Closing address by Professor Kader Asmal, Minister of Education, Republic of South Africa

In his Songs of the Soldier of the Revolution Bertolt Brecht wrote:

When the difficulty
Of the mountains is once behind
That's when you'll see
The difficulty of the plains will start.

So I have chosen as the theme of my address this evening: 'From the Mountains to
the Plains'

As some of you will know, I was originally invited to address the opening session of this Symposium. When Shula Marks and Christabel Gurney first spoke to me in Cape Town some weeks ago about their plans, I was excited at the prospect of giving an address on this day of remarkable resonance, June 26th, which is of such special significance for the freedom struggle in South Africa and for all those associated with the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain and then throughout the world.

This Symposium - on the theme 'The Anti-Apartheid Movement: A Forty Year Perspective' - is a most appropriate way in which to celebrate South Africa Freedom Day as well as being a very important initiative in its own right.

Yesterday's Special Joint Session in Cape Town of the newly elected Parliament meant I could only arrive in London this morning. Initially I was disappointed that I would be unable to address the opening session. But I wanted to be here for a number of reasons, not necessarily in ascending order of importance. I want to find out who proposed the name 'Anti-Apartheid Movement'; I want to find out who designed the badge - the ying-yang badge. That's not a particularly profound matter, but it is part of the seeking for our past. I want to link our past experiences in the international solidarity movement with today's work of consolidating and building on what has already been achieved in the first five years of democratic government so that we can realise our vision of a genuinely democratic society.

Today we have been examining the role of the Anti-Apartheid Movement from many different viewpoints. The organisers felt that I may be specially placed to add to these contributions since I can look at the role of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the contribution it made to the wider international campaign against apartheid from a number of different perspectives. You will forgive me if I repeat one or two things that have been said already, but most of what I have to say comes from a perspective that is different from the perspectives here.

The first of these is as one of the small group of South Africans who 40 years ago today joined with the Committee of African Organisations and others to launch the Boycott Movement. Within the year it had been transformed into the Anti-Apartheid Movement. It was an exciting and challenging period and none of us ever imagined the size of the mountains which would have to be climbed. In fact as we now know it would take 35 years - and great suffering and sacrifice across the whole of Southern Africa - before the freedom struggle would eventually triumph in South Africa.

The second of these perspectives is the one I gained as Chairman of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. This gave me a different insight into the role of the AAM. Through a range of different structures - some formal, others very informal - the anti-apartheid movements across the world sought ways to co-operate with each other and to co-ordinate their work. The relationships between anti-apartheid movements were not always straightforward. Each had its own characteristics which reflected their own societies; the history of Ireland has been very different from the history of Britain and this brought its own dynamic to the relations between the British and Irish anti-apartheid movements. And so I began to see the British Anti-Apartheid Movement from the perspective of a country which had its own experiences of colonial rule, at the same time realising that the logic of history and contiguity of geography resulted in a sharing of experiences. In the end ten young working class Dubliners struck against the supplier of South African grapefruit and went on strike for two and a half years, a most remarkable expression of solidarity, because of the shared experience of the United Kingdom and Ireland. This could only have happened not because of contiguity, not because of history, but because we were part of an international movement. While my experience in Ireland might have been very different from yours, we were part of that international campaign.

The third of these perspectives is that of a member of the African National Congress National Executive Committee during the transitional period in South Africa, and then as a Cabinet Member in the first democratic government. The most exciting five years I have spent in my life were the five years I shared with someone an American academic has called 'a person with whom the twentieth century began when he was released from Pollsmoor Prison' - Nelson Mandela. It was a most remarkable five years I have spent, just to be with him, and work with him. I think some of us should write about that, from a different perspective from the historians and political scientists who no doubt will write about it.

The transitional period, however short, was perhaps the most complex. It led to tensions and misunderstandings between the international solidarity movement and the African National Congress and the wider democratic movement within South Africa. Yet solidarity during this period was crucial and there is a story which has still to be told as to how it was possible to sustain it during the inevitable changes and shifts of policy and the enormous pressures which the negotiators faced and under which the Anti-Apartheid Movement worked during that period 1990 to 1994. There is a history to be written. It will not be a simple history; there were enormous complexities within the African National Congress itself and these were dictated by the process of internal developments within South Africa.

