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Date : 16/03/2004
Source: Department of Education
Title: K Asmal: Occasion of receiving Honorary Doctorate in Law from UWC


ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, MP, MINISTER OF EDUCATION, ON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVING AN HONORARY DOCTORATE IN LAW FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE, 16 March 2004

Chancellor, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
Chairperson of Council, Ms Shelagh Tyeku

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian O'Connell
Members of Council and the Senate
Members of the University Executive
Academics, workers and students
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen

It is an honour and a special, personal pleasure to be with you tonight to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Between 1990 and 1994, I was part of this community. Whenever I come back to UWC, I feel like I am coming home.

During my years of exile, Ireland gave me a career in law, a livelihood, a refuge, and a home. Let me say, in case no one has noticed, that I am very fond of Ireland. Over nearly three decades, I was enriched by the culture and engaged in the politics of that island.

But we never forgot that there was another island off the Cape coast where our leaders were imprisoned. We never forgot that under apartheid our people were in exile in the land of their birth.

We worked to internationalise the struggle against apartheid. The campaign to isolate apartheid South Africa, the International Defence and Aid Fund, the British and Irish Anti-Apartheid Movements, the mobilisation of the United Nations - these and many other efforts achieved nearly universal opposition to apartheid as a crime against humanity.

For almost thirty years, Ireland gave me a home. In 1990 the University of the Western Cape gave me a homecoming. Many years before, I had completed my education. But my time at UWC was truly an education.

In Ireland, working in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, we knew that things were bad in South Africa. Coming home, we learned that things were worse. The depth of the poverty, misery and despair produced by apartheid was much worse than we could see from a distance. The wounds inflicted by apartheid were deeper than we had imagined.

We knew that the law had been perverted under apartheid. We knew the joke that Archbishop Desmond Tutu told during his Nobel Laureate lecture in 1984: Zambia, with no access to the sea, could have a Minister of Naval Affairs, because apartheid South Africa, with no justice for majority of its people, had a Minister of Justice.

Coming home, we learned that things were worse. Apartheid legislation had inflicted deep, psychological scars. We had to dismantle apartheid's illegitimate legal apparatus. But we also had to deal with the profound human damage that had been caused by that legislation.

I had already been a Professor of Law. But during my time at UWC I professed the law like never before. I took my teaching seriously. Recently, the Norwegian Minister of Education shared with me their formula for university lecturers: They have the "freedom to do research and the duty to teach". But teaching is more than merely a duty. It is a dedicated calling; it is a profound human exchange; and it can even be a joy and a pleasure.

I learned from my students at UWC. One of the first things I learned was enormous challenges my students had to deal with just to be there in the first place. In the first course I taught, many of the students came from single-parent families and were supported by their working mothers. I am still in contact with some of those students.

During my time at UWC, I was also involved in the process of negotiations. In forging a new constitutional order, we professed the law in a contest of minds, hearts and political will.

We had to deal with constitutional tensions. We negotiated through the tensions between a unitary and a federal state, between individual and collective rights, between reconciliation and reconstruction.

We had to deal with constitutional tricks. In the negotiations, the old National Party fought for a rotating presidency, group rights, ethnic vetoes, and other tricks that would have embedded apartheid privileges in the Constitution.

And we had to come up with constitutional solutions. Some solutions were informed by international models. For example, I remember a particularly tense time when Cyril Ramaphosa, our chief negotiator, phoned me at 2am, asking: "How are we going to deal with the status of so many official languages?" I was able to draw on my familiarity with Irish constitutional debates to propose a solution - "parity of esteem" - that laid the foundation for the progressive realisation of linguistic, cultural, religious and other collective rights under our Constitution.

But we could also draw upon our own human rights tradition within the African National Congress (ANC). We could draw upon the ANC's Bill of Rights of 1923; the fully developed Bill of Rights of 1943 in Africans' Claims in South Africa, which was far in advance of any other human rights instrument in the world in specifying not only political rights, but also social rights, economic rights, and women's rights; the Women's Charter of 1954; the Freedom Charter of 1955; and other landmarks in the human rights tradition of the ANC.

During my time at UWC, therefore, I was professing law with both hands, one in the university classroom, one in the constitutional negotiations.

I therefore take great pride in the Constitution we as a nation produced after months and years of deliberation. During my recent visit to Constitution Hill, I was again reminded of the great significance of our achievements. Our Constitution represents a roadmap to a present and a future in which never again will the fundamental rights of freedom, equality and human dignity be violated.

As I walked on the Great African Steps at Constitution Hill, built from the bricks of the demolished Number Four prison, I realised the symbolism of using the bricks of the past to build the possibilities of the future. My memory was triggered to remember that our Constitution came from the sacrifices of many who came before us and those who marched alongside us to freedom.

