Mbuzini, 19 January 1999
Your Excellency, President Mandela
Your Excellency, President Chissano
Premier Matthews Phosa
Distinguished guests
On behalf of the Machel family, I would like to begin by expressing our thanks to all those who have made this monument possible;
To the community who offered this plot of land where Samora and his companions died, which is essential to the power of this memorial;
To the local authorities who have always been supportive;
To the government of Mpumalanga province who have been closely involved,
And of course the national Governments of South Africa and Mozambique. We thank you all, most sincerely.
It is what we wanted as a family from the beginning, that the significance of this small plot of land and what happened here should be understood and preserved and kept alive.
But there is even more to it than that.
We wanted, in a very real sense, to keep Samora himself alive.
The only way to do that is to sustain the values and te principles which were the passion of his life and the lives of those who died here with him.
Samora is part of a generation of Mozambicans that brought independence to Mozambique.
They contributed to the independence of Zimbabwe and to freedom in South Africa.
Indeed through their example and their solidarity they helped deepen freedom in Southern Africa as a whole, in Africa and the world.
It is only the generations to come that can keep alive the values for which they fought.
As part of Samora's generation, I want my son to be imbued with the understanding that there can be no freedom or prosperity for Mozambique except as an integral part of Southern Africa.
I want all the children of those who died on this spot to share their parent's conviction that the freedom, peace and prosperity of any country in our region depends on the other countries enjoying these same things.
My wish is that all of my son's generation throughout the region, orphaned and brutalised and ravaged by apartheid as they have been, should acquire a passionate sense of their common destiny and of a common citizenship beyond that of the nation.
And my most fervent wish is that as citizens and patriots of a shared Southern Africa, they would be unshakable in their resolution that never, never again should differences in political approach be allowed to lead to violence in our region.
They should know that those thirty-five men and women, and many, many others died because our opponents failed to open the way to the peaceful resolution of differences.
The plane in which those men and women died was bringing them back from a mission of peace.
White and black of every shade; young and old; men and women; drawn from every region of Mozambique and every walk of life, they were in their diversity and in the principles for which they stood, a microcosm of the alternative civilisation based on non-racialism, justice and respect for one another.
We do understand the anger of my son's generation at having been caught up in such a senseless apparatus of injustice, oppression and inhumanity.
If they should channel that anger into the building of peaceful and prosperous societies based on the principles of social justice for which their parent's generation fought, then the triumph over oppression and injustice will be complete.
As a family we deeply appreciate the creation of this memorial. It is a link in the chain of history, helping the torch of humanity pass from our generation to the next, so that they in turn can pass it on to their children.
I thank you!