founded a second newspaper, Ilizwi Labantu, in 1898. While the Ilizwi group necessarily also had to employ a parliamentary strategy, they refused to be constrained by considerations of persons and past association. They insisted on judging the white politicians on their deeds rather than the fine words pronounced on the hustings. In many quarters their paper was greeted with enthusiasm by African voters who ware tired of Jabavu's highly personalised style of leadership.
Despite their radicalism, Rubusana and his associates could not see beyond British imperialism. During the Anglo-Boer War they all threw their support behind Britain. Rubusana and other ministers of religion lent their moral authority to enlisting African labourers, wagon drivers, scouts and hundreds of other non-combatants to contribute towards the British victory, which finally came in 1902.
Rubusana never knew that the promises made by the imperial government and its mouthpieces in South Africa would amount to little more than hot air unless the African electors could exert organised pressure to hold them to their words. Thus in 1902 he was instrumental in calling together a number of African leaders in the Cape, to found the South African Native Congress. Though the South African Native Congress (SANC) had countrywide ambitions, it was in fact confined mainly to the Cape. Amongst its first actions was a petition addressed to Joseph Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, reminding him of the fine promises his predecessors had made to the black British subjects in South Africa.
Chamberlain and his Liberal Party ministry were however committed to doing a great deal with the Boers. A tidy sum of three million pounds was voted towards the rehabilitation of the former Boer republics, and by 1907 both the Transvaal and the Free State were granted responsible government, with their old racist constitutions unchanged. That year the SANC again took up the issue of black political rights, in a petition addressed to the King. In it they pleaded the loyalty of the average black South African to the British Crown and Empire, and called for the retention of the imperialist connection, as this (they hoped) would be a moderating influence on the racism of the South African white population. Neither of these appeals bore any fruit, and the movement towards the political unification of the four colonies steadily gained momentum during that first decade of the twentieth century, despite the vocal protests of the African and Coloured political organisations.
Zemk'Inkomo Magwalandini
The other important formative influence on Rubusana was his religion. He was a dedicated minister of the Congregational Church, participating in its councils and actively involved in proselytising its message to the African people. He translated a number of Congregational texts into Xhosa, and was also active in the Native Education Association, led by Elijah Makiwane. As the descendant of a respected traditional statesman, Rubusana was in a position to persuade many of the Chiefs in the Ciskei and Transkei to open up schools and churches in their districts.
As a recognised authority on the Xhosa language, he was appointed to serve on the Xhosa Bible Revision Committee, set up to refine the translation supervised by Tiyo Soga in the 1850s. He personally supervised its publication in Britain when he accompanied the Thembu king, Dalindyebo, to attend the coronation of King Edward VII in 1904. During his stay in London he also published his first book, Zemk' Inkomo Magwalandini (Defend Your Heritage), an anthology of traditional epic poetry, didactic Christian essays and Church history. (Karis and Carter, in Volume 4 of their Documentary History, mistakenly refer to it as a collection of proverbs.) As one of the earliest collections of the oral poetic tradition, the book was a remains of inestimable historical and literary value.
Zemk' Inkomo Magwalandini reflects the two dimensions of Rubusana's political thinking. He was a committed modernist, : represented by his espousal of Christianity and western education, while at the same time recognising that there were a number of abiding values in traditional African society. By re-affirming the aesthetic validity of traditional modes of literary expression, Rubusana was also performing a patriotic task - emancipating the African intellectual from the cultural and psychic enslavement imposed by servile imitation of western canons.
By the end of the decade Rubusana was universally recognised as one of the leading black politicians in South Africa. Amongst Africans his status was second only to that of John Thengo Jabavu. Thus, when Jabavu withheld his support from the South African Native Convention, which met in Bloemfontein in 1909, it was natural that Rubusana was chosen as its President. In this capacity he led the black deputation to London in June of that year in an attempt to have the 'colour bar clauses' expunged from the draft constitution.
