I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the
trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our
sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders,
lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.
The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of
the veld.
The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and
the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the
foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.
At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to
the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the
pestilential mosquito.
A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that
none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!
I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful
Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who
were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as
a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live,
fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel
occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their
own actions, they remain still, part of me.
In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity
informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the
lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that
Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to
dishonour the cause of freedom.
My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African
crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of
Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who
sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps,
destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.
I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds,
in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.
I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely,
that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be
foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition
for that human existence.
Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim
that - I am an African.
I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a
titanic battle, the one redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend
the indefensible.
I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger
appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and
women in His image.
I know what if signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, subhuman.
I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not,
simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had
ensured that they enjoy.
I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the
rest.
I have seen the corruption of minds and souls in the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a
veritable crime against humanity.
I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the
conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.
There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the
street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger,
those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.
Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To
these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare.
And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in
KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.
They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are
available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband.
Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past - killers who have no sense of the worth
of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would
seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who
brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.
All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!
Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are
heroes and heroines.
I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.
I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution
should result in the perpetuation of injustice.
The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in
the description of our country and people as barbaric.
Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad.
Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines.
Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are
determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.
We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate
their own definition of what it means to be African.
The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes and unequivocal statement that we refuse to
accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins.
It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that
the people shall govern.
It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue,
and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual.
It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the
oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by
another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the
fear of tyranny.
It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as
equals with their fellow human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic
dispersal.
It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, promote them, strive for
their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with
repression.
It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule.
It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force.
It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define
ourselves as one people.
As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud
without any feeling of conceit.
Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the
unique creation of African hands and African minds.
Bit it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat
ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of
all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.
Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and shortsightedness.
But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a
super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious
future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after!
Today it feels good to be an African.
It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the
African National Congress, to say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an
input into the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have presided over the
birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted their wits one against the other, to the
unseen stars who shone unseen as the management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly,
the advisers, experts and publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across the globe
- congratulations and well done!
I am an African.
I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.
The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is
a pain I also bear.
The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we
share.
The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering
of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair.
This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned.
This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so
decisively to the evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from
the ashes.
Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now!
Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace!
However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!
Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our
past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity
of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!
- A speech by former President Thabo Mbeki.
