WELCOMING REMARKS BY PREMIER T S P MAKWETLA AT THE NATIONAL IMBIZO ON UBUNTU AND NATION-BUILDING, HELD AT BOSHABELO, MPUMALANGA, ON 17-18 NOVEMBER 2006
Your Excellency, the Deputy President of the Republic, Hon Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka;
The Hon Speaker of Parliament, Ms Baleka Mbete;
The Minister of Arts and Culture, Minister Pallo Jordan;
The Executive Mayor of Steve Tshwete Municipality,
Hon Clr Mantlakeng Mahlangu and
The Executive District Mayor of Nkangala District, Hon Clr Speedo Mashilo;
MEC for Culture, Sport and Recreation, MEC Nomsa Mtsweni;
The chairperson and members of the Board of the SANHC;
The CEO of the NHC, Adv Sonwabile Mancotywa;
The CEO of the Freedom Park Legacy Project, Dr Wally Serote;
All dignitaries present;
Our revered traditional leaders from across the length and breadth of our country;
Our exhalted spiritual leaders;
The community of Botshabelo and its distinguished representatives “Beng Mmabu!”;
The community of Steve Tshwete municipality;
Fellow South Africans;
Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is an extra-ordinary moment and a humbling privilege for me to welcome you to our province at a place which happens to be my ancestral village, and the place where I was actually born. If heaven exists, there must be a big commotion among the spirits of those who founded this place exactly hundred and forty years ago, that today, many years after the lights of this luminous community-of-old were extinguished by those who believed they represented a superior civilisation, we have returned here in search of humanity, to assert our humanity; in search of ubuntu, to assert ubuntu bethu.
Allow me Programme Director, through you, to express our appreciation to the National Heritage Council CEO, Mr Mancotywa and his management, for having assembled this unique convocation, the first of its kind in our province, in Botshabelo, to refocus us, and to energise us as a nation, in pursuit of the ideal of a more humane society for our country. Through their vision, the ruins of Botshabelo have received what they have been crying for, the reassertion of the values of ‘Ubuntu'-‘Botho' because Botshabelo, the place of refuge, was a product of two civilisations which believed they shared a common mission to construct a society based on ‘Ubuntu'-‘Botho', namely the white man's Christianity and the virtues of African communalism. In that quest, like similar experiences of missionary work elsewhere, Botshabelo could not escape the contradictions presented by the cultural imperialism inherent in the phenomenon of missionaries.
Secondly, Botshabelo cries out for ‘Ubuntu' because more than the pain suffered by communities which were uprooted from their lands, its history was obliterated and a new false legend was concocted to provide a false history within the nefarious apartheid policy of divide and rule. Understandably therefore, the mere act of our assembling here today is a symbolic restoration of the glory of a village which in the context of its historic time, was like Rome, a city which easily dwarfed many other cities in South Africa, over and above its cultural value. “ Mpumalanga – Reclaiming the Past, defining the Future ”, a soon-to-be published manuscript on the heritage of our province, edited by Prof Peter Delius, says, and I quote, “Botshabelo was a major centre of agricultural production and innovation. It came for a time to have the largest school in the Transvaal and a fine church, certainly the finest in the Transvaal, and in the early 1870's, the credit worthiness of the mission station was considerably greater than that of the ZAR.”
Thanks to the bigotry and obscurantism of Afrikanerdom and apartheid rule, a centre so important in our development and evolution as a country and as a region, has been successfully wiped off our minds and our memory.
Dear Guests, over the next two days you will interrogate and exchange views about the value system of Ubuntu. I am under no doubt that in that endeavour, you will find the story of this place fascinating, and a pertinent challenge in bringing to the fore the many facets and complexities of the subject we are here to deal with.
Mission stations everywhere were the first communities which had to contend with a clash of cultures among people who were coming from very diverse cultures – the missionaries and the early African Christian converts. Their experience, I believe, is relevant to this dialogue. Having assessed it, and agreeing that we are a society in perpetual motion, the question is, how much of this behavioural culture can be deployed in abetting the mission of building nationhood among South Africans?
This heritage site is also relevant, I believe, to the theme of nation-building, because in an interesting way, Botshabelo, the place of refuge, later acquired a diverse community, constituted over time by some people who came from the chiefdoms and kingdoms from within this region which were still intact along their tribal lines, and including whites from near commando outposts. In the setting of the Transvaal of the 1870's, this mission station, it can be argued, logically represented a microcosm of communities which were still to form at a much later period in time elsewhere.
Once again in welcoming you all on behalf of our province, let me say that the challenge is our willingness to apply a scientific, people-centred vision of history to the African past, as to the past of other people of other continents.
To quote from the teachings of the late President of Frelimo, Samora Moises Machel, “Pride comes from the victories of the revolution, from the constant affirmation of its popular, Mozambican character, and not from an idealised and romanticised reconstruction of the past. On the contrary, such romanticism creates an ideological climate favourable to what are regarded as the two main enemies of people's power: neo-colonialism and traditional feudalism, both of which play down the importance of class contradictions in Africa and both of which perpetuate the mentalities of subservience and under-development. The objective is not to negate a mystified colonial history by means of a mystified pre-colonial history, but to de-mystify history altogether, so that the true role of the masses as its creator can be revealed.”
There can be no denying the truth that our biggest challenge in this dialogue is to find a link and to align the ‘Ubuntu value system' with what can be referred to as the culture produced by our struggle for a unitary, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa. An ‘Ubuntu value system' must serve to advance this goal.
As Amilcar Cabral says, “We may consider the national liberation movement as the organised political expression of the culture of the people who are undertaking the struggle.”
Perhaps the point argued by Samora Machel is eloquently argued by Amilcar Cabral when he says:
“To develop the economic and social progress of the people, the following objectives are important:
• Development of a popular culture of all positive indigenous cultural values;
• Development of a national culture based on the history and achievements of the struggle itself;
• Constant promotion of political and moral awareness of the people (of all social groups) as well as patriotism, of the spirit of sacrifice and devotion to the cause of freedom, justice and social progress;
• Development of a technical, technological and scientific culture, compatible with requirements for progress;
• Development, on the basis of a critical assimilation of man's achievements in the domains of art, science, literature, etcetera of a universal culture for perfect integration into the contemporary world, in the perspectives of its evolution;
• Constant and generalised promotion of feelings of humanism, of solidarity, of respect and disinterested devotion to human beings.”
Programme Director, distinguished guests, there can be no better framework to use as a guide in dealing with the main question of the day, the philosophy of ‘ubuntu', than by responding to the challenges raised by Amilcar Cabral. Indeed, this is the soul-searching that President Thabo Mbeki was enjoining all of us to do, in his “4 th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture” at the University of Witwatersrand.
On behalf of our province we wish you seminal discussions that will irresistibly bring back the legacy of Botshabelo to the many ailing hearts in our province and beyond.
I thank you.