So I speak, this evening, with the benefit of all three perspective which I believe, taken together, enable me to speak with a little authority.

This evening I want first to look back at the cause which brought us to where we are today. When we formed what was to become the Anti-Apartheid Movement, in the spring of 1959, we did so against a background of the African continent moving rapidly on the road to decolonisation and independence. In South Africa, the African National Congress had not yet been banned and many believed that the spirit of African (and Arab) nationalism would soon envelop the whole continent from Cairo to the Cape.

Europe was emerging from the austerity and privations of the first post-war decade and this was reflected in the idealism of the movements against nuclear weapons, against racism and in the birth of the New Left in Britain. These days were very much therefore part of this wider movement for peace, equality and justice. From these early beginnings it proved possible for a single issue campaign focused on a problem some 6 000 miles away to take root and eventually prove to be one of the most important British campaigning organisations of this century.

This evening I want to identify the most important of the questions which have been posed during our proceedings today - and to add some more. It will be for historians and other researchers to begin to give authoritative answers. Yet as an actor on this mini-stage of history, I am sure you will allow me to give you some of my opinions.

What are these questions?

Firstly, and perhaps the most critical of all, is to ask how was it possible for the Anti-Apartheid Movement to survive as a united and effective campaigning organisation for 35 years, especially during the very difficult period of the late 1960s and early 1970s when the liberation movement was effectively smashed inside South Africa and when we could not draw on the inspiration of the struggles inside South Africa to justify and develop our work? Was it the philosophy of the movement? Was it its policies? Was it the particular mix of British activists, heirs to a long tradition of anti-imperial struggle, with South African exiles determined to liberate their country? Was it the loyalty and support of the activists? Was it the special relationship which it enjoyed with the African National Congress and the other Southern African liberation movements?

Secondly, what was its contribution to the liberation struggle in South and Southern Africa? Many have paid tribute to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, but what were the most decisive of its roles. Was it that it kept the crime of apartheid on the international agenda? Was it the campaigns for sanctions and boycotts - which made it lots of enemies as well as friends? Was it the campaigns against political repression and for the release of political prisoners - not least that of Nelson Mandela? Was it its role in explaining and supporting the liberation movement's decision to embark on armed struggle - and subsequently the space it helped give the nascent democratic movement within South Africa - especially the UDF and COSATU - enabling it to flourish and grow.

Thirdly, what was the Anti-Apartheid Movement and how was it capable of mobilising the people of Britain? Some saw it just as Charlotte Street and then Mandela Street. Some saw it as the activists in the local groups who were the backbone of the AAM across the country. Some saw it as the affiliates - eventually encompassing all the major trade unions - which provided organised support and much-needed funding. Some identified much more with the complex network of groupings within and without the official structures of the Movement, often focusing on specific issues, such as the lawyers, architects and health groups.

Fourthly, what was it that enabled this comparatively small organisation - which for most if not all of its existence was extremely unpopular in the corridors of power in Whitehall and Downing Street - to be capable of exerting considerable influence over the United Nations and the Commonwealth and play an important role in shaping international policy towards Southern Africa? Or, to put it another way, to the best of my knowledge there was no historical precedent for a campaigning organisation playing such an important role in popularising United Nations policies on any issue. I dare say when somebody writes the history of solidarity in the United States that the Free South Africa Movement was deeply affected by the existing international movements across the world. The Free South Africa Movement in the United States resulted in the only political defeat that Ronald Reagan suffered in his two terms - the Anti-Apartheid Sanctions Act of 1986 when Congress overruled the veto of Ronald Reagan. That did not happen because there were black lobbyists in the United States; it happened because this was part of a world-wide surge of opposition against the apartheid regime.