The 1909 deputation to London was an historic landmark, being the first occasion during this century that African and Coloured formed a united front in pursuance of common objectives. Besides Rubusana, the deputation was composed of Dr A. Abdurahman, leader of the African People's Organisation (APO), D Dwanya, Matthew Fredericks, John T Jabavu, D J Lenders, Thomas Mapikela and one white parliamentarian, W P Schreiner. It was joined by Alfred Mangena, who was then resident in London.
The Independent Labour Party was the only British political party to support the deputation in London. The Aborigines' Protection and Anti-Slavery Society, long associated with lobbies for more humane colonial policies, assisted in obtaining access to members of parliament, and later an interview with the Secretary for Colonies.
The deputation had two main objectives - reversal of the 'colour bar clauses' and preventing the incorporation of the three British territories (Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland) into the Union until the white public forswore racism. Everyone they met listened politely to their arguments, but at the end of the day the Act of Union was passed, with the 'colour bar clauses' intact. The deputation did succeed however in preventing the absorption of the High Commission territories.
Rubusana returned home with his deputation in September 1909 to report that they had been unsuccessful. White South Africa duly marked the unification of the four colonies with great pomp and ceremony in May 1910.
Rubusana announced his candidacy for the Thembuland constituency in the Cape Provincial Council as soon as the elections were announced. Many who had mouthed sentiments of racial equality now joined the ranks of the arch-racists to denounce Rubusana for daring to contest the seat. Richard Rose Innes, the Independent Liberal politician and a long-time backer of Jabavu's, recorded his disapproval in the East London Dispatch. Even Jabavu was less than fulsome in his support., All these impediments notwithstanding, W B Rubusana ran a most effective campaign. His contacts in the church and its related organisations provided a ready-made network to mobilise the voters; the SANC branches throughout the Cape and the newspaper Ilizwi Labantu provided rallying points for his supporters. When the results were announced on September 21st, Rubusana had won the seat. He had won as a champion of African rights, and it was this more than his black face that frightened the racists.
In 1911 Rubusana made his third voyage overseas to attend the Universal Races Congress in London. Two other black South Africans attended the congress: John Thengo Jabavu and King Dalindyebo of the Thembu. The conference, organised by the Ethical Culture Society to discuss race relations throughout the world, had attracted numerous participants from the United States, Asia and other parts of Africa. Among the American participants was Dr W E B du Bois, the father of Pan-Africanism, and at the time engaged in setting up the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the United States. Here Rubusana had the opportunity to rub shoulders with many of the leading black political figures of the world, exchange experiences, and broaden the international contacts of the South African movement.
The conference itself proved disappointing to the colonial delegates who attended. The Ethical Culture Society was practically apolitical in its approach to racism and national oppression. It was seemingly unaware of or unconcerned with the realities of imperialism—the immense profits being squeezed out of the colonies, the material stake important sections of the population in the metropolitan countries had acquired in colonial oppression. They seemed to regard racism. racial discrimination and national oppression as ethical problems which could be resolved by polite dialogue between its perpetrators and its victims. Rubusana, Du Bois and the others knew from experience that racism was sustained by a complex of institutions, backed up by armed force and grounded in the economic realities of mines, huge plantations, and a lucrative trade in raw materials. Only the organised power of the oppressed could effect change.
Rubusana and the Formation of the ANC
Rubusana returned home more than ever convinced of the need for a national organisation. He and his colleagues had attempted to create such a movement in 1902, but had not been able to extend beyond the boundaries of the Cape. The idea of setting up a national organisation had been placed before the deputation to London in 1909 by Pixley kaIsaka Seme. The time was obviously ripe to implement it in later 1911. Thus it came about that Rubusana was one of the hundred strong body of delegates who converged on Bleomfontein on 8th January 1912 to attend the inaugural conference of the African National Congress. As an experienced political campaigner, he was appointed on to the constitutional commission chaired by Richard Msimang, and elected as one of the Vice-Presidents of the ANC.
