South African History Online

New Delhi, 15 October 1990

Your Excellency, Mr. Venkataraman, President of the Republic of
India;
Your Excellency, Mr. Sharma, Vice-President of India;
Honourable
Prime Minister, Mr. V.P. Singh;
Honourable Members of
Parliament;
Distinguished Guests;

Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen.

First of all, I would like to thank you most sincerely, Mr President, for
your kind and gracious words about me and your warm welcome to our delegation.
What you have said will remain in our hearts and minds for many a long year.

We are especially pleased to be in India. This country is, to us, like our
home and away from home. Since we had arrived this morning we have been
overwhelmed by the friendship of everyone we have met. We have been struck by
the strength of the feelings of oneness and solidarity with us which seem so
deeply in the consciousness of your people.

We had, of course, imagined that we would be received as friends. But the
actual experience has gone beyond anything we could have visualised. Indeed when
we depart these shores, we shall leave greatly strengthened to continue the
common struggle in which both our people's are involved until victory is won.

It must surely have inflicted great pain on those of your compatriots who
were wrenched from their country in the last century, and exported as indentured
labour to South Africa. These they were called coolies, a pejorative term which
unfortunately persists to this day, and subjected to all manner of indignities
and degradation, since the white settlers a viewed them as sub-human, in the
same way that they saw and treated the African people.

But at the end of the day, Mr President, when we have got the better of laugh
feelings of anger and wiped off our tears of pity at the recollection, we as
South Africans must admit that what British colonialists exported as disposable
beasts of burden, our country has inherited as a remarkable component part of
the one South African nation which is in the process of formation.

For in the wake of the indentured labourers came an ancient culture from the
East which has already become an indelible part of what today we call South
African, and when I speak of culture, are use this word in its broad meaning, to
encompass the very mode of existence of the human person.

In the continuing process of the intermingling of the peoples of the African,
Asian and European origin, there is emerging as a people that is uniquely South
African, talented, friendly, inspired by the humane or objectives and civilised,
in the best meaning of that word. The indentured labourers and their offspring
have made no mean contribution to this outcome. They are today African and have
helped to form this both South African by the positive values and practices they
have contributed to the making of our nation.

The indentured labourers also served to establish an umbilical cord that ties
together the people's of our respective countries. As much as India is a
particle of our country, so are we too a particle of India. History has
condemned us to seek each other out, to deal with each other as members of the
same family.

It is that history which makes it possible for each one of us to claim the
immortal Mahatma Gandhi as our national hero. It is that history which drove us
and drives us still to look to the examples he set to decide what we should make
of our own destiny. It is that history which brought Jawarlal Nehru's daughter
the late Indira Gandhi to our country, which she visited as a young woman. It is
that history which brings us here today and brings us to a country with an
unequalled record of struggle against the criminal system of apartheid.

Mr President;
Ladies and gentlemen;

The common struggle which we have waged to uproot this system and to free all
the people of South Africa is approaching its successful conclusion. We have not
got there yet but our victory day is not far off. In the end, the weight of
internal and international struggle has produced the situation in which the
architects of the apartheid system have been obliged to admit that their policy
has failed and that the system can no longer be maintained.

It is our firm and honest view that you should rejoice in this victory as
your very own. It is not for us to lecture you about India's contribution to the
impending success of the struggle for emancipation of all the people of South
Africa are. All we need to do is to reaffirm that we would not be talking
victory today if the example set by the young Republic of India had not been
followed by the rest of the world. That, today, even school children in all
countries known what a apartheid is and are engaged in action to end this
criminal system, is testimony to that fact.

We still need to walk the last mile together, to achieve the common objective
of the transformation had of South Africa into a united, democratic, non-racial
and a non-sexist country. We are strengthened by the knowledge, confirmed by you
this evening, Mr President, that as the government and the people of this great
country remain loyal to the commitment made a number of decades ago to fight on
until not only South Africa but the entire African continent is liberated.

Mr President;

As the struggle advances, so do the demands of the ANC increase. We look
forward to your assistance to help us elaborate a detailed view of the
democratic South Africa we seek to build, as well as generate the resources
which will enable us to rebuild the ANC as a legal organisation, resettle the
released political prisoners and the repatriated exiles and mobilise the masses
of our people to participate in the political process which must lead to the
adoption of a democratic constitution.

We also carry a special message of greetings to you, Mr President, the
government and the people of India, from our President, my brother, friend and
colleague, Oliver Tambo, who has had the honour to visit India in the past. We
also bring the warm greetings of the rest of the ANC and the millions of our
people, of all races, who value India as a proven and dependable ally.

I would also like to take this opportunity to convey my own thanks to you for
the determined fight you waged for our release from prison. We heard your voices
even through the thick prison walls. And when we heard that demand wafting
across the vast expanses of the Indian Ocean, we knew that there was no
possibility that apartheid regime could hold us in jail forever, as it intended.

And so we are here in New Delhi today because you refused to forget us.
Tomorrow we will receive diplomatic representatives of the Indian government and
people, because you would not accept the argument that the issue of apartheid
was a matter domestic to the racist Pretoria regime. As we further break down
the walls which continue to separate the people of South Africa because of the
apartheid system, both now and in a free South Africa, so will the contribution
of the original indentured labourers blossom to its former fullness so that all
South Africans can enjoy free and unfettered access to everything which makes
this country a jewel in the combination of things which combine to make human
civilisation.

In the midst of all of that must surely be the certain eventuality of
relations between our two countries and peoples when we shall co-operate to
mutual benefit, for the advancement of the common objectives of freedom and,
democracy, independence, social progress and peace.

Thank you.