Finally, what was the wider impact of the work of the Anti-Apartheid Movement on social developments within Britain? How much did it help shape and influence the strategies and tactics of other campaigning organisations? What was the effect of its campaigns on anti-racist struggles within Britain? Was it an example of active citizenship, of which much is said these days? Did it help empower people and demonstrate that they had the capacity to bring about change?

In beginning to address some of these issues, I think it is important that we pay tribute to those who had the vision, the conviction and the imagination to realise that it was possible for the work of the Anti-Apartheid Movement to take root amongst the people of Britain and to achieve its many successes. It was they who ensured that the Anti-Apartheid Movement was founded on three key pillars which from the beginning shaped it and supported it for the next 35 years.

The first of these pillars was its relationship with the freedom movement within South Africa. The Boycott Movement was set up in 1959 in response to the African National Congress's call for international support for its campaign for a boycott of products produced by firms which supported the National Party. From then on it took its lead from the liberation movement. After Sharpeville in March 1960, the symbolic boycott became a demand for the total isolation of South Africa and for the imposition of comprehensive sanctions by the United Nations. When the African National Congress and other movements in Southern Africa embarked on armed struggle, the AAM sought to explain and support this strategy. However, although it had a special relationship with the ANC, the AAM was neither conceived as nor acted as an exclusively ANC support group. You may write in your studies of the AAM as a British NGO, but in the end the AAM was part of the liberation of Southern Africa. That was its fundamental raison d'être.

Although some South Africans associated with the ANC quickly came to form the core of the first committee (Tennyson Makiwane, Ros Ainslie, Vella Pillay, Masizi Kunene, Abdul Minty, Ruth Ballin, Nanda Naidoo, Mana Chetty) - many of them students escaping the extraordinarily named 'Extension of University Education Act' - they were joined by Patrick van Rensburg from the South African Liberal Party and they also had links with the National Union of South African Students. Over the years this apparent contradiction of a movement which had at its heart its relationship with the African National Congress but which did not perceive this as an exclusive relationship did produce tensions, but was essential to its success.

The second pillar was its determination to ensure that it had a broad appeal to the people of Britain. Unlike other anti-apartheid movements, but very much like the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement which grew out of the British Movement, the AAM's essential quality was to be a mass movement inside Britain. From the beginning its aim was to educate people about the evils of apartheid. It sought to reach out to people in Britain and to win them to the cause of freedom in South African, and although this remit was soon to widen to include support for the struggles against racism and colonialism throughout Southern Africa, South Africa was the core of its work. Much of the time of the staff of the AAM was spent not on digging up cricket pitches or attending international conferences but on replying to seemingly bottomless piles of letters asking for information from schools and colleges or dispatching pamphlets and fact sheets. Many of them were produced by the International Defence and Aid Fund, which I can say now, officially and formally, played a unique and quite crucial role in the struggle.

The third pillar was its base amongst the people of Britain. Although the impetus for the formation of the Movement came from South Africans, we all knew that it would not achieve much unless it became a British movement and became engaged in British political life - although always as a non-party movement open to all. In the early years this was not always easy, especially at the height of the Cold War. The Movement owes a debt to Labour and Liberal politicians like David Ennals, Barbara Castle, David Steel, Andrew Faulds and Joan Lestor who became office bearers in the 1960s and early 1970s when the Movement was still working to put down roots in British society. Perhaps this aspiration only truly became a reality later with the mass campaigns of the 1980s. But this would never have happened without the groundwork of those early years.

I was told that there are records from the early 1960s showing that I had spoken at ten trade union meetings. This made me go back to my diary and I found that on 12 January
1963 I was with S O Davies, the MP for Merthyr Tydfil and the South Wales Miners Federation. S O said 'How long have you been way from home?' I told him two years. He said 'Ring up your home now'. This was an extraordinary outpouring of generosity. We were spat upon outside Hampstead Town Hall by Oswald Mosley, and then supported in
that way by S O Davies and the scores of trade unionists who were giving hospitality to people and movements which they had never heard of before and which they then helped to build. So that while we say that the captains and the kings - as Brendan Behan would have said - gave us respectability in the political parties the real passion came from the plain people of England and Wales and Scotland. They were the ones who gave us both the support and the inspiration.

