Master of ceremonies
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen
We are a delegation that represents government and the people of South Africa in the province of KwaZulu-Natal; we are here to pay tribute to the heroes of the South African people, Reverend William Cullen and his wife Ida Belle Wilcox, who settled in this province in 1881 and left that country after a great sacrifice.
By the time they left, they had planted the seeds of liberty through honestly preaching the Christian gospel and living through the principles of equality of human beings. These teachings helped to sow the seeds of racial tolerance and reconciliation that turned South Africa from the bloodbath that the world predicted when the democratic dispensation was born, into a miracle that was admired by the entire world.
On 27 April 1994 former President Nelson Mandela went to cast his ballot in the first ever election in his lifetime at the age of 72, in Inanda village outside Durban city in KwaZulu-Natal. Thereafter he went to the grave of the first President of the African National Congress Dr John Langalibalele Dube; stood at attention and took a military salute and declared: “Mr President I am here to report that now South Africa is free!”
For all South Africans, the story of their freedom is symbolised by this picture of the former commander in chief of the military wing of the ANC called uMkhonto We Sizwe reporting to his departed leader of the revolution, that his mission had at last been accomplished. Dr John Dube never lived to see the anger of his people and their determination to be free develops to the level of deciding to take up arms to overthrow their oppressors. However, his spirit had guided and inspired them for eighty two years through the organisation he co-founded to unite all the people of South Africa in general and African people in particular.
The history of the people of South Africa and their struggle against colonisation and oppression will be written by authors and researchers for centuries to come. Fifteen years into the new dispensation many of the heroic encounters of our people remain in the memories of the participants and those to whom such heroic deeds were narrated by word of mouth except for fewer incidents in which the detailed accounts were documented.
Often this history is told, not by those who struggled to shape their destiny but often the story has been told by those who opposed the quest of our people for freedom. It is much lately that many stories are recorded by those whose journey to freedom is being recorded. For most of the people in the world the name “South Africa” is synonymous to the name of Nelson Mandela, the revered Madiba of our times. We all belong to a generation that will count itself blessed and most fortunate to have lived during the lifetime of Madiba.
This is the man whose sacrifices, resilience and commitment to human liberty saw him spend almost two thirds of his life fighting for freedom, one third of which was in prison. He and his comrades had been prepared for the death sentence to be imposed during their infamous Rivonia treason trial by the apartheid regime, in which event they had instructed their lawyers not to lodge an appeal. They were prepared to die to see South Africa free and they lived to see the dawn of the democratic dispensation.
The story of South African people continues to inspire many people under similar conditions and always gives hope to many who seek to improve the conditions under which they live. Their hope is provided by the triumph of the most scorned, oppressed and downtrodden who challenged the most sophisticated and feared regime in the whole continent of Africa and won!
The leadership Mandela gave to the toiling masses of South Africa and the inspiration that shook the greatest powers in the world and yet touched the poorest and powerless through his compassion and quest for peace and reconciliation with his former captors has made Madiba a legend of mythological proportions, whose spirit is invoked to fill the hearts of people by the mere mention of his name.
Yet Madiba was one out of many leaders that served with him, suffered like him and endured the pain and the yoke of oppression and collectively took responsibility for pioneering the path to a free and democratic state. Together with his comrades they represented the will of our people and their desire to be free and walked the same path with many lesser known heroes whose contribution was nevertheless of equally significant proportion.
It is not possible to talk about Madiba and the revolution that took place in our country without remembering the contribution of his co-accused, leaders such as Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Wilton Mkwayi, Raymond Mhlaba, and others who were tried and sentenced with him. Nor is it possible to leave out many who served our struggle and left an indelible mark during their lifetime, such as Lilian Ngoyi, Charlotte Maxeke, Helen Joseph, Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Joe Modise, Johnny Makhathini, Dr Yusuf Dadoo, Dr Monty Naicker, TT Nkobi, Dan Tloome, Moses Kotane, Bram Fischer, Chris Hani and many more.
These heroes are not just names but are people whose lives represent chapters in the book about the people of our country and the struggle for human dignity. Madiba is amongst a long line of the Presidents of the African National Congress who led the struggle for freedom of the people of South Africa. Each one of them highly revered and highly dedicated democrats and fearless campaigners for human rights.
Such luminaries include the current President Jacob Zuma, the former President Thabo Mbeki, the much loved and respected Oliver Reginald Tambo (who led the ANC for effectively thirty years when it was outlawed till it was legalised); including Chief Albert Luthuli (who presided over the ANC at the time of rising militancy and steered the path for peace to become the first Nobel Peace Prize Laureate in the African continent); the Reverend Mahabane, Dr Pixley Seme and others.
