Date: 17/07/2003
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: Asmal: Presentation of book to Nelson Mandela


SPEECH BY PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, MP, MINISTER OF EDUCATION, AT THE PRESENTATION TO MR NELSON MANDELA OF THE BOOK, NELSON MANDELA: FROM FREEDOM TO THE FUTURE, Johannesburg, 17 July 2003

Tomorrow, as you all know, Mr. Nelson Mandela will be eighty-five years old -- or eighty-five years young -- and still with us, still going strong. As a tribute to Madiba, and as a testimony to his lasting legacy, we are presenting him with this book as a birthday gift: Nelson Mandela: From Freedom to the Future: Tributes and Speeches.

Our book honours an individual imbued with great ideals of reason, imagination, justice, and freedom, with the depth of moral character formed by the toughest of circumstances, able yet, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant once had it, to "treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only."

Based on selections from Nelson Mandela's speeches, spanning over fifty years, this book provides a lively, memorable profile of his enduring commitments to freedom and reconciliation, democracy and development, culture and diversity, and the flourishing of all the people of South Africa, Africa, and the world. The book highlights Madiba's ongoing concerns for children, education, and health; it features his own tributes to South African heroes, such as Steve Biko, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu; and it concludes with his significant contributions to international peace building. In this book, we will be able to recall and reaffirm the solid foundation that Nelson Mandela established for building a sustainable future.

The chapters are introduced by leading national and international figures in the fields of politics, diplomacy, development, education, health, religion, culture, and the creative and performing arts. Some are able to be with us today. In these introductory essays, authors pay tribute to Nelson Mandela's achievements, animating their accounts with personal memories, stories, and reflections, but they also creatively engage the principles at stake in each of these areas. In the light of the legacy of Nelson Mandela, they identify the building blocks for a South African future.

We are well aware that the praises of Nelson Mandela have often been sung. He has been honoured, awarded, and celebrated all over the world, by international political leaders and ordinary people, in an unprecedented, sustained chorus of love and respect. Enraptured by all this praise singing, we might sometimes forget the long struggle and the dark days, the painful losses and the hard negotiations, which made this joyful music possible.

Also, we might find ourselves taking for granted the truly remarkable consensus, across every conceivable divide, which have greeted the achievements of Nelson Mandela. As we saw in the 1990s, the presidents of the United States and Cuba, who were politically divided on many matters, nevertheless agreed on singing Madiba's praises.

Recognizing Nelson Mandela as "the symbol of freedom for the world," US President Bill Clinton sang his praises, identifying personal qualities of strength, determination, and wisdom that bore profound political significance. In similar terms, the President of the Republic of Cuba, Fidel Castro sang the praises of Nelson Mandela, observing that "Nelson Mandela will not go down in history for the 27 consecutive years that he lived imprisoned without ever renouncing his ideas. He will go down in history because he was able to draw from his soul all the poison accumulated by such an unjust punishment. He will be remembered for his generosity and for his wisdom at the time of an already un-containable victory, when he knew how to lead so brilliantly his self sacrificing and heroic people, aware that the new South Africa would never be built on foundations of hatred and revenge."

In both cases, Nelson Mandela is recognized for his distinctive merger of the personal and the political. Political transformation in South Africa was enabled by Nelson Mandela's personal capacity to purge any poison of hatred or revenge from his soul, to rise above bitterness, to demonstrate a generosity of spirit, and to reach out to others, all the while remaining true, even under the harshest conditions of injustice, imprisonment, and oppression, to his political principles.

Those principles, Nelson Mandela would argue, were not his alone. They were the shared achievement of a political movement, the African National Congress. As his favourite self-description, he often has explained that he is first and foremost a loyal member of the ANC. Still, as Presidents Clinton and Castro recognized, the political assumed a distinctively personal quality in Nelson Mandela. He proved, as Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan observes in his foreword to this book, that one individual, with such courage and tenacity, with such dignity and magnanimity, can actually make a difference in political struggles.

These praise singers, you might say, are just politicians, engaging in political rhetoric. But real singers, real artists, poets, and musicians, have also sung the praises of Nelson Mandela. Here is the poet laureate of Great Britain, the poet Andrew Motion:

That straight walk from the
prison to the gate -
that walk the world saw, and
which changed the world -
it led you through to life from
life withheld,
from broken stones with your
unbroken heart
To life which you imagined
and then lived,
which once we shared in your
imagining
but soon shared in the
present that you shaped:
the life which gave each
human hope its chance
of turning into truth and
staying true;
the life which understood
what changing takes;
the life which showed us we
become ourselves
in part by watching you
becoming you.

In Andrew Motion's evocative formulation, we, the new South Africa, but also we, the human community, become ourselves by forming a sense of belonging to a shared, collective identity, by watching Nelson Mandela become himself.

By providing a focal point for a sense of human solidarity, shared in the present, Nelson Mandela changed the way people experienced the space of South Africa and the larger world. That shared space of human solidarity, mutuality, and recognition, however, was shaped by Nelson Mandela during a time of dramatic historical transformation. Inspired by Nelson Mandela's return from prison, Nobel Laureate for Literature, Seamus Heaney, reflects upon the world-historical significance of such a rare merger of hope and history. Here is Seamus Heaney:

Human beings suffer
They torture one another
They get hurt and get hard
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme

Although inspired by Nelson Mandela's freedom, and the freedom mobilized in South Africa in large measure by his ability to merge hope with history, this chorus resonates with other historical struggles, from the past to the present, wherever human beings suffer and unexpectedly, remarkably, discover that their hopes are justified by being borne out in history.

So, Nelson Mandela belongs to the world. However, South Africans can say, with justification, that he belongs, in the first instance, to us, with us, as an integral part of our struggles, accomplishments, and hopes for the future. The chapters of this book document that South African story, tracing the basic themes of Nelson Mandela's political vision, not only to recall the past, but also to identify enduring foundations for the future.

The chapter titles can only give a sense of the depth and breath of Nelson Mandela's political vision: Struggle, Freedom, Reconciliation, Nation-Building, Development, Education, Culture, Religion, Health, Children, Heroes, and Peace. As these chapters unfold, we develop a profound understanding and appreciation for the enduring gift of that Nelson Mandela has given us in leading us from freedom to the future.

Helping us to understand this enduring legacy, the authors of the introductions to each chapter of this book, who are leaders, in their own right, in many fields of endeavour, reflect upon the personal and political ingredients for building a South African future. Their thoughtful, vivid, and revealing commentaries, we will find, cast new light on our path.

On behalf of my co-editors David Chidester and Wilmot James, I want to thank them all for their magnificent contributions: Albie Sachs on freedom; Van Zyl Slabbert on reconciliation; Jakes Gerwel on nation building; Cyril Ramaphosa on development; Mamphela Ramphele on education; Miriam Makeba and Bill Cosby on culture; Desmond Tutu on religion; Olive Shisana on health; Gra