The newly founded ANC was the brainchild of two generations of African politicians. The older group, amongst whom were Rubusana and his contemporaries, had acquired practically all their political experience in South Africa and had been reared in the traditions of Cape liberalism. The younger group, amongst whom were the young barristers, Seme, Mangena, Montsioa and Msimang, had trained abroad and were motivated by ideas of a continental emancipation movement which would enable the African peoples to make their unique contribution to world civilisation. Both groups however were adherents to the principles of 19th century British liberalism and appealed to that tradition when addressing the British government or its local off-shoot the all-White South African parliament.
The first test of strength for the ANC was the Natives Land Bill then being discussed by the South African parliament. The bill was yet another chapter in the hot house development of South African capitalism at the expense of the African peasant. Powerful economic interest groups in mining and White agriculture had agitated for the bill and there was complete consensus among all the parliamentary parties about its desirability. The bill sailed through three readings in the House of Assembly, piloted by the erstwhile 'friend of the Natives' Sauer and became law in June 1913.
The ANC launched a wide-ranging political campaign against the bill, including public meetings, letters to the press, memoranda to politicians and deputations to the Prime Minister. When all these yielded no results they resolved to send a deputation to Britain to persuade the British monarch to withhold his assenting signature which would make the act law. Rubusana was involved in every aspect of the Anti-Land Act Campaign and featured prominently in every stage of its development. When the deputation to London was chosen it was inevitable that he would be amongst them.
This first ANC deputation to London was led by President Dr John L. Dube and besides Rubusana included Thomas Mapikela, Saul Msane and Sol T. Plaatje. As in 1909 the deputation lobbied MPs at Westminster receiving support from the Labour Party alone. It was finally granted an interview with the Secretary for Colonies on 24th June 1914. In his response the British Colonial Secretary offered the deputation no comfort and advised them that since the Act of Union the British parliament no longer had any jurisdiction over South African internal affairs. That being the case they should address themselves to the South African government.
The reverses of 1914 for Rubusana were crowned by a personal political defeat. When his term of office in the Cape Provincial council expired that year he decided to contest the seat once more. However on this occasion an old colleague with whom he had struggled shoulder to shoulder in many a campaign but with whom he had over the years had numerous differences took the field against him. This was John Tengo Jabavu, in the eyes of many the doyen amongst Black political leaders in the Cape. Jabavu had kept his distance from the South African Native Convention and withheld his support from the ANC. He had in fact tried to organise his own South African Races Congress in opposition to it. All these actions had cost him dearly ire terms of his former prestige but he stubbornly refused to recognise that the movement of the African people had outgrown both his leadership and his politics. Obviously piqued by the stature Rubusana had acquired, Jabavu decided to run as a candidate in the 1914 election.
Some have suggested that Jabavu at this time was not acting in his own behalf but was the stalking horse of White politicians who resented Rubusana's incumbency. Whether this is true or not the consequences of his action was that the bloc African vote was split between himself and Rubusana; 294 and 852 respectively. This allowed a White candidate who received every white vote in the constituency to take the seat with 1004 votes. This practically ended Jabavu's political career. He died seven years later, a lonely figure remembered more for his shortcomings than his strengths. Rubusana never sought to re-enter the lists for the provincial council seat after his defeat.
Rubusana and others arrived back in South Africa shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. They received the news while attending a special ANC conference convened to hear their report. The conference adjourned in order to enable the leadership to entrain for Pretoria where they offered the unequivocal support of the ANC and the African people for the war effort.
Rubusana personally offered his services to recruit 5,000 men provided the government was prepared to train them in modern warfare. The ANC leaders undertook to suspend all their campaigns and mass agitation for the duration of the war as a demonstration of loyalty. Smuts, on behalf of the government, thanked them for their declarations of loyalty but declined Rubusana's offer with words to the effect that since this was a "White man's war" he saw no reason why the Africans should take a hand in the fighting.