In 1994 four members of staff left UWC to serve our first democratically elected government in the Cabinet of President Nelson Mandela. Brigitte Mabandla became Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Dr Zola Skweyiya was appointed Minister for the Public Service and Administration. I came from the Law Faculty to be the Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry. And Dullah Omar, Director of UWC's Community Law Centre, became Minister of Justice.

During my years at UWC, I made friends. Dullah Omar was my friend. I recall the words of the author Bessie Head, who wrote in 1963 that "the fantastic thing about friendships in South Africa is that one always and only meets one's friends through politics." I met my closest friends through politics.

But I also understand how Bessie Head felt when she lamented, "One is constantly losing friends these days." On Saturday, we lost a friend. We lost a comrade in political struggle. We lost a colleague in law.

During his life, Dullah Omar was on the frontlines of the struggle against apartheid. Agents of the apartheid regime tried to limit the life and work of Dullah Omar. They tried to confine him, but they could not. They tried to kill him, but they could not. They tried to break his spirit, but they could not. Apartheid could not limit him. In the end, apartheid met its limit when it met Dullah Omar.

As Minister of Justice, it was Dullah Omar who worked tirelessly to lead us from our past by removing all the barriers of apartheid legislation. It was Dullah Omar who charted our future by drafting legislation for human freedom and human fulfilment. It was Dullah Omar - path-maker, bridge-builder - who introduced to Parliament the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act on 17 May 1995 with these words:

I have the privilege and responsibility to introduce today a Bill, which provides a pathway, a stepping stone, towards the historic bridge of which the Constitution speaks whereby our society can leave behind the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and commence the journey towards a future founded on recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence, and development opportunities for all South Africans irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. Its substance is the very essence of the constitutional commitment to reconciliation and the reconstruction of society.

The words of Dullah Omar on that occasion almost a decade ago still ring true today. Like the highest poetry of our politics, he articulated our enduring ideals in the midst of our political struggle and our historic transition.

As the great poet Seamus Heaney tells us, the best poetry merges the timeless and the timely, the eternal and the ordinary. So does the best in politics; so does the best in law. So did our friend and comrade Dullah Omar merge the timeless and the timely, the eternal and the ordinary, in helping us emerge from apartheid as a new nation.

In 1997 Dullah Omar presented a lecture for the Human Rights programme of Harvard University. Two decades earlier, he had been invited to enter the Master of Laws programme at Harvard, but the apartheid regime prevented him from leaving the country and confiscated his passport. With characteristic modesty and humour, Dullah Omar began his lecture by apologising for his long delay in getting to Harvard.

His theme in that lecture, as in all of his work, was the necessary relationship between law and justice. "Although apartheid has been banished by our Constitution and removed from our statute book," he observed, "its legacy lives on." We were still faced with the enormous challenge of translating law into justice. In our new democracy, we were still confronted with the daily challenge of making the liberating and empowering provisions of our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our new legislation a reality for all our people. In this work of translating law into justice, Dullah Omar noted in 1997, our "process of emancipation has just begun."

Today, during this momentous year in which we celebrate ten years of freedom and democracy, we know that our process of emancipation is still unfolding as we work to make justice a reality. Today and every day, we can reaffirm our commitment, which was Dullah Omar's lifelong commitment, to establishing justice in our land.

If establishing justice is be a truly lifelong commitment, we have to ensure that current and future generations do not forget the injustices visited upon our people by successive colonial and apartheid governments.

The role of history in this regard is invaluable. History, as Milan Kundera reminds us, represents the triumph of memory over forgetting.

During my term of office as Minister of Education, I have enthusiastically promoted the teaching of history as a school and a university subject. Judging by the responses we have received from various social actors, I am very confident that our mission of making history a central feature of the curriculum is succeeding.

As many of you will know, no academic discipline can survive unless it continues to produce knowledge through research and publication. In promoting history, this is exactly what we have been doing. On 31 March, for instance, my Ministry will be holding a large celebration at the Centre of the Book, under the theme "keeping memory alive, shaping the future". As part of this occasion, we shall be launching a range of history books, which will be distributed, to our public schools in celebration of ten year of freedom.

On this occasion, I wish to urge all the aspirant and the practising lawyers to keep the memory of where we have come from, and to follow in the footsteps of the generation of Dullah Omar by learning and practising law as a service to the community - to be people's lawyers, and not simply lawyers motivated by self interest.

In this regard, we should adapt the name of the award winning film, "Once they were warriors", to "Once they were socialists". We should embrace the spirit of selfless dedication to the community and working tirelessly to uplift the poorest of the poor. We should do so not in the sense of vulgar socialism, but in the longstanding humanitarian tradition of our liberation movement - in the spirit of ubuntu.

I thank you for the honour of this Honorary Doctorate. I would like to dedicate it to the memory of Dullah Omar and to keeping his memory alive in our ongoing process of emancipation.

I thank you.

16 March 2004
Source: Department of Education (http://www.education.gov.za)

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