One Day We Shall Ses Each Other Again
© Un Photograph/John Isaac
Our march to liberty is irreversible.
Nosotros must not allow fear to stand in our way.- Nelson Mandela
Chronology of Nelson Mandela's Life
Speaking Out For Justice
Key Statements & Speeches by Nelson Mandela
1961 — 2008
On Liberty | On Racial Bigotry | On Reconciliation | On Human being Rights | On Fighting Poverty | On Building Peace
On Freedom
Those who are voteless cannot exist expected to continue paying taxes to a government which is not responsible to them. People who live in poverty and starvation cannot exist expected to pay exorbitant house rents to the government and local authorities. Nosotros furnish the sinews of agronomics and manufacture. Nosotros produce the piece of work of the gold mines, the diamonds and the coal, of the farms and manufacture, in render for miserable wages. Why should we keep enriching those who steal the products of our sweat and blood? Those who exploit us and refuse us the right to organise merchandise unions? ...
I am informed that a warrant for my arrest has been issued, and that the law are looking for me. ... Any serious politician will realise that under present-day conditions in this country, to seek for inexpensive martyrdom by handing myself to the police is naive and criminal. Nosotros accept an of import programme before usa and it is important to carry it out very seriously and without filibuster.
I have chosen this latter class, which is more difficult and which entails more risk and hardship than sitting in gaol. I have had to separate myself from my dearest wife and children, from my mother and sisters, to alive as an outlaw in my own state. I have had to shut my concern, to abandon my profession, and alive in poverty and misery, equally many of my people are doing. ... I shall fight the government next with you, inch past inch, and mile by mile, until victory is won. What are you going to do? Will y'all come along with us, or are you lot going to cooperate with the government in its efforts to suppress the claims and aspirations of your own people? Or are you going to remain silent and neutral in a matter of life and death to my people, to our people? For my own part I have made my selection. I volition not get out South Africa, nor will I surrender. Merely through hardship, sacrifice and militant activity can liberty be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the terminate of my days.
- "The Struggle is my Life"
Printing Argument issued while underground in South Africa
26, June 1961
In its proper pregnant equality earlier the law means the right to participate in the making of the laws past which i is governed, a constitution which guarantees democratic rights to all sections of the population, the right to arroyo the court for protection or relief in the example of the violation of rights guaranteed in the constitution, and the right to take part in the administration of justice every bit judges, magistrates, attorneys-general, police force directorate and similar positions.
In the absence of these safeguards the phrase "equality before the law", in so far every bit information technology is intended to apply to united states, is meaningless and misleading. All the rights and privileges to which I have referred are monopolized by whites, and we relish none of them. …
... (I) consider myself neither morally nor legally obliged to obey laws fabricated by a parliament in which I am not represented. That the will of the people is the basis of the authority of government is a principle universally acknowledged as sacred throughout the civilised globe, and constitutes the bones foundations of freedom and justice. It is understandable why citizens, who have the vote too as the right to direct representation in the country'southward governing bodies, should be morally and legally bound by the laws governing the state.
It should be every bit understandable why we, as Africans, should prefer the mental attitude that nosotros are neither morally nor legally bound to obey laws which nosotros accept not made, nor can we exist expected to have confidence in courts which enforce such laws. …
I hate the practice of race discrimination, and in my hatred I am sustained by the fact that the overwhelming majority of mankind hate it equally. I hate the systematic inculcation of children with colour prejudice and I am sustained in that hatred by the fact that the overwhelming bulk of flesh, here and abroad, are with me in that. I hate the racial arrogance which decrees that the adept things of life shall be retained equally the exclusive right of a minority of the population, and which reduces the bulk of the population to a position of subservience and inferiority, and maintains them every bit voteless chattels to work where they are told and behave as they are told past the ruling minority. I am sustained in that hatred by the fact that the overwhelming majority of mankind both in this country and abroad are with me.
Nothing that this court can practice to me volition alter in whatsoever style that hatred in me, which tin simply be removed by the removal of the injustice and the inhumanity which I take sought to remove from the political and social life of this country. ...
