A Farewell To Madiba! National Assembly,
Cape Town, March 26,1999.
Madame Speaker
Chairperson of the Council of Provinces
Honourable Members
Mr President
Isinamva liyabukwa
Mhla wasabel'igwijo,
Uthwel'uthuli lwezitho zabaphambili,
Wadad'emafini nje ngokhozi,
Wadelel'inkunzana nje ngemamb'emnyama,
Lath'izulu liqulath'indudumo nombane,
Ladedel'ilanga nalo lithand'ukubuka libukele,
Azoth' amazwe onke ngokuthethelwa ngamehlo,
Evulel'ithutyana lwemilozi kubantwana bezulu,
Ndlebe zibanzi ziphulaphul'izingqi zekhehle,
De wavulek'uqhoqhoqho siyinginginya sisonke,
Ngoba namhlanje sifun'ukukhahlela sithi,
Sina ndini!
Madiba!
Dalibunga!
Msimbithi we sizwe!
Nkom'eduna yomthonyama!
Sithwalandwe!
You have walked along the road of the hereos and the
heroines.
You have borne the pain of those who have known fear
and learnt to conquer it.
You have marched in front when comfort was in the midst
of the ranks
You have laughed to contend against a river of tears.
You have cried to broadcast a story of joy.
And now you leave this hallowed place to continue to
march in front of a different detachment of the same
army of the sun.
Not the comfort of the fond superintendence of the
growing stalks of the maize plant or of the Ngunki herd
with its milk, its flesh or its hide.
Nor the pleasant chatter of your grand-children with
mountains to climb which are but little mounds.
Not the pensive silence of the elderly, whose burdened
minds cascade backwards because to look too much into
the future is to impose a burden on bones that have
grown old.
You leave us here not because you have to stop.
You leave us here because you have to start again.
The accident of your birth should have condemned you
to a village.
Circumstances you did not choose should have confined
you to a district.
Your sight, your heart and your mind could have reached
no further than the horizon of the natural eye.
But you have been where you should not have been.
You have faced death and said - do your worst!
You have inhabited the dark, dark dungeons of freedom
denied, itself a denial to live in a society where freedom
was denied.
You have looked at the faces of some of those who were
your comrades, who turned their eyes away from you because
somewhere in their mortal being there lingered the remnants
of a sense of shame, always and for ever whispering
softly - no to treachery! a thing in the shadows, present
at every dawn, repeating, repeating, repeating - I am
Conscience, to whom you have denied a home.
You have not asked - who indeed are these for whose
lives I was prepared to die!
You have asked who am I, that I too did not falter,
so that I too could turn my own eyes away from myself
and another, who was a comrade.
You have stood at the brink, when you had to appeal
to the gods about whether to win a dishonourable peace
or to lose the lives of your people, and decided that
none among these would exchange their lives for an existence
without honour.
You have been where nobody should be asked to be.
You have carried burdens heavier than those who felt
it their responsibility and right to proclaim you an
enemy of the state.
You have to convince your enemies to believe a story
difficult to believe, because it was true, that your
burnished spear glittered in the rays of the sun, not
to speak of hatred and death from them, but because
you prayed that its blinding brilliance would tell them,
whose ears would not hear, that you loved them as your
own kith and kin.
You have had to bear the mantle of sainthood when all
you sought was pride in the knowledge that you were
a good foot soldier for justice and freedom.
But despite it all and because of it all, we are blessed.
We are blessed because you have walked along the road
of our heroes and heroines.
For centuries our own African sky has been dark with
suffering and foreboding.
But because we have never surrendered, for centuries
the menace in our African sky has been brightened by
the light of our stars.
In the darkness of our night, the victory of the Khoikhoi
in 1510 here in Table Bay, when they defeated and killed
the belligerent Portuguese admiral and aristocrat, Dom
Franscisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy
in India, has lit our skies for ever.
In the darkness of our night, Autshumato, the Khoikhoi
leader who was the first political prisoner on Robben
Island, shone on our firmament as our star of hope.
And so these and other since, the kings and queens
and generals and warriors who resisted Africa's colonisation,
the leaders who, and the movements which fought for
African emancipation - these who are, permanently, our
heroes and heroines - have come and gone, over the generations,
one after the other, each to take his or her place as
a star in the African sky.
Among them are our own, whose names we recite to tell
ourselves that we are - black liberators, white liberators,
human beings, whose only fault has been to strive to
live as human beings.
Among these, Madiba, we recite you name, because your
fault too, for which your have paid your price, was
that yours strived so that you, together with us, could
live as a human being.
As these human beings, we have, for five years, traversed
the rooms and passages that surround us and occupied
this theatre of drama and farce and the birth of the
new, carrying on our foreheads the title - the law makers!
The sense of wonder still pervades our ranks that out
of the turnult and the babble of tongues, the veiled
enmities and the bloodless wars, there could have arisen
over our devastated land, out of this house, with its
own history, the sun of hope.
Though standing like little giants, because we stand
on your shoulders and others of your generation, we
must proclaim it to the world that here, in these houses
of the law-givers, we have striven to do the right things,
because to have done otherwise would have been to condemn
ourselves to carry, for all time, the burden of having
insulted all the sacrifices you made.
Others, before us, who also had the power to decide
how each and all shall behave, according to such rules
and regulations they were empowered to set, arrived
from Europe at the Cape of Good Hope on the 23rd of
December, 1802.
These were the representatives of the Batavian Republic
of the Netherlands.
As they landed on the shores of our oceans, only a
heckler's shout from where you sit, Madiba, they carried
in their heads the lesson they had been taught, on "Methods
to Follow when Attending Savage Peoples". And here
is an example of their lessons:
Convey to them our arts,
but not our corruption,
the code of our morals,
and not the example of our vices,
our sciences and not our dogmas,
the advantages of civilisation,
and not their abuses,
conceal from them how the people
in our more enlightened countries,
defame one another, and degrade
themselves by their passions.
On the 10th of May, five years ago, you stood in front
of the Union Buildings in Pretoria to proclaim to the
universe that the sun could never set on so glorious
a human achievement as was celebrated that day.
Black and white South Africans had, at last, arrived
at the point when, together, they could say:
Let us nurture our arts, and not our corruption.
Let us communicate morality, and not our vices.
Let us advance science, and not our dogmas.
Let us advance civilisation, and not abuse.
After a long walk, we too have arrived at the starting
point of a new journey.
We have you, Madiba, as our nearest and brightest star
to guide us on our way.
We will not get lost.
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