Remarkably AAM succeeded in becoming a movement which had many different facets, which worked in different ways, at different levels, and often with a degree of spontaneity to which the national organisation responded, though not always without initial misgivings.

I would like first to acknowledge how the AAM helped shape the international campaign against apartheid. Although Britain was of key importance as the country with the largest Western stake in South Africa, and, in the 1980s together with Ronald Reagan in the US, as apartheid's staunchest political ally, from the beginning the Movement calculated that what was needed was a world-wide movement against apartheid leading to action under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.

In the early years it initiated the World Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners, worked closely with the UN Special Committee against Apartheid, stimulated the formation of anti-apartheid groups in other European countries as well as in Africa,
and lobbied and worked with the countries of the Commonwealth and Commonwealth structures. We heard how quickly Jamaica and other West Indian countries adopted the most far-reaching policies the moment they became independent.

What did the world-wide movement against apartheid achieve? Of course it was South Africans themselves and the people of the front-line states who at huge cost, not least to the fabric of their own societies, fought for and won their own liberation. But I believe the international movement, with AAM playing a significant role within it, made an enormous contribution. That is why I am here. Because the history of the international solidarity movement is a history that needs to be written not in an official tome, with all the archives being collected in one country, or in one place in South Africa. There are bits and pieces of history we must write, individual contributions, the anecdotal contributions of individuals. The contribution we need to make is to let the South African people know that the international struggle was one of the four or five pillars of the liberation struggle; outside the actual activists very few people in South Africa know about the range, the depth and the quality of the international struggle against apartheid.

The international struggle told the world about what apartheid really meant. Western governments, guided by considerations of profit and strategic interest, continued to give practical support to apartheid, but in the minds of the peoples of the world, there was no doubt that apartheid was an evil to be combated by every means within their power. We must never forget the very young men and women who joined the underground in South Africa, who went to South Africa and worked with the liberation movement, who put their lives at stake, who shared their knowledge with the liberation movement in the South African underground. There is a very rich history to be written about those in the traditions of the Résistance who went thousands of miles away because of their support and understanding of what the struggle was, a struggle led by the liberation movement, but interpreted by the anti-apartheid movements. There is a wonderful story to be written of Dutch men and women, of Danes and Swedes and Irish and English men and women, and Americans who went to South Africa, and came back as unsung heroes and heroines. One day that story has to be written, because they were in the best traditions of international solidarity.

The Anti-Apartheid Movement generated support - and space - for the liberation struggle. It may be hard, in the wake of the African National Congress's second election victory, and it may be uncomfortable for those without a sense of history, to remember how friendless we were in the dark days of the 1960s and early 1970s. In those years the international anti-apartheid movement kept alive the conscience of the world, giving the liberation movement time to rebuild.

Sanctions were a lynch-pin of the international movement's strategy. Economists will argue over the extent to which sanctions damaged and distorted the South African economy and over how heavily economic difficulties weighed in de Klerk's decision to come to the negotiating table. I have no doubt about the role sanctions played. I recall Barend du Plessis' statement in 1990 that disinvestment was the dagger that finally immobilised apartheid. The Arab oil-producing states' ban in 1974 forced South Africa to spend an inordinate amount of money buying oil on the black market and exploiting loopholes. The World Campaign against Military and Nuclear Collaboration spent a great deal of energy and time exposing the loopholes in the arms embargo, which was first made mandatory by the UN Security Council in 1977. The history of the arms embargo is very interesting because of what happened in Lagos in an attempt to forestall this momentum towards full economic sanctions. It is an interesting strategy of international diplomacy that conceded this imperfect arms embargo because they had to resist the demand for sanctions. We were correct to expose the ways in which Western companies and governments ran rings around the arms embargo. Nevertheless the embargo did impose a huge burden on the South African economy, forcing it into uneconomic projects and when the crunch came, at Cuito Cuanavale, leaving it short of vital airpower.

Above all the fear of sanctions led the apartheid government to build capacity and invest in state corporations, in a way which by the mid 1980s was exhausting its credit and led to the crisis in its relations with the international banking world which we can now see was one of the key events forcing the Nationalist regime to abandon apartheid.