Rubusana was as much responsible for the decision to declare a moratorium on mass agitation during the war as the other ANC leaders. This was probably the biggest tactical error they committed. The government did not reciprocate their action by suspending the provisions of the Land Act. Instead it pursued them vigourously unimpeded by ANC agitation or organised opposition. After four years of ruthless application the Land Act became a fait accompli and by 1918 its social and economic consequences were irreversible. Having thrown away a tactical advantage the ANC was unable to pick the threads of the campaign when the war ended.
Rubusana and his colleagues in the ANC leadership viewed the war as an opportunity to demonstrate in practice their loyalty to the institutions of empire. Loyal service during the empire's hours of crisis, they thought, would not go unrewarded when better times returned. What happened after the war ended was an object lesson in the realities of imperialist politics.
In 1918 two South African delegations, one led by Sol T. Plaatje for the ANC, the other by J.B. Hertzog for the Afrikaaner Nationalists, departed for Europe to present their respective cases to the British government and the allied powers at Versailles. The delegations represented divergent streams of political thought. The African nationalist delegation identified strongly with liberal democratic values - equality before the law, representative government, civil liberty —the ideals which the allied powers had purportedly waged the war to preserve. The Afrikaaner nationalists were not only historically linked to the defeated central powers but rejected every precept of the liberal democratic tradition. What is more while the ANC leaders, quite misguidedly it is true' rushed to Pretoria to declare their loyalty, Afrikaaner nationalist officers in the South African Defence Force seized the opportunity to raise a rebellion against Britain with a view to resurrecting the defeated Boer Republics. However, when the two delegations arrived in Britain it was Hertzog who received a sympathetic hearing. The ANC delegation returned empty handed while Hertzog returned bearing firm promises and an undertaking that South Africa would be granted greater autonomy within the imperial framework to accommodate the demands of the Afrikaaner nationalists. The 1918 delegation to London was the last time that African political leaders appealed to Britain to intercede on their behalf.
In 1919 Rubusana was 61 years old. The constitutional commission on which he had served finally reported to the ANC conference that year. After an animated discussion the lengthy constitution they had drafted was adopted with a few amendments. Though the constitution was couched in the accents of the liberal constitutionalist tradition the past seven years had drastically transformed South Africa and with it the African people. During those seven years the ANC had been steeled in a lengthy political experience. In and around the growing urban areas clusters of permanent urban African communities had sprung up composed of peasants driven off the land by the 1913 Land Act. These were to become the battalions of the national and class struggles that erupted across the length and breadth of the country in the subsequent decades.
Rubusana Inspires Us All
Rubusana spent the last 17 years of his life in relative quiescence. Most of his notable contemporaries, Jabavu, Bokwe, Makiwane and others passed away during the early 1920s. After a lifetime of political struggle he was allowed to live out his last years as an elder statesman, occasionally consulted on important matters, but away from the cut and thrust of day-to-day politics. His name hardly features during the stormy years of the 1920s and 30s. He died on 17th April 1936 in East London at the age of 78.
Walter Benson Rubusana's life story spans the most crucial years in the shaping of modern South Africa. For nearly forty of those years he was actively engaged in the most important political and social struggles of his country. As a man of the cloth, a writer and political leader he was in the forefront of the battles waged by his people providing leadership. Though we may, with the wisdom of hindsight, fault his judgement on occasion, there can be no doubt that he was a man of immense personal courage and integrity committed to the democratic ideal of a free South Africa. Like many of his contemporaries he experienced the decades leading up to and including Union as a period of shattered illusions. Rubusana's greatness lay in the fact that he did not for a moment allow these setbacks to demoralise him. He drew the appropriate lessons from each defeat, picked himself up and fought on. Unlike Jabavu he was willing to grow with the times and even learn from the younger men like Seme and Dube whom he joined in founding the ANC. The life and work of Walter Benson Rubusana are an important part of our democratic heritage from which we draw inspiration for the battles that still lie ahead of us.
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* Published in Sechaba, January 1984