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Date : 26/06/2004
Source: The Presidency
Title: T Mbeki: Launch of SA Democracy Education Trust's publication


ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA, THABO MBEKI, AT THE LAUNCH OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN DEMOCRACY EDUCATION TRUST'S PUBLICATION, THE ROAD TO DEMOCRACY, Presidential Guest House, Tshwane, 26 June 2004

Chairperson of the SADET Board, Minister Essop Pahad,
Honourable Ministers and Deputy Ministers,
SADET Project Leader, Ben Magubane,
Trustees and sponsors of SADET,
Your Excellencies, Ambassadors and High Commissioners,
Distinguished guests,
Distinguished members of the media,
Ladies and gentlemen:

I am very honoured and proud to receive the first volume of The Road to Democracy. Tonight, I welcome you to the Presidential Guesthouse to celebrate the launch of the first publication of the South African Democracy Education Trust's project to record, for posterity, our travails, tribulations and valour in our quest for democracy.

I am particularly happy because this project of SADET retraces our own road to democracy and then preserves it so that our descendants will have the real possibility of learning about an era in the twentieth century, when their ancestors fought courageous war for freedom so that they could live in harmony and peace.

In the Foreword to the first volume of SADET, we suggested that this project is engaged in a type of history that would help to ensure that the young and all future generations do not, once again, allow some human beings to dehumanise another by defining themselves as the betters, and the rest the lesser.

The task of this SADET project is to re-evaluate the past, honestly and rigorously, in a way that should produce reliable beacons for the future. It will help to chart the way forward, so that all of us can enjoy an egalitarian future - however hurtful, unjust and inequitable the past may have been.

South African history was marked, for generations, by ignoring much of what had indeed taken place. For years fruitless efforts were made to implant into the collective mind of all our people historical falsehoods, which suggested not only that history began with the arrival of whites, but also that blacks converged on the South African shores simultaneously as whites began their pillage of this country, including the genocide of the Khoi and the San people. For decades these falsehoods were peddled as historical truths and given a veneer of respectability by many apartheid academics.

It is therefore the responsibility of all of us to ensure that our people, especially the youth, are well-versed about the achievements and sacrifices made for the freedoms we all enjoy today; equally about the distortions, euphemisms, and obfuscations of the false history propagated by apartheid.

Chairperson, let us use this occasion to also reflect a while on history, the phenomenon. I am sure we would agree that history is both yesterday and tomorrow. It informs our grasp of what has gone before, and helps us deal with what is to come. It is both ancient and modern; it is written and oral.

It deals in the practical. It covers diversities such as conflict, peace, trends, music, art, science and memory. It makes us laugh and it makes us weep; for we humans, among all living things, know the difference between what is and what should be.

History helps us face the bewildering surges of human ideas with which we have to deal today, tomorrow, and beyond. It is our partner in life, if we would just appreciate and nurture it.

On 21 March 2001, a day with resonance not only in Sharpeville and Langa but throughout South Africa and the world, we launched SADET which would have as one of its tasks 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.

As a result of this struggle, South Africans from all walks of life, of all colours, had gone to the polls in 1994, the majority for the first time in our history. That was the outward manifestation, at the ballot box, of a whole tradition of past struggle aimed specifically to achieve what happened that day.

In the past, the paucity of recorded historical memory has meant that many, both in our country and elsewhere, could not fully access our past, nor adequately understand and explain the condition especially of the African people.

This previously 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 its false values, both the constructive and destructive tendencies of human beings.

It is a mirror, yes, but more: it is a nurturing companion. The generations that grow up in our democratic era dare not be oblivious to where we come from or forget the sacrifices made by those who preceded them and brought us to where we are.

Without interventions such as this one, our collective memory would fade very fast; the human repositories and personal witnesses of those times would die. Accordingly, the stories of our past must be captured and held in trust for posterity. It is our responsibility to do this, and do it well.

While each generation of pioneers celebrates its unique contribution, it does so perhaps because of the continuum of history and how each phase of struggle is both conditioned and made possible by previous ones.

Today there is a danger of memory lapse about where we come from. 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 ensure that we are not overcome by a collective amnesia.

Furthermore, 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. 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 the struggle that we waged.

Within our history are lessons, which we and future generations must learn so that we are better able to grapple with the challenges of reconstruction and development and bring a better life to all our people, in this country, on the rest of the continent and in the Diaspora.

The fact that this is a written history means that it has a shape and form which will preserve it in a systematic way, indeed in a way that makes it readily available, in concrete form, for years to come. It will form a textbook for the nation, a view of ourselves; and part of a guide into the future, for our people, for learners and scholars.

The great projects and ideas of revival and development in Africa, such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development, will gain greater force as people are able better to understand the background to where these people, who are Africans engaged in the regeneration of their continent, come from.

The SADET project must present us with the ongoing, palpable, living histories of our people. Accordingly, our task is also to show the human faces that made history and thus ensure that the historical account is itself an apt and reliable tribute to those to whom we owe our liberty. We must do this while some of that remarkable band of people - in the case of this volume, those who were active in the 1960s - are still alive and able to cast clear minds back to events.

In this process, inevitably, there will be differences of opinion over roles played and attitudes adopted, and indeed sacrifices made, in the run-up to democracy. That is as natural as it is necessary.

History is a complex mosaic, and all the pieces must be woven into a coherent whole if we are to benefit from the process. The very substantial effort behind the current project should be seen as an example to others to capture the moments in time that made us what we are - a confident, strong, free and united nation.

However much the oral tradition might admittedly produce what the Preface refers to as "unprocessed words", even inaccuracies, the preservation of these precious, genuine memories is an essential part of the broader whole. The fragments, of themselves, may have limitations, but the whole has an overarching authenticity that can only impact positively on the generations to come.

Let us sit down and listen to the past foot soldiers and generals of liberation; and the ordinary people who marched side by side with them, enduring untold sufferings; or even those who, from the sidelines, cheered them on, or stood by and watched, some of them resentfully opposing the noble struggle of our people. They all have something to offer.

Let us press on to discover our nationhood with this volume tucked under our arm - so that the moving stories of a march to freedom and its cries of anguish and triumph are never allowed to fade into the dim and distant past.

In the year in which, in thankfulness, we celebrate ten years of democracy, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to the first volume of the type of history we seek. I hope it will humanise us by recounting the memories and experiences of so many who have participated in the struggle that led to where we are today. In endorsing the project that gave rise to this volume, I believe that all of us should stress the importance of history and memory in shaping our new nation and the road ahead. In this spirit, strengthened, we march on.

The SADET series is our salute and promise to the dead and the living. Those of us who are alive feel blessed to tell our own story of the history of our road to democracy. I commend SADET's first volume and look forward to the others in this very significant historical series.

Thank you.

Enquiries: Bheki Khumalo
Tel: (012) 300 5436
Cell: 083 256 9133
Issued by: The Presidency
26 June 2004

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