Let’s learn the speeches that shaped SA
THE Americans and British have a thing for lauding and quoting great speeches made by leaders in their societies. From Abraham Lincoln to John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher, their words are often used as quotations in speeches and articles to showcase some profundity.
Harold MacMillan’s 1960 “Winds of Change” speech or Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech in 1940 have lived on in legendary fashion across world stages.
In South Africa, we are poor at keeping alive the great speeches made in our land. They are hardly quoted and do not live on in everyday life or serve as signposts for sensible leadership. Other than a few Long Walk to Freedom quotes, most South Africans cannot quote a line out of a South African leader’s speech, yet there are several great speeches that should be part of our cultural landscape.
A while back, I listed six speeches that shaped South Africa, which should be part of our everyday consciousness and regularly quoted from in corporate, academic and civic life.
The power in Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia Trial speech on April 20, 1964, is palpable. He delivers it with an astute authority that reaches beyond platitudes to sheer life-on-the-line commitment.
FW De Klerk’s February 2, 1990 speech should be part of our remembrance. Where were you on that day? What emotions did you feel as you heard those words?
What about Nelson Mandela’s Inauguration Speech on May 10, 1994? Or Thabo Mbeki's “I am an African” speech on May 8, 1996? Every line in that speech should be printed out on the walls of corporate offices.
A quote from that speech reads: “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. 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.”
This makes me shiver when I contemplate its depth. A black future president reaches over and out to identify with European colonial migrants and the suffering of his Boer oppressors.
The other is Steve Biko’s speech in Cape Town in January 1971 and Prof Ben Okri’s September 12, 2012 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture at UCT.
I don’t have room to quote from all of these, but I do wish to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 6th speech in my collection of great South African speeches. It was the speech given by Onkgopotse Abram Tiro, president of the SRC at the University of the North (now Limpopo), on April 29, 1972.
He spoke eloquently about being at a black university run by whites who made no space for black leadership. He was expelled from the university a short while later. He went on to teach at Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto and nurtured some of the leaders of the 1976 student uprising.
The issues raised in Tiro’s speech in 1972, 50 years ago, have remained unresolved and are now at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement in South Africa.
As a society, it’s a blight on our cultural integrity that we can quote Lincoln and Churchill more than we can quote Mbeki or Biko.
It’s a shame that our children are not taught the speeches that shaped South Africa. It’s a shame that political, corporate and academic South Africa does not lead in making these important words part of our cultural life.
Perhaps it is because we have failed to create a common narrative that memorialises our greatness that we are now failing to find cause to celebrate our common humanity.