Issued by: Department of Foreign Affairs
21 March 2002
Today we pay tribute to our brothers and comrades who dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom in our country and who paid for this with the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.
They are the selfless ones whose contributions to ending apartheid, to the birth of democracy in South Africa, remain unsurpassed, who paved the way for a brighter future for all South Africa's people.
They fought a just struggle against those who manned an unjust and vicious apartheid system; they walked the hard road that took them away from their loved ones, a journey of conscience, commitment and conviction, step by step, they walked in defiance and protest against those who enslaved our people and colonised our country and continent for more than three hundred years.
We, who survived, cannot truly know their pain, what went through their minds, their hearts, in those final hours before they took their last steps to the gallows to be murdered by the agents of the apartheid regime.
We cannot fully feel the pain of the parents who lost their children when they were too young, children who lost their father sin this way, wives and lovers who lost their loved ones never to see them again.
We only know that if they had not taken that journey towards liberation, we would not be here today and would not be free people walking tall in the world and taking huge strides into the future.
They believed that the People Should Govern and that we, the African people, should take our rightful place as our own liberators from dictatorships, from poverty, from underdevelopment, from racism, from that very dehumanisation that they experienced at the hands of those who were paid to kill them and to extinguish the light of freedom.
The light of Africa continues to rise in the world. The spirit of our fallen heroes will never die because we have inherited much from them, strength, endurance, an indomitable will for change, for a better life for all. New generations have come into being to ensure that the sun continues to shine over us and to illuminate the road ahead.
We remember Solomon Mahlangu, we remember Benjamin Moloise, we remember Neo Moerane, we remember Marcus Motaung, we remember Mosolodi.
We remember them and all our brave countrymen whose footprints we now walk in full of hope and determination, the build a human rights culture in our land, to entrench equality in our daily lives, to end the poverty of millions of our people, to ensure economic prosperity and sustained development for all of South Africa and Africa's people.
We re-commit ourselves to engage in totality with our history, with reality to believe in human dignity, to recognise our collective and individual worth and fulfil our great potential to pick up the pieces of our broken lives and make them whole again, to continue to unite our people as one conscious force for progressive change.