What can we say today ?
100 years have past since the siege!
Out of the womb of the siege came:
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| Our former President Mr. Nelson Mandela said this word echoing the work done by Sol Plaatje: | ||
| When we ourselves received the baton from
Dube, Sol Plaatjie, Ghandi, Abdul Abduraman, Charlotte Maxeke, Gumede,
Mahabane and others, we might not have fully appreciated the
significance of the occasion, preoccupied as we were by the detail of
the moment. Yet, in their mysterious ways, history and fate were about
to dictate to us that we should walk the valley of death again and again
before we reached the mountain-tops of the people's desires. And so the time has come to make way for a new generation, secure in the knowledge that despite our numerous mistakes, we sought to serve the cause of freedom; if we stumbled on occasion, the bruises sustained were the mark of the lessons that we had to learn to make our humble contribution to the birth of our nation; so our people can start, after the interregnum of defeat and humiliation, to build their lives afresh as masters of their own collective destiny. |
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ADDRESS BY NELSON MANDELA TO THE CLOSING SESSION OF THE 50TH NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ANC, Mafikeng, 20 December 1997 |
