Introduction

This year I celebrate 68 years of membership of the ANC, having joined the ANC Youth League as a 13½-year-old in 1956.

You can therefore imagine what a difference it would make to me and others of my generation if the South Africa of today looked like the South Africa for which many sacrificed in many ways, including by losing their lives.

The ANC held a victory party at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg as soon as the results of our very first democratic elections of 1994 were announced. I happened to serve as the Master of Ceremonies that joyful evening.

As I was making my introductory remarks to kick-off the celebrations, my eyes fell on one of our esteemed guests that evening – Mrs Coretta Scott-King, wife of the late esteemed leader, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.

Almost spontaneously I repeated the words her husband and comrade cited as he ended his famous “I Have a Dream” speech - “Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”

I am certain that those words of thanks to the Almighty were uttered by millions throughout our country because, indeed, these millions were free at last from 350 years of cruel white minority colonial and apartheid rule.

That freedom meant that at last as visualised in the Freedom Charter we would have a government “based on the will of all the people”.

 

Full speech attached.