This long list of leaders of our people who served as leaders of our struggle for freedom served after the founding President General of the ANC elected on 8 January 1912, Dr John Langalibalele Dube. This was the pioneer! The pathfinder! I vulandlela! I ngqalabutho! A giant well ahead of his time, Dr John Dube was an intellectual, a visionary that was trained in the Oberlin College in Minnesota in the United States of America. He was a courageous man who believed in employing education as a tool for political and economic emancipation in the face of brutal dispossession and oppression by the colonial masters of the time.
He established the school that stands today, called Ohlange (meaning it is institution for the indigenous people) and was greatly influenced by such leaders as Booker T Washington, who emphasised skills development and combined that with intellectual and spiritual development. His stay in the United States of America coincided with the rise of the spirit of Pan-Africanism, as espoused by many of the African intellectuals and leaders such as Marcus Garvy, Deb Du Bois, Nkwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta including Dr Dube’s cousin and African scholar Dr Pixley Seme, Patrice Lumumba, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and others.
This was a new form of thinking as African people were going through the era of modernity with very few models to follow but a path that ultimately led to the liberation of the entire continent of Africa from colonisation. For Dube, all this would not have been possible, were it not for the insightful and honest missionary, who lived true to himself and the Word of God he preached. The work of Reverend Wilcox and his wife Ida Belle who founded a few mission station in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, the Natal Colony in the region eastern area of South Africa was a catalyst and a spark that lit the flame that shed the light towards our long road to freedom.
Dr Dube was handed to the care of the Wilcox family as a young man of sixteen showing a great potential, which even his widowed mother could never have foreseen as she asked Wilcox to help educate him, as such education as she wished for was only available to white boys in the colony. The closeness of these families endured over their lifetime together, as Dube was helped through university by the friends of the Wilcox family in the United States as well as his own part time employment.
He was a writer who published his first book in the early twenties, and continued to author several other books that are part of the classical Zulu literature, such as “Isitha somuntu” (translated to mean Man is his own enemy”) and “Insila ka Shaka”, an account of life in the palace under the reign of King Shaka ending up as a pictorial and romantic story of love across different ethnic cultures.
This is the man who founded the first Natal Native Congress, the provincial precursor of the well known African National Congress which he was to lead in 1912. He founded the Zulu language newspaper “Ilanga laseNatali”, a paper that exists today. This paper became a mouth piece for the oppressed and offered a platform for intellectual exchange of ideas, similar to “Indian Opinion” established by Mahatma Gandhi who also formed the Natal Indian Congress and lived a short distance away at the same time.
The African and Indian Congress movements later signed a pact in 1947 and joined forces to fight apartheid from a common platform and ultimately opened membership to accommodate all members in the African National Congress. The efforts by colonial masters to draft indigenous people to serve them as slave labour in their farms and sugar plantations as well as in the mines, coupled with their feeling of insecurity caused the authorities to impose a poll tax.
This step was vigorously resisted by people in the area resulting in the 1906 Uprisings led by traditional leaders and Christian leaders such as Bhambatha kaMancinza, Sgananda Shezi (a 96 year old general that had served five Kings in the Zulu dynasty), Chakijana ka Gezindaka, Mjongo kaMncindo Bhengu and many others who were executed and imprisoned in St Helena, deposed or banished. It was this uprising that led to the imprisonment of King Dinuzulu in St Helena. He is the son of King Cetshwayo who had defeated and humiliated British imperial forces featuring the most experienced soldiers that had seen battle in India, Java, and other parts of the eastern colonies.
Amongst those who supported and urged people not to pay taxes was Reverend Wilcox. In one of the most violent repression that killed over three thousand of the African people, Dr Dube recorded the events in his newspaper, despite the threat from the colonial authorities. Mahatma Gandhi volunteered to become a stretch bearer as a leader of the so-called Indian Volunteer Corps. That is the time Gandhi coined a movement of Satyagraha, that is: peaceful protest.
Gandhi lamented the futility of violence as a means to solve problems and declaring that in such a situation, neither the perpetrator nor the victim wins. Soon thereafter, the people of South Africa, who had previously fought against colonisation as individual ethnic groups with hostility amongst them, decided to combine their strength. They were shocked at being excluded in the formation of the Union of South Africa and mobilised the African National Congress as the true Parliament of the People in contrast to the Union of South Africa in 1910 where the minority excluded the majority.
Seeing through the strategy of land dispossession, Wilcox encouraged Dube and other leaders of the converts, to buy land and distribute to the African people through a shareholding company of black and white people formed in 1909. Wilcox had established mission stations in Thembalethu and Cornfields between the towns of Estcourt and Ladysmith in the province. This is where he delivered sermons which encouraged people to maintain self confidence and to resist colonial oppression.
Known as “Mbuyabathwa” Wilcox fought for the empowerment of local people and was never afraid to criticise the colonial authority. He made a deep impression as a white man who was not ashamed to stand on their side. “There is nothing in the whole Bible to show the superiority in a white skin, or that a man born with kinky hair and a dark complexion is not as good as any other man”. He said, adding that with education the black people will ultimately rise and challenge the issue of taxation without representation. This indeed happened and the rest is history.
