Issued by Ministry of Education
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 19 NOVEMBER 1999
Why do we take such an event as the millennium seriously? As though the arrival of a new year with lots of zeroes should necessarily and mystically add up to something special. We could remain aloof and criticise all the exaggerated commercialism based on some kind of Eurocentric, Christian-based calendar and an excuse for a good party.
But whether we like it or not, epochs do matter. For example partisans of the French revolution turned the calendar back to zero, began counting again from year one, because they had a keen sense of the link between time and injustice. For many, the anniversary around the 27 April 1994 now means the beginning of a common citizenship for South Africans.
So too Bertolt Brecht who wrote in his Songs of the Soldier of the Revolution:
When the difficulty
Of the mountains is once behind
That's when you'll see
The difficulty of the plains will start.
Our experience of the 20th Century in South Africa has been one of negotiating a high mountain, fraught with enormous difficulties. From the pain and triumph of struggle our battle culminated in the extraordinary settlement of 1994 and the victory of our liberation movement together with the development of a social contract embodied in our new Constitution. As we prepare to enter the new Century we face the deceptively flat plains which present a new and more serious set of challenges and which are likely to be immeasurably more difficult to negotiate.
Right at the beginning of the Century W E B Dubois, the United States historian, predicted that the problem of the 20th Century would be the problem of the colour line. Throughout the world this century has seen race as the salient factor. From the inherent racism of colonisation, to the Holocaust and the evil experience of apartheid, very few societies, especially those in which whites are the majority, have been able to deal systematically or at all with issues of racism and its effects.
And in no place was this more evident than in South Africa. We said we shall overcome and we did just that. Ours is now a world of formal equality but that is not enough. We must conquer the difficulty of the plains, confront the major fault lines of our society. Now our challenge is to celebrate our diversity, our multicultural origins and as a nation of different traditions and persuasions, but not in the way that assorted ethno-chauvinists have tried to do, by building barricades around ourselves. We cannot advance towards a common culture through cultural separation; or through the tattered banners of inherited tribal and ethnic identities. Every few months or so the same tired band of would-be ethno-separatists launch yet another campaign to save the allegedly beleaguered Afrikaans language. The fact is that Afrikaans writers such as Andre Brink were far more endangered by the old apartheid regime, which allegedly championed Afrikaans, than they would ever be under the new constitutional and moral order, which protects the cultural rights of all. Culture is not static and if you lock into a kind of ghetto by protecting it from other influences and other cultures, it will wither away.
In 1994 we were indeed a house divided, yet we joined hands to pull our nation back from the very pit of destruction. Today, our government at all levels together with institutions of civil society must work to re-kindle the spark of non-racialism and integration which were the hallmarks of our liberation struggle. We must mobilise ourselves to re-establish the plain, essential virtues of decency and the common good.
In a globalising international order there is more interdependence and common intellectual and commercial interest among the peoples of the world than ever before, yet the sickening ethnic wars and genocide of the last ten years in other parts of the world tell us a different story. The purveyors of hatred and xenophobia insist that human diversity is an evil to be resisted.
The re-assertion of ethnic chauvinism and racism and the elevation to positions of power and influence of chauvinistic political parties, especially in Europe, the very Continent which first proclaimed the rights of man, is a development that we must watch with intense concern and combat with all our power. Yeats' rough beast is still slouching its way to Bethlehem, its now come again, to the shame of these democratic countries.
We can show the way. But we cannot be blind to the fact that formal equality is not enough. If we are to avoid a repetition of the tragic events at the Tempe Military Base and the vitriol of the HoĞrskool Vryburg racist incidents, we dare not ignore that there are enormous racial chasms which divide this country and which are still associated with feelings of racial and cultural superiority on the one hand, and a legacy of economic well-being for a few and deprivation for many on the other. The long and painful process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped to bridge such chasms but has not eradicated them altogether.
We need to accept the challenge of celebrating our diversity. We must give our millennium resolutions practical effect through ensuring that our education and other programmes are designed to bind our country under a single banner. It is more than just tolerance and understanding that are required but a genuine effort to develop a common value system for all who live in South Africa, freed of sexism and racism.
Yet it is disappointing that many of our fellow South Africans have chosen to criticise rather than welcome legislation which will deal with questions of equity, equality and anti-discrimination. It is as though some people see disaster in every mistake we make, and take an almost pornographic delight in each incident which can be interpreted as confirming their fear of the imminent collapse of South Africa.
Our diversity must be a source of celebration. For this reason, I want to announce the setting up of a directorate in my Department to develop policies for the pursuit of common values. I shall also soon announce the support of a senior public figure to head the working group.
More than ever our country needs dedicated and committed citizens who will be champions in opposing racialism and sexism in all spheres of our life. A challenge for us is to find a way to focus on and dismantle our racial legacy, without becoming caught up in its coils as others have in their own racial prisons. As we use race in order to move beyond it, we must remain aware that ours is a non-racial destination.
The function of leadership is to help abandon our fears, not feed them. We have in South Africa the most exciting opportunity to overcome our past and forge our own future. To be a real rainbow nation does not mean that we plunge our identities into a single melting-pot from which some new stereotype emerges. A rainbow retains its component parts, while yet being inseparably joined. For those of us who fear their language or culture will be lost, I can only say that no language or culture can be artificially bolstered for ever by government decree, and no government decree can ever destroy the language or culture of those who are determined to preserve them.
To those of us who complain that political freedom and equal human rights have not immediately brought about economic advancement, I can only say that this, too, is a challenge which faces all of us. We must remember that the face of poverty that we see at the bottom of the well is black.
Our quest to develop a new national identity and a common set of values, has to be given priority to ensure that we avoid the pitfalls which some groupings would have us enforce in the interests of the so-called protection of minority rights. We often fail to realise that the adoption of a set of common values is not the trade-off of one set of assumptions for another but rather the creation of a new value system with a new set of values, a heritage of which we can all be proud
Narrow minded people, like the colonial politicians still alive, who proclaimed that there would never be majority rule in a thousand years, must take heed of the changing tide of history, and those of us who espouse a democratic and non-racial future must proclaim that never again will we allow the ravages of oppression and subjugation to descend upon us. The predictions of W E B Dubois must not also be true for the 21st Century.
Forty three days away from the new millennium we are still hovering between the fear that Y2K disasters will descend on the world, and the hope that the new century will offer us a fresh start and new opportunities. Parts of the world today are engulfed in conflict. In other parts, political parties are reverting to ethno-chauvinism and thereby winning votes. This scourge of racism must be defeated, and here in South Africa we can be proud that we are embarked on a quest to find the way of doing just that.
I want therefore to plead for a celebration at the turn of the century, a looking forward to the future and a determination to grasp the opportunities we have in South Africa. We must face the challenge of building a better world, not just for ourselves as individuals or for a limited circle of the like-minded, but for the benefit of all. Perhaps this is an ancient message. But in an ancient culture, which gave birth to the many peoples of the world, it is a message that applies to us all. Let the new century be an African century.