South African History Online

Acceptance speech of the President of the ANC, Nelson Mandela, at the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony

Oslo, Norway, 10 December 1993

Your Majesty the King,
Your Royal Highness,
Honourable Prime
Minister,
Madame Gro Brundtland,
Ministers,
Members of Parliament and
Ambassadors,
Esteemed Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
Fellow
Laureate, Mr. F.W. de Klerk,
Distinguished guests,
Friends, ladies and
gentlemen:

I am indeed truly humbled to be standing here today to receive this year's
Nobel Peace Prize.

I extend my heartfelt thanks to the Norwegian Nobel Committee for elevating
us to the status of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate my compatriot and
fellow laureate, State President F.W. de Klerk, on his receipt of this high
honour.

Together, we join two distinguished South Africans, the late Chief Albert
Luthuli and His Grace Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to whose seminal contributions to
the peaceful struggle against the evil system of apartheid you paid
well-deserved tribute by awarding them the Nobel Peace Prize.

It will not be presumptuous of us if we also add, among our predecessors, the
name of another outstanding Nobel Peace Prize winner, the late African- American
statesman and internationalist, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.

He, too, grappled with and died in the effort to make a contribution to the
just solution of the same great issues of the day which we have had to face as
South Africans.

We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace, violence
and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and repression and
liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from want.

We stand here today as nothing more than a representative of the millions of
our people who dared to rise up against a social system whose very essence is
war, violence, racism, oppression, repression and the impoverishment of an
entire people.

I am also here today as a representative of the millions of people across the
globe, the anti-apartheid movement, the governments and organisations that
joined with us, not to fight against South Africa as a country or any of its
peoples, but to oppose an inhuman system and sue for a speedy end to the
apartheid crime against humanity.

These countless human beings, both inside and outside our country, had the
nobility of spirit to stand in the path of tyranny and injustice, without
seeking selfish gain. They recognised that an injury to one is an injury to all
and therefore acted together in defence of justice and a common human decency.

Because of their courage and persistence for many years, we can, today, even
set the dates when all humanity will join together to celebrate one of the
outstanding human victories of our century.

When that moment comes, we shall, together, rejoice in a common victory over
racism, apartheid and white minority rule.

That triumph will finally bring to a close a history of five hundred years of
African colonisation that began with the establishment of the Portuguese empire.

Thus, it will mark a great step forward in history and also serve as a common
pledge of the peoples of the world to fight racism wherever it occurs and
whatever guise it assumes.

At the southern tip of the continent of Africa, a rich reward is in the
making, an invaluable gift is in the preparation, for those who suffered in the
name of all humanity when they sacrificed everything - for liberty, peace, human
dignity and human fulfilment.

This reward will not be measured in money. Nor can it be reckoned in the
collective price of the rare metals and precious stones that rest in the bowels
of the African soil we tread in the footsteps of our ancestors. It will and must
be measured by the happiness and welfare of the children, at once the most
vulnerable citizens in any society and the greatest of our treasures.

The children must, at last, play in the open veld, no longer tortured by the
pangs of hunger or ravaged by disease or threatened with the scourge of
ignorance, molestation and abuse, and no longer required to engage in deeds
whose gravity exceeds the demands of their tender years.

In front of this distinguished audience, we commit the new South Africa to
the relentless pursuit of the purposes defined in the World Declaration on the
Survival, Protection and Development of Children.

The reward of which we have spoken will and must also be measured by the
happiness and welfare of the mothers and fathers of these children, who must
walk the earth without fear of being robbed, killed for political or material
profit, or spat upon because they are beggars.

They too must be relieved of the heavy burden of despair which they carry in
their hearts, born of hunger, homelessness and unemployment.

The value of that gift to all who have suffered will and must be measured by
the happiness and welfare of all the people of our country, who will have torn
down the inhuman walls that divide them.

These great masses will have turned their backs on the grave insult to human
dignity which described some as masters and others as servants, and transformed
each into a predator whose survival depended on the destruction of the other.

The value of our shared reward will and must be measured by the joyful peace
which will triumph, because the common humanity that bonds both black and white
into one human race, will have said to each one of us that we shall all live
like the children of paradise.

Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which recognises
that all people are born equal, with each entitled in equal measure to life,
liberty, prosperity, human rights and good governance.

Such a society should never allow again that there should be prisoners of
conscience nor that any person's human rights should be violated.

Neither should it ever happen that once more the avenues to peaceful change
are blocked by usurpers who seek to take power away from the people, in pursuit
of their own, ignoble purposes.

In relation to these matters, we appeal to those who govern Burma that they
release our fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, and engage her
and those she represents in serious dialogue, for the benefit of all the people
of Burma.

We pray that those who have the power to do so will, without further delay,
permit that she uses her talents and energies for the greater good of the people
of her country and humanity as a whole.

Far from the rough and tumble of the politics of our own country, I would
like to take this opportunity to join the Norwegian Nobel Committee and pay
tribute to my joint laureate, Mr. F.W. de Klerk.

He had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to our
country and people through the imposition of the system of apartheid.

He had the foresight to understand and accept that all the people of South
Africa must, through negotiations and as equal participants in the process,
together determine what they want to make of their future.

But there are still some within our country who wrongly believe they can make
a contribution to the cause of justice and peace by clinging to the shibboleths
that have been proved to spell nothing but disaster.

It remains our hope that these, too, will be blessed with sufficient reason
to realise that history will not be denied and that the new society cannot be
created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly
repackaged.

We live with the hope that as she battles to remake herself, South Africa
will be like a microcosm of the new world that is striving to be born.

This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed
from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the
threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of
the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees.

The processes in which South Africa and Southern Africa as a whole are
engaged, beckon and urge us all that we take this tide at the flood and make of
this region a living example of what all people of conscience would like the
world to be.

We do not believe that this Nobel Peace Prize is intended as a commendation
for matters that have happened and passed.

We hear the voices which say that it is an appeal from all those, throughout
the universe, who sought an end to the system of apartheid.

We understand their call, that we devote what remains of our lives to the use
of our country's unique and painful experience to demonstrate, in practice, that
the normal condition for human existence is democracy, justice, peace,
non-racism, non-sexism, prosperity for everybody, a healthy environment and
equality and solidarity among the peoples.

Moved by that appeal and inspired by the eminence you have thrust upon us, we
undertake that we too will do what we can to contribute to the renewal of our
world so that none should, in future, be described as the wretched of the earth.

Let it never be said by future generations that indifference, cynicism or
selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of humanism which the Nobel
Peace Prize encapsulates.

Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr to have been
correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the
starless midnight of racism and war.

Let the efforts of us all, prove that he was not a mere dreamer when he spoke
of the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace being more precious than diamonds
or silver or gold.

Let a new age dawn!

Thank you.