- Courtroom statement
Pretoria, South Africa — 15 October–7 November 1962
The complaint of Africans ... is not only that they are poor and the whites are rich, but that the laws which are made by the whites are designed to preserve this situation. In that location are 2 ways to break out of poverty. The first is by formal instruction, and the second is by the worker acquiring a greater skill at his work and thus higher wages. As far as Africans are concerned, both these avenues of advancement are deliberately curtailed by legislation. ...
Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters volition be Africans. This makes the white man fear republic.
But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will event in racial domination. Political division, based on colour, is entirely bogus and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one colour group by another. The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs information technology will non change that policy.
This and then is what the ANC is fighting. Their struggle is a truly national 1. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their ain experience. It is a struggle for the correct to live.
During my lifetime I have defended myself to this struggle of the African people. I accept fought confronting white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I accept cherished the ideal of a democratic and free social club in which all persons alive together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. Simply if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
- Statement from the dock at the opening of the defense force example in the Rivonia Trial
Pretoria, South Africa — twenty Apr 1964
Our struggle has reached a decisive moment. We phone call on our people to seize this moment so that the process towards commonwealth is rapid and uninterrupted. We take waited too long for our freedom. We can no longer wait. Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts. To relax our efforts at present would be a mistake which generations to come will not exist able to forgive. The sight of freedom looming on the horizon should encourage us to redouble our efforts.
It is only through disciplined mass activeness that our victory can be assured. We call on our white compatriots to join us in the shaping of a new S Africa. The freedom movement is a political abode for yous besides. Nosotros phone call on the international community to go along the campaign to isolate the apartheid regime. To lift sanctions now would be to run the take chances of aborting the process towards the complete eradication of apartheid.
Our march to freedom is irreversible. We must not allow fear to stand in our way. Universal suffrage on a common voters' role in a united democratic and non-racial South Africa is the simply way to peace and racial harmony....
- On release from prison
Cape Town, South Africa — 11 February 1990
On Racial Discrimination
It will forever remain an enduring blight on human history that the apartheid crime ever occurred. Future generations will surely ask: What error was made that this system established itself in the wake of the adoption of a universal annunciation of man rights? It will forever remain an accusation and a claiming to all men and women of censor that it took as long as it has before all of us stood upward to say 'enough is enough.'...
Let u.s.a. travel information technology together. Permit us, by our joint actions, vindicate the purposes for which this Organization was established and create a situation wherein its Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will become function of the trunk of law on which will exist based the political and social guild of a new South Africa. Our mutual victory is assured.
- Address to the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid
22 June 1990
Information technology surely must be one of the great ironies of our age that this august Assembly is addressed, for the first fourth dimension in its 49 years, by a South African Head of Country drawn from among the African bulk of what is an African state.
Future generations will find information technology strange in the extreme that it was only so late in the 20th century that information technology was possible for our delegation to take its seat in the Assembly, recognized both by our people and the nations of the earth every bit the legitimate representative of the people of our country.
Information technology is indeed a nigh welcome affair that this baronial Arrangement volition marker its 50th anniversary next yr with the apartheid system having been vanquished and consigned to the past. That celebrated change has come about not least because of the dandy efforts in which the UN engaged to ensure the suppression of the apartheid crime against humanity. …
In all we do, we have to ensure the healing of the wounds inflicted on all our people across the cracking dividing line imposed on our society by centuries of colonialism and apartheid. We must ensure that colour, race and gender become only a God-given gift to each one of u.s. and non an indelible mark or aspect that accords a special status to whatsoever.
Nosotros must work for the day when we, as South Africans, see one another and collaborate with one another equally equal human beings and as part of 1 nation united, rather than torn asunder, by its variety. The route we shall accept to travel to reach this destination volition by no means exist easy. All of united states of america know how stubbornly racism can cling to the mind and how deeply information technology tin can infect the human being soul. Where it is sustained by the racial ordering of the material world, as is the case in our country, that stubbornness can multiply a hundred-fold.
And notwithstanding however hard the battle will be, we will non surrender. Whatever the time information technology will take, nosotros will not tire. The very fact that racism degrades both the perpetrator and the victim commands that, if we are true to our delivery to protect human dignity, nosotros fight on until victory is achieved.
