Chairperson and hon members, as a nation we need symbols on which to hang our understanding of the past. We need a Nelson Mandela to express our endurance under injustice and our hope for reconciliation.
We need a Pixley ka Isaka Seme to represent the moral high ground from which we commenced, and we need an Albert Luthuli to symbolise our faith and convictions. These are the symbols of South Africa's liberation struggle.
Many more will be named in this debate, like Oliver and Adelaide Tambo and Walter and Albertina Sisulu; the Right Rev Bishop Alphaeus Zulu and the Rev Canon James Calata; Prof Z K Matthews and his son, Mr Joe Matthews; Mr Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe; Dr Wilson Zamindlela Conco; and Mr Steve Bantu Biko, to name but a few.
However, let us not create an elite group of heroes and heroines to the exclusion of the millions of South Africans who furthered our liberation struggle through their individual choice to let go of resentment, to seek to understand and to lay down the desire to retaliate. Today, this House will honour freedom fighters who took up arms, but the IFP seeks to honour the ones who refused to take them up.
After October 1979 the IFP fell from grace with the then ANC's mission-in- exile, for we refused to support the armed struggle. A decades-long campaign of vilification was launched against Inkatha and its president, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The rift between our parties became a chasm when the ANC's people's war was turned against the very people they sought to liberate, their fellow oppressed who happened to be members of the IFP.
We have never entirely breached the divide. The reconciliation efforts that began with Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi inviting Nelson Mandela to address a joint rally in Taylor's Halt in 1991 continued into the Government of National Unity, but reconciliation was never complete and now seems to have been muscled off the agenda by the leadership of the ANC.
The truth of the IFP's role in the liberation struggle is belittled and ignored. In debates like this, the ruling party remembers icons from the ANC, but it does not remember Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whose uncle was the founder of the ANC in 1912, whose mentor was Inkosi Luthuli, who undermined the apartheid system from within at the behest of Oliver Tambo and, indeed, did many other things that contributed to where we are.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi is therefore one of the greatest unsung heroes of South Africa's liberation struggle, whose full contribution has not been recognised and cannot be captured in such a brief debate. I thank you, Chair. [Applause.]