I am an African : Africa Month Inspiration
May 31, 2016
For the month of May, many a places around the continent were
celebrating Africa month. I deemed it fitting that I celebrate this month with a look that shows or says "Africa my continent". We come from a continent that
has seen; and is plagued by many atrocities which have been happening for centuries and decades. Sadly there are
still places where our brothers and sisters suffer from famine and war stricken challenges.
In the words of my former president Thabo Mbeki’s famous parliamentary speech I
leave you for now. Please do read the speech, I promise you will enjoy it especially if
you have not heard or read it before. Thanks for stopping by.
I am an African by Thabo Mbeki
“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 lightning, 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 the 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 of
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 independence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a
country, we keep an inaudible and 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 Ashanti of Ghana, as Berbers of the desert. I am the
grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas,
and the Vroue monument, 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 Nongqawuse.
I am he who made it possible to
trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which our
stomachs yearn. 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 of these people, and in the knowledge that none dares 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 to 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
it signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who,
sub-human. 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 imposed 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 as a result of 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, of torture, of imprisonment, of 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 an unequivocal statement
that we refuse to accept that our African-ness shall be defined by our race,
our colour, our gender or our 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 regards to colour, to
race, to gender, to age or to geographic dispersal. It provides the opportunity
to enable each one and all to state their views, to promote them, to 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. But it 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, to petulance,
selfishness and short-sightedness. 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, the experts and the 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 people of Liberia, Somalia, 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. 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”
I am an African
Outfit
Details
Jacket: Identity
T - Shirt: H&M
Skirt: Fashion World
Shoes: Woolworths
Neckpiece: Custom made
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