With South Africa in the forefront of world cricket and rugby, it is easy to forget that less than a decade ago South African sports teams were banned from every major sporting competition. This was no trivial matter for sports-mad white South Africa. Actually the first moves to isolate South Africa from the international sporting world took place before the formation of the Movement, when the British Table Tennis Federation refused an all-expenses paid invitation to South Africa. This was due to the efforts of Ivor Montagu, distinguished film maker and member of the British Communist Party. Soon after, South Africa was expelled from the World Table Tennis Federation. Suspension from the International Olympic Committee followed, with irresistible consequences in other sports and international sporting organisations.

Lastly the international anti-apartheid movement worked in innovatory ways with international institutions like the UN and the Commonwealth, ways that made them respond to pressures from outside, from non-governmental bodies and pressure groups, democratising them and making them more accountable to world opinion. In many ways this was a pioneering act. It is hard to imagine now an inter-governmental environmental conference without its lobbyists from outside and without a parallel event run by grass-roots activists. Or a G7 meeting on debt relief without an input from those calling for greater remission. In its relations with international bodies the world-wide network of anti-apartheid movements paved the way.

Within this international network the British Anti-Apartheid Movement played a major role, as a policy and campaign initiator - setting priorities for the international movement, from sanctions to the campaign to free Nelson Mandela. Other groups raised funds and material aid for the liberation movements, for the UDF in the 1980s and for the democratic trade union movement. This was of enormous importance. The British Anti-Apartheid never really tried to challenge that. But the Anti-Apartheid Movement here ensured that sanctions and the campaign to isolate apartheid stayed centre-stage. It navigated the difficult transition from a period when organised opposition was largely located outside South Africa to the establishment of supportive relationships with the growing internal opposition from community groups, civics and trade unions, united under the umbrella first of the UDF and then the Mass Democratic Movement, which reached a crescendo in the mid-1980s. This was not an easy process and it can be argued that AAM did not always make friends along the way. Nor did it carry all sections of the international movement with it.

But paradoxically the international movement's success in isolating South Africa, particularly in the sporting and cultural fields, helped ease the process of transition. From 1990, as boycotts were lifted, white South Africans saw that they too had a stake in the success of negotiations. Noone wanted to go back to the bad times when to speak with a white South African accent overseas invited hostility and suspicion. In this way the work of the international movement may actually have helped the process of reconciliation - I will revise that - it may have helped the process of change. The sad thing in South Africa is that there has not been a responsive position taken to the remarkable magnanimity of the African people. It is sad that although we have a democratic order and we have eleven parties sitting in Parliament there is still not that understanding that when we pulled ourselves away from the edge of the abyss of destruction, it was the Africans who pulled us away from that abyss. That is why the speech of the President yesterday to say that we must now get down to work for the real reconstruction of South Africa has enormous importance, because whites in fact have not yet made any reciprocal gesture and do not have the reciprocal understanding of the enormous sacrifices the Africans have made to bring us to this stage.

In its campaigning AAM was a movement of many parts which cohabited and interacted in sometimes unforeseen ways. We must therefore recognise that the Movement inevitably reflected what was happening in South Africa. From the beginning it aimed to be a mass movement with powerful grass roots; it achieved this only at some points in its 35-year history. AAM did not foresee the reaction to the Springbok rugby tour of 1969, coming as it did after the student protests of 1968 and in the wake of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. But it reacted magnificently, working in partnership with the Stop the Seventy Tour to organise the biggest demonstrations yet seen against apartheid and helping to defend those activists who saw direct action as the way to stop the tour.

Likewise, the huge growth in grass roots support in the 1980s was a response to the dramatic struggle within South Africa, but the Anti-Apartheid Movement rose to the occasion, marshalling mass demos of almost unprecedented numbers of people, culminating in the quarter of a million-strong rally to demand Nelson Mandela's release on the eve of his 70th birthday in 1988.

