Nelspruit, Friday 30 July 2004
Good Evening
Honourable National Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr Pallo Jordan and members of your Department and Ministry; chairperson of the National Heritage Council, Dr Luli Callinicos and distinguished delegates and members of the National Heritage Council, allow me to welcome you most heartily to the Province of Mpumalanga and to the city of Nelspruit.
It is indeed a great honour and privilege for me to be part of a gathering as important as this one. Tonight's gathering takes place in the shadow of your earlier meetings were you were able to discuss a way forward on how to protect, promote and preserve our rich heritage content.
In doing so I believe you will be forging partnerships with many in our communities who are willing to lend a hand to advance the emancipation of the people and creating a better life for them.
In many parts of this province people are acting in unity in the pursuit of a society that embraces common nationhood.
People are overcoming centuries of oppression and attempted assimilation to reclaim their cultural heritage, and to build a nationhood that will shape lives meaningfully and with beauty.
Clearly as a people we have begun to emerge into a nation confident of itself, aware of its immense possibilities. We are a people prepared to do extra-ordinary things to attain the goal that comes from forging a People's contract in order to improve the lives of our people.
The victory that we have scored against apartheid has laid the firm basis for all the people of South Africa to unite across colour, language, ethnic and religious barriers. It has launched us on the course of realising our true potential.
We are mindful that the journey to where we are today has not been easy. But all of us persevered because we knew that what we had set out on was the right road.
It is my humble opinion that the Heritage Council has indeed begun to right a century-old wrong - being forced to deny our past. Our freedom has made it possible for us to reclaim our history.
Comrade Pallo and Dr Callinicos, you and your team must indeed give meaning to the Heritage Council's mandate to promote and protect the heritage content and integration of living heritage, for present and future generations.
The challenge you will face in promoting nation-building and national identity, would be to ensure that this happens without anyone of us feeling that what you are doing is not of the collective experience of all of us.
The experiences of all the people of the country - including our traditions, rituals, skills and techniques and indigenous knowledge systems - must be recorded in many different ways, many different voices, and stored. Your work must add value to our task of forging our common nationhood.
The nation, with your help, needs to come to a proper understanding of our history, which has been most grievously affected, by the ravages and distortions of apartheid and colonialism.
In conclusion, Ladies and gentlemen, as we take this mammoth task forward, our priorities must bring an end to the poverty of our people. Our century must be one in which the divisions of the past must truly cease to exist.
As we reconstruct and reclaim the whole country for all, we must break down all the divisions and attitudes of the past. We must do so while freeing everyone form the last vestiges of oppression.
Freeing everyone from hunger, disease and want. It is our task to make the most of our freedom, to entrench it in our new epoch as a fundamental and a permanent feature of our very existence.
We must develop a way in which our languages, our cultures, our heritage can
further grow and flourish.
We must display to other nations of the world, as well as to ourselves, our capacity to give humanity what is proudly the product of the composite effort of all our people.
Our success as a nation depends, in no small measures on the conservation of our heritage sites and the preservation of our culture.
On behalf of the people of Mpumalanga, on whose behalf I speak here tonight, allow once again welcoming you here and wishing you a pleasant steam-train journey as you take in the sights of this beautiful province.
Thank you.