A cursory look at the history of missionaries reveals many instances where they were often the only wall between the oppression and the brutality of colonial settlers and authorities and had no law to protect them. Yet the missionaries provided education through the schools they built and health services through the missionary hospitals. It was the missionary that built the first teacher training colleges, training teachers and nurses and the first doctors of African origin and risked their own reputation in the process.
Wilcox was influential in the sending of the first delegation of elected leaders of the African National Congress to make the representation to the crown “as civilised and educated men” led by Dube in 1914 and another in 1919. This occurred after the enacting of the 1913 Land Act, which made the issue of land dispossession to be the fundamental grievance of the African people. For their part in ‘opening the eyes of the native’; the Wilcox family was ostracised by colonial settlers and dispatched out of the country, impoverished, humiliated without the ability to pay for themselves, let alone to support themselves as family. So ruthless was the punishment that his name hardly ever featured in daily discussion.
Rev Wilcox mentored and supported the man who grew to become the founder of our vehicle for freedom. Today we can trace the roots of the values of our leadership to honourable people like Wilcox and many others. These values of dedication to serving humanity, integrity, principled leadership, compassion, peaceful coexistence of diverse people with tolerance for different cultures, religions and faiths, protection of human rights, equality, justice, freedom, democracy were intertwined within the fibre of our struggle for freedom.
It is the legacy of Mandela, OR Tambo, Chief Albert Luthuli, and Dr Dube that they inherited from the values of the African people and the missionary and other leaders of faith in an effort to achieve human development and a better world order. The complexity of our struggle and the multiplicity of men and women that contributed to the fulfilment of the dream for a free and democratic society make it impossible to single out one person for all the credit.
This tribute today is an effort to add a word of appreciation and gratitude to those whom their lifetime never allowed them to be acknowledged yet, nevertheless were pivotal in charting the way to our final destination. We felt it appropriate for that since it was the government of the Natal Colony that visited the brutality and ill treatment to the Wilcox family for the stand they took in support of our people.
Now that Wilcox vision and wishes had triumphed, our people are free and they have elected us into government office, we come here to apologise to the departed Wilcox family. We thank them for the sacrifices and the good work they did. This we do as an effort to correct the wrongs of our own history and to make the Wilcox remaining and future generations walk with their heads held high for they are descendants of the stock of courageous man and woman of principle.
In closing I must pay tribute to the ‘Zulu’ man from Mali, Prof Cherif Keita. He has brought us here together to tell the story over a hundred years old. He was a French teacher, who had never been to South Africa before he ‘met’ Dr John Dube, has never done research in history and landed in Durban by coincidence. I say he was driven by the spirit of our heroes.
In isiZulu there is an expression that goes: “kuyofa abantu kusale izibongo, yizo ezosala zibadabula nasemanxiweni”. Translated it means “when people die, the spirit of the heroes lives on in the praises of the work they did for humanity” This means Reverend Wilcox will never die. We have come with the grandchildren of Dr John Dube to unite them with their family and for them to thank the Wilcox family on behalf of their family. Nothing can be said about Dube without thinking of Wilcox.
Professor Keita is what we call in my language “umvusi wenyamazane” In African tradition when the hunting expedition retires with lots of game captured in the hunt, the hunter who spotted the deer and started the chase, is never forgotten by those who take the deer down. They all share in the festivities of their success. He was indeed sent by the spirit of our heroes to ensure that justice which eluded the rulers at the time, is restored by those who have lived to lead the free South Africa.
Our gratitude goes to the consul general’s office of South Africa for all the work they have done for the success of this mission. The struggle for liberation in South Africa was highly supported by the people all over the world. This was because of many friends such as Wilcox and others who were not prepared to countenance the injustices of apartheid. During the difficult days when all legal protests and liberation organisation were outlawed, our struggle survived with the support of the international community who gave ever so generously to the African National Congress led by our former President Oliver Tambo.
In recognition for such support, the new democratic government of South Africa regularly bestows the highest honour as mark of respect called the “Grand order of Oliver Tambo. The government of KwaZulu-Natal has nominated Reverend Wilcox fro such an order. I have now been informed that President Zuma has accented to the bestowing of this honour to Reverend William Wilcox and Chancery of National Orders has today delivered to me a notice that invites the family to receive the National Order Posthumously on 11 December 2009.
I now hereby formally inform you as I hand over the letter to the elder and youngest generations of the Wilcox family. This further cements the relationship of the American people with the people of South Africa. Long live the friendship of the people of the world! Long live the international spirit of human solidarity!
Thank you!
Ngiyabonga!
Amandla!
Issue by: KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government
9 November 2009
Source: KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government (http://www.kwazulunatal.gov.za/)