At the same time AAM was a lobbying organisation par excellence. If Mike Terry and Abdul Minty and others succeeded in anything, it was to give lobbying a decent honourable name. They were not doing it for secret sums of money, they were doing it for principle. They were seeking to understand how the channels of power worked and to influence them on precise policy issues. For example when the Labour Government seemed likely to abandon the arms embargo in 1967, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, with the help of Barbara Castle, was able to intervene. In the same way at what might have seemed the depths of its influence, on the eve of Botha's visit to Britain in 1984, the outcry over the invitation led to Margaret Thatcher agreeing to meet the Anti-Apartheid Movement's President Trevor Huddleston and Abdul Minty, at Downing Street which helped to shape the agenda of the meeting.

AAM grew from a movement largely depending on students for its grass roots support to a movement with deep roots in British society. Its 30 or 40 local AA groups in the 1960s had grown into a nation-wide network of over 180 groups twenty years later. Activists came from all faiths or no faith, Christian and non-Christian, agnostic or atheist; they came from a range of backgrounds, middle class professionals, trade union activists or unemployed; most, though not all, were young. We must pay a tribute to the young of Britain who galvanised themselves. From small beginnings in the 1960s AAM had 600 affiliated local trade union organisations by the mid-1980s and 35 affiliated national trade unions representing over 90 per cent of the membership of the TUC. By the late 1980s AAM had sections which worked among the black and ethnic minority communities, in women's organisations, with health and education professionals and an Inter-Faith Committee which linked together Christians, Muslims, Jews and Sikhs.

It was an innovating organisation in that it pioneered forms of action which have since become normal practice for single-issue pressure groups. In 1971 AAM activists mounted the first ever political protest inside a company annual general meeting, namely Barclays Bank, parent of South Africa's biggest high street bank.

In the 1980s Nelson Mandela became a household name in this country, the most recognisable name - not face yet - throughout the world, to a large extent because of the involvement of the music business, and AAM's message was carried way beyond the conventional political constituency by the activities of Artists Against Apartheid and other musicians. This culminated in the 'Tribute to Nelson Mandela' Wembley Stadium celebration held to mark Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday - televised in 67 countries, the world's biggest ever audience for a live cultural event. The Movement had come a long way from its beginnings in 1959, but showed the same combination of tenacity and clarity of purpose with vision and imagination as to how to win support for its aims.

Almost uniquely among pressure groups in Britain, the Movement mobilised in local government with the formation of Local Authorities Against Apartheid. The appointment of Sidney Mufamadi to be Minister for Local Government shows that we mean to take local government development seriously as the heart of our democratic order. Local Authorities against Apartheid is a grouping which has carried on to give support to local government structures in South Africa today and we must strengthen these links because we want to strengthen local government .

The AAM's success in mobilising beyond the conventional political constituency for a cause in which the British public had no obvious immediate self-interest, kept alive a morality in British public life which was otherwise lacking in the Thatcher years.

How can we ensure that the history of this international movement of solidarity against apartheid is recorded and why is it important that we do so?

You have discussed today the ongoing work of cataloguing the written record, of collecting oral testimony, of making available the film and video footage. I understand that tomorrow there is to be an international consultation, which will discuss both the co-ordination and accessibility of the international archives and how to retrieve those that may have disappeared or are not currently accessible. All this is of the greatest importance. It will provide material for historians from Southern Africa and Britain for many years to come.

May I make a small recommendation. I don't think we should look for the perfect solution. Every step ahead is part of progress. We should not look for territorial acquisition, but work out solutions to protect material and make it accessible. For the first time I can speak on behalf of the South African government. The South African government has a responsibility and a duty to ensure that this process takes place not only in Britain but across the world. We owe it to all those who supported us - they are also a living part of the history of our struggle.

A word of caution. The Anti-Apartheid Movement does not own its own history. Indeed as a one-time activist I am aware that even my words this evening form only one thread in the historical tapestry to be woven out of the stories of the many who played a role. It will be for historians to discuss where the Movement succeeded and where it failed, to show how things happened and to evaluate its impact.

