On 26 June 1961, at a London press conference, Nelson Mandela had this to say:
I have had to separate myself from my dear wife and children, from my mother and sisters, to live as an outlaw in my own land. I have had to close my business, to abandon my profession and live in poverty and misery, as many of my people are doing.
He pledged that -
I shall fight the government side by side with you, inch by inch, mile by mile until victory is won ... I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender ... The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.
Indeed, this was a long walk to freedom, a journey well travelled. It is an ideal he lived to achieve. This was a journey encouraged by stories and tales of many victories, of many battles fought by our ancestors, Dingani, and Bambata, Squngati and Dalasile, Hintsa and Makana, Sekhukhune and Moshoeshoe, who became the pride and glory of all Africans for defending our fatherland.
It was a journey born out of love, passion, loyalty and dedication to the emancipation of our people through fearless yet bitter struggles led by our heroes and heroines like Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Joe Slovo, Steve Biko, Lilian Ngoyi, Moses Kotane, Winnie Mandela and Chris Hani plus many more, who laid down their lives to secure our freedom.
These were men and women of character who lost everything for our freedom, and whose losses can never be measured or compared. Today I stand here as a free son of the soil. Yes, I am indeed free, free from the bondage of apartheid, from the chains of brutal oppression by the then government of the few by the few, from laws of tyranny that declared our people and forebears terrorists, killers and slaves in the land of their forefathers, laws that made them inferior because of the colour of their skin. Those are the laws of brutality that forced masses of our people out of the country, and millions to their early graves.
As we celebrate our hard-won freedom it becomes critical to remind each other never to cease remembering and retelling the story of our struggle. Blade Nzimande was right when he said:
How we go forward into our future is very much determined by how we recall our past.
He was right when he further said that our 1994 democratic breakthrough was the outcome of a protracted struggle over many decades, if not centuries. It was the outcome of a hard-fought victory for change in the balance of forces. Those who distort our past hope to disarm and demobilise us in the present and we will never allow that.
We celebrate this freedom, because it was fought for and won for us not to abuse it but to build a better future and better life for all. We celebrate because we have achieved more in just less than 15 years than any of our oppressors ever achieved during their 300-year reign of terror.
We celebrate because of the many things that we have achieved. A lot of speakers today have given statistics of things that we have achieved. I am not going to repeat that. The facts will speak for themselves.
As we celebrate, we are conscious of the challenges that our country is still facing. We are confident and positive that with the plans and leadership we have, victory is certain. Our pace might be slow, but the truth is that the slow movement of a tiger is not a mistake, but a calculated accuracy. A mother will never forget a child on her back. The ANC has not forgotten its people. We are alive to the reality that the freedom we are celebrating did not only bring about positive change, for sooner than we had expected, the draconian forces of racial hatred began to rise.
The demon of self-enrichment and greed is fast creeping in to reverse our gains. We should all stand firm and fight all these things with all we have. We must all unite against poverty, hunger, disease, unemployment and crime.
In the true spirit and sense of reconciliation and ubuntu, I challenge the critics of the ANC, in particular the DA and its white supporters, and all those whose minds accepted the distortions of our history to jump off their high horse and stop criticising the very party that created the freedom platform they are today abusing.
I want to give you advice from Mahatma Gandhi, who once said:
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
I challenge you to be true and honest to the belief that we share a common pursuit of a united, nonracial, democratic country. Stop criticising and not offering alternatives. Remember the North American Indian proverb that says, that before you criticise a man, you must first walk a mile in his moccasins, hon Groenewald. I challenge all those who want to rob us of our rich history and distort it by telling repeated lies about the cause of killings of farmers - as if our townships and suburbs are immune from such barbaric acts of criminals - to tell the nation the truth.
This truth is that as long as the DA continues to shout slogans during elections like, "ANC gevaar!" ["ANC threat!], "Stop Zuma!"; as long as Afrikaners continue to hold high the apartheid regime flags and sing De la Rey; as long as white farmers continue to treat our people badly, killing them and saying they mistook them for baboons, pigs and guinea fowls; for as long as our people are killed by being thrown into lions' dens alive; as long as they are called "kaffirs" and are subjected to abject poverty and misery; as long as the lives of white farmers are seen as more valuable and important than those of black farmworkers; as long as our courts allow a situation where when a white person who has killed a black person such a white person is declared mentally unstable, and blacks are treated as the only people capable of being murderers; and as long as blacks still live in appalling and hazardous conditions as we see here in the Western Cape settlements, the struggle continues.
The people will ask questions, and stories will be told. The people will feel at a particular point that they have been generous enough, and that they have been provoked, they have been robbed and will think that it is justifiable for them to fight back. That will not help us in our peace and reconciliation mission. So, stop playing a blaming game, but play your part. Stop abusing reconciliation and the generosity of black people and please play your part because we deserve better. You are not fit and capable to lecture us on what our people want, for yours is nothing but a skewed and selfish political agenda.
During his treason trial Nelson Mandela said:
We of the ANC had always stood for a nonracial democracy, and we shrank from any action which might drive the races further apart than they already were.
But the hard facts are that for every one step that we move forward to close the gap, the majority of our white people move three steps away to widen the gap.
Despite all these things, Mandela taught us that the ANC, as the mass political organisation, could not and would not undertake violence because its members had joined in the express policy of nonviolence.
ANC leaders have always and up to this age prevailed upon the people to avoid violence and pursue peace through peaceful means. On the contrary, the same white community and their political leaders are failing to master this and at any slightest act of crime they advocate war instead of peace. It is in a period like this that one would expect the DA and FF Plus leaders to provide leadership instead of making a meal out of the death of a farmer.