- Address to the United nations General Associates
iii Oct 1994
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On Reconciliation
Nosotros in South Africa are convinced that it is both possible and practicable to achieve our goal of a better life for all in the shortest possible time. Nosotros derive our confidence from the cognition that this is a vision shared past the overwhelming majority of Due south Africans across the colour and political divides.
And nosotros fully appreciate the role of the international community in making this happen — not but in the form of material support. If we are able today to speak proudly of a rainbow nation, united in its diversity of civilisation, religion, race, linguistic communication and ethnicity, information technology is in part because the world prepare us a moral example which we dared to follow.
This accomplishment is bound to final because it is founded on the realisation that reconciliation and nation-building mean, amidst other things, that we should ready out to know the truth well-nigh the terrible past and ensure it does non recur. Ours must therefore not exist merely a respite earlier the bitterness of the past once more reasserts itself.
We recognise too, that reconciliation and nation-building would remain pious words if they were not premised on a concerted effort to remove the existent roots of past conflict and injustice. Our national security and the survival of our young commonwealth depend, above everything else, on the programme to run into the basic needs of the people. Reconstruction and development will ensure that all South Africans accept a stake in life; that they share an interest in the well-being of the land as a whole.
- New Delhi, India
25 Jan 1995
Many people have been sceptical of our capacity to realise the ideal of a rainbow nation. It is true that South Africa was oftentimes brought to the brink of destruction because of differences. But permit us re-affirm this one thing here today: information technology is non our diversity which divides usa, information technology is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since nosotros have achieved our liberty, there can only be ane division amid united states: betwixt those who cherish democracy and those who do non!
Equally freedom loving people, we want to come across our country prosper and provide basic services to all. For our freedom can never exist complete or our republic stable unless the basic needs of our people are met. Nosotros have seen the stability that evolution brings. And in turn nosotros know that peace is the most powerful weapon that whatsoever customs or nation can have for evolution.
As nosotros rebuild our land, we should remain vigilant against the enemies of development and democracy, fifty-fifty if they come from within our ain ranks. Violence will not bring us closer to our objectives. All of u.s.a. should ask ourselves the question: Have I done everything in my power to bring near lasting peace and prosperity in my city and my country? ...
- Durban, Due south Africa
16 Apr 1999
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On Homo Rights
Quite appropriately, this 53rd General Assembly [of the United Nations] will be remembered through the ages as the moment at which nosotros marked and celebrated the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Announcement of Human Rights.
Born in the backwash of the defeat of the Nazi and fascist law-breaking against humanity, this Declaration held high the hope that all our societies would, in future, be congenital on the foundations of the glorious vision spelt out in each of its clauses.
For those who had to fight for their emancipation, such as ourselves who, with your aid, had to free ourselves from the criminal apartheid organisation, the Universal Declaration of Man Rights served as the vindication of the justice of our cause. At the same time, it constituted a challenge to usa that our freedom, once achieved, should exist defended to the implementation of the perspectives independent in the Proclamation
Today, we celebrate the fact that this celebrated certificate has survived a turbulent five decades, which have seen some of the most extraordinary developments in the evolution of human society. These include the plummet of the colonial system, the passing of a bipolar globe, jiff taking advances in science and engineering and the entrenchment of the complex process of globalisation.
And yet, at the end of information technology all, the homo beings who are the subject of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights continue to exist affected by wars and violent conflicts. They have, as yet, not attained their freedom from fearfulness of decease that would be brought about by the use of weapons of mass destruction as well as conventional artillery. …
This is probably the last time I volition accept the honour to stand at this podium to address the General Assembly. Born as the First Globe State of war came to a close and departing from public life as the world marks half-a-century of the Universal Proclamation of Man Rights, I have reached that part of the long walk when the opportunity is granted, as it should be to all men and women, to retire to some balance and tranquillity in the village of my birth.
Equally I sit in Qunu and grow as ancient as its hills, I will keep to entertain the hope that in that location has emerged a cadre of leaders in my ain country and region, on my continent and in the world, which volition not let that whatever should be denied their freedom every bit nosotros were; that any should be turned into refugees as we were; that any should be condemned to get hungry equally we were; that any should be stripped of their human dignity every bit we were. ...
