Madam Deputy Speaker
Honourable members
Ministers and Deputy Ministers
Ladies and gentlemen
As we all know, yesterday, 31 May 2010, marked the centenary of the union of South Africa.
We are gathered in this National Assembly, as public representatives in the democratic state of South African.
We are assembled here not to apportion blame and to exclude others from sharing in nation-building and social cohesion programmes.
In our approach to commemorate history, we should neither be eclectic nor silent.
Madam Deputy Speaker,
As it has been said by speakers before me in this House, the formation of the union was a significant milestone in the establishment of the nation-state we now know as the Republic of South Africa.
This marked the culmination of engagements of the victorious British economic interest on the one hand and the defeated Boer republics on the other in a manner which excluded the African people who had also participated in the war.
It is worth noting that this war which was referred to by the Afrikaner historians as Tweede-vryheidsoorlog and referred to by the British historians as the Anglo-Boer War implying that only Afrikaners and the British participated in the war.
And yet we know here today that Sesotho language is today richer because of the multi-racial and diverse participation in the battlefields. When the Basotho people say “ntwa ya dibono”, they were referring to what they saw during the war when the Scotsman had died and their behinds were revealing due to the Scottish attire they were wearing. Through this Sotho saying, we are reminded that people from Scotland also took part in the war, not just the Anglo and the Boer.
The founding of the Union is one singular event that determined the contours of modern-day South Africa since the South Africa Act of 1909.
Honourable members,
Engagement with the union of South Africa as a chapter in our history will help us not only to understand where we are today as a nation, but also, based on this historical understanding, help us find correct ways out of our present conditions. We are a people that have always been ready to engage and discuss what is of concern to us as a nation.
Throughout the history and experience of dispossession, African people opposed exclusion and never accepted being left out of processes that affected their lives.
Therefore they always posited principles of inclusivity as opposed to exclusion.
It is thanks to visionary leaders such as Dr Abdurahman, Mohandas Gandhi, Tengo Jabavu, Sol Plaatje and Dr John Langalibalele Dube who kept abreast with all the developments leading up to the formation of the Union.
These brave men and women could unpack and translate every part of the debates to our chiefs, elders and ordinary fellow Africans.
Honourable members, because of their exclusion from participating in the affairs of the Union, people came in 1912 from the then-four provinces to form the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) as their own parliament.
Most importantly, the seeds for non-racialism in South Africa are traced back to this era of the activism wherein leaders opposed the rendering of Africans as “temporary sojourners” in a land of their birth.
As public representatives, we are obliged to take the lead on behalf of our people by relaying our history as our forebears did in the past.
Let us engage with history in its entirety and shun the silence to inaction.
I believe we are ready to take on the meanings and implications emanating from centenary of the Union. Since the dawn of our constitutional democracy, we have always demonstrated a collective maturity to deal with inconvenient truths, as uncomfortable as they may be.
A task before us, irrespective of where in the political spectrum we reside, is one requiring us to engage with this history comprehensively and objectively.
We have to deal with this history in its entirety and embrace it for what it is.
Failing which, history will become subjective and reflective of the interests of and viewpoints of victors.
As the old African idiom states, “only once lions have historians will hunters cease to be heroes,”
Therefore, our task as a nation united in its diversity should not be restricted by a willing embrace of only what is positive in our eyes because those negative elements in our historical record are there to alert us about directions we should steer away from.
Ordinarily, this centenary celebration should be a subject for national discourse, discussed in every town and village, dorpie and township.
But as matters have turned out it is not! Instead we find ourselves in a headlong rush to move forward without understanding where we come from.
I am of the view that the occasion of 31 May 2010 should have ideally created a platform for all our people, black and white, young and old, and regardless of creed, to discuss even those subject areas we are most uncomfortable with, simply because that is necessary for healing and in due course creating a united nation.
However, we are a nation in progress and I readily accept that history is never completely done and thereafter placed in a freezer; hence we must tell it for what it is.
History is alive and is forever evolving and all of us have to be involved and participate in its telling and retelling.