History is always the product of the society that writes it. Already the history of our struggle is being re-written. Within South Africa we have to maintain the momentum for transformation and through transformation for reconciliation. At the international level, we have to sustain and develop our relations with governments and business irrespective of their positions during the apartheid era. But this does not mean that we can write out of the history of our struggle those who were culpable both within South Africa and internationally. We must not allow the history of those who chose to collaborate with apartheid to be forgotten.

As the new Minister of Education, it is clear to me that an understanding of the past is crucial if we are to avoid the mistakes of the past. In many parts of the world, and South Africa is no exception, one senses an impatience with history by a present-minded generation interested only in the market and its utilitarian values. This is borne out by the great fall in the number of students who are studying history. This is not a call for an exercise in triumphalism or blame. But unless we have some knowledge of where we have come from, how we arrived and where we are now, we are unable to address the big questions about who we are and what sort of society we should live in.

I therefore hope that today's Symposium will stimulate the research and study which is essential if we are to understand the mountains which had to be crossed in the course of the struggle for freedom and also how it helped us face the challenges of the transition from apartheid to democracy.

Five years ago, as last week's inauguration of President Mbeki reminded us, was when we discovered, as Brecht predicted, that the struggle of the plains lay ahead. Although I should add, on a personal note, that both forests and water have flourished on the plains in the last five years.

The new South Africa was born into a very different world from 1959 when it seemed that Africa faced a new dawn of political freedom and economic potential; from the 1970s when Angola and Mozambique won their freedom and it seemed possible to build socialism in Africa; or even from the 1980s when there was still room for manoeuvre on the world stage.

In a different era, in the aftermath of the devastation caused by the Second World War, Brecht wrote:

The house is built of the stones that were available.
The rebellion was raised using the rebels that were available.
The picture was painted using the colours that were available.

That is true for us today.

I praise the work of ACTSA. I praise the emphasis on the work in South Africa and the region, especially focusing on the tragic situation in Angola where not all Western governments have yet imposed effective sanctions to stop UNITA building its war machine, and on the need for remission of the external debt of Mozambique and the poorer countries of the region. ACTSA needs the support of all those who worked in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and especially of those younger people to whom the AAM is history.

Coming from a secular tradition, I have some difficulty in either believing in or invoking miracles, to describe what has happened in South Africa since 1989. We have effectively removed the threat of violence for political ends without imposing a state of emergency. Such political stability has ensured a second general election where nearly 90 per cent of the registered electorate voted freely. In the midst of criminal activity which is now evident to all South Africans, we continue to uphold the human rights parts of our Constitution against the barbarians of the mind and soul. Our economic stability, hard won in the face of huge upheavals among the tired and now tatty Asian Tigers, will enable us to have growth in equity, justice and development in an environment in which we respect the right of labour to organise and represent workers within a democratic and comprehensive framework of labour legislation. We will continue to insist on growth with democracy.

Five years on and we have begun to tackle the awesome legacy of apartheid's inequalities and deprivation. With the provision of water, electricity, housing, telephones and schools we have shown that reconstruction is not a buzz-word but the only way of dealing with the past.

We need your critical alignment with us as we consolidate our democratic gains and give concrete expression to the economic and social rights in our Constitution. Such solidarity is necessary if South Africa is to take its rightful place in a world where ethno-chauvinism and racialism once again rear their heads. The beginning of negotiations for a democratic order ensured that South Africa drew away from the abyss of self-destruction. The negotiated settlement of 1993 averted what could have been the long-feared, all engulfing race war. Compared to other situations where liberation struggles were waged, South Africa emerged without the horrendous loss of lives tragically seen elsewhere. For this, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, as part of the organised international campaigning, deserves great credit.

The AAM can take pride that it initiated, with the liberation movement, a world-wide movement which was instrumental in establishing the only universal consensus the world has seen since the second world war: opposition to racism and apartheid.

It was as if we - internationally and in South Africa - embraced each other and took to heart Seamus Heaney's stirring lines from The Cure at Troy:

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a life time
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

We hoped with you. We dreamt our utopian dreams. And, with your help, hope and history rhymed.

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