Were all these hopes to interpret into a realisable dream and not a nightmare to torment the soul of the aged, and then volition I, indeed, have peace and tranquillity. Then would history and the billions throughout the world proclaim that information technology was right that we dreamt and that we toiled to requite life to a workable dream.
- Accost to the Un General Associates
21 September 1998
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On Fighting Poverty
South Africans have shown a tremendous chapters to join hands when facing difficulty. The apartheid system eventually fell because of the unity of those who were denied their rights, and considering all sectors of gild recognised that they had more to gain from working together than from fighting each other. It is that aforementioned quality that has helped us, and so quickly, to lay the foundations for a improve life.
When apartheid ended we faced the difficult task of reconstructing our shattered gild and providing the most basic of services for our people. We had to build schools and hospitals, to provide housing and jobs, to boost our economy, to protect our people's rights through our Constitution and our courts, to help South Africa bargain with the sectionalisation of its past and start the healing procedure, to deal with abuse and impairment which engulfed most of our communities.
Essentially our task was to create the weather in which every South African has the opportunity to create a amend life for themselves. But regime cannot run into these challenges by itself. It requires of us all to pull together, into a partnership, in social club to bring about the necessary changes.
In order to achieve these goals, we also needed to transform government from a organization serving minority interests to ane that meets the needs of all South Africans. And all these things had to be done in a country where most people were denied experience of government or proper educational activity and training. This is why we have placed aheavy accent on building capacity in government. …
When we say that the all-time solutions to these challenges can just be found when nosotros work with each other, it requires a commitment of each and every i of us. Today we should all ask ourselves: What accept I done to amend the surround in which I alive? Do I litter or exercise I protect my surroundings? Do I spread racial hatred or do I promote peace and reconciliation? Do I buy stolen appurtenances or do I assistance reduce criminal offence? Do I pay my ante or exercise I cheat on my taxes, service fees and licences? Practice I expect everything to exist delivered to me or practise I work with my local councillors to create a improve life for myself and my community?
- Bothaville, Southward Africa
14 October 1998
As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our globe, none of us can truly rest. We shall never forget how millions of people around the world joined u.s.a. in solidarity to fight the injustice of our oppression while we were incarcerated. Those efforts paid off and we are able to stand here and join the millions around the world in support of freedom against poverty.
Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in scientific discipline, technology, industry and wealth accumulation.
Nosotros live in a world where knowledge and information accept made enormous strides, still millions of children are non in school. We live in a world where the AIDS pandemic threatens the very material of our lives. Still we spend more money on weapons than on ensuring treatment and back up for the millions infected by HIV. It is a world of dandy promise and hope. Information technology is also a earth of despair, disease and hunger.
Overcoming poverty is non a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. Information technology is the protection of a fundamental man correct, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no truthful liberty. The steps that are needed from the developed nations are articulate.
The first is ensuring merchandise justice. I have said before that trade justice is a truly meaningful way for the adult countries to testify commitment to bringing nearly an finish to global poverty. The second is an end to the debt crisis for the poor countries. The third is to evangelize much more than aid and brand sure information technology is of the highest quality. ...
- Live eight concert
Johannesburg, South Africa — 2 July 2005
↥ Speaking Out For Justice...
On Building Peace
Peace is not merely the absence of conflict; peace is the creation of an surroundings where all can flourish, regardless of race, colour, creed, religion, gender, class, caste, or any other social markers of deviation. Religion, ethnicity, language, social and cultural practices are elements which enrich human being civilization, calculation to the wealth of our diversity. Why should they be allowed to become a crusade of division, and violence? Nosotros demean our common humanity by assuasive that to happen. ...
- New Delhi, India
31 January 2004
In that location is withal too much discord, hatred, division, disharmonize and violence in our world hither at the outset of the 21st century. A fundamental concern for others in our individual and community lives would go a long way in making the world the ameliorate place we so passionately dreamt of. … It is and so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who brand peace and build. ...
- Soweto, South Africa
12 July 2008
A Phone call to Activeness
for Commonwealth, Peace & Prosperity for All
Source: https://www.un.org/en/events/mandeladay/legacy.shtml
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