I wish to underscore the point that everyone has to be involved in this history-making process for if we leave others out of the narrative they are most likely to retreat into a laager and so deprive our nation of the creativity consequent on the multiplicity of ideas we need to shape our future.
Let me not delve into the details of events that occurred leading up to the formation of the Union 100 years ago as this has been covered by other Honourable members.
Safe to say that today millions of our people are landless is a direct outcome of deliberate laws of dispossession.
For practical purposes, this epochal moment signalled the beginning of the long period of exclusion of the majority of our people from meaningful participation in the main body politic.
This exclusion also meant that race continued to be a significant index in both the politics and economy of our country.
The consequences of the establishment of the Union of South Africa are reverberating in all aspects of society today, sixteen (16) years into democracy.
And so, if we are to address the challenges besetting us in present-day South Africa, challenges of poverty and inequality, social cohesion, and residues of racism and sexism, we can only do so guided by a clearer comprehension of this collective past from which none of us can escape.
Of course, reflection on odious acts in our past does not call for common interpretation of history.
Instead, it is to encourage all of us to be candid and open about our shared past with the view to not only preventing repetition of such mistakes, but more importantly, to use such mistakes to rebuild our nation.
Madam Deputy Speaker,
This is our history and a ledger of memory upon which our present socio-economic conditions are based. Admittedly, our past is a past of pain for many of our people.
The majority of South Africans have suffered much from policies of dispossession and from practices of exploitation.
Yes, we are saddled with monuments reminding us of this pain and suffering.
Yes, there is a temptation for us to consider wiping the slate of our history clean and doing away with remnants of oppression. But what would be a net result if we venture in this direction?
Every event in our lore dating from the arrival of the Dutch East Indian Company in 1652, should, of necessity, be objectively catalogued and narrated for posterity.
If we decide to make feel-good-history our focus, we are most likely to repeat the errors of our past.
Should we be remiss in this task, I believe we would be betraying the memory of those who lived and died in the course of this history.
Honourable members,
In embracing the past, especially its negative and unappealing aspects, such as those resulting from land dispossession, we do not, by any stretch of the imagination, intend to rub it in among certain sections of our population.
What we need is an all-inclusive process that involves the participation of all communities and social groups in determining our collective history and shared destiny.
This is what would happen if we remain silent about our history and select to focus instead on episodes favourable to our purposes.
Only this time, those condemning history to the bin of forgetfulness will not be agents of oppression, but all of us through our silence and selective amnesia.
As it is commonly said, there is no silence without a language to make it so.
Instead, it is our duty to betray silence since there is no sorrow as deep as a sorrow of the unknown and what is denied.
I am convinced this would not be a correct approach. We need to dialogue with events from whence we come.
We have to negotiate our presence by preservation in the unimaginable acts that took place during South Africa’s period of slavery, colonialism and apartheid.
There cannot be any lasting comfort in razing down material testaments which I would suggest need to be imaginatively recaptured by our artists, architects and historians so that the tales continue to live on, not only in the oral narrative but in the material representations such as museums and place names.
After all, in the dialogue with slavery, colonialism and apartheid are stories of survival and ultimate triumph against inhumane systems.
The project we began sixteen (16) years ago of nation-building and social cohesion demands nothing less than inviting every group and community in deciding, on how we approach and relate to our shared history and common destiny.
I am of the view that if everyone is made to feel welcome in communicating the narrative of South Africa, then we would be a step closer to convincing them to feel patriotic as South Africans.
Honourable members,
Our history when viewed in its entirety, offers us salutary benefits on how to deal with issues of racial politics, building programmes of unity and in forging ahead to build a society all its inhabitants can be proud of.
In conclusion, let us remember the fact that silence is as much an omission as it is a commission.
The late national laureate, Mazisi Kunene, offers us a reason to preserve our history with these words.
“We must congregate here around the sitting mat. To narrate endlessly the stories of distant worlds. It is enough to do so, to give our tale the grandeur of an ancient heritage and then to clap our hands for those who are younger.”
I thank you.
Address by the Deputy President, Kgalema Motlanthe, at the Parliamentary debate on the centenary of the union of South Africa
