Published date
Related Collections from the Archive
Related content
I stand here not as a diplomat, I am not schooled in that line; but I do stand here as a man who shares a profession with a man we are commemorating today, Martin Luther King, Jr. - a Minister of the Word of God; schooled perhaps in other ways of telling the truth, the rugged truth sometimes, and not sugar-coated truths.
I thank you very much for having invited me to come all the way from my Mother country which has been taken away from me and my people, to this occasion of commemorating and celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a great privilege to be here.
Sometimes I wonder, when I look at what has been happening here over the last few days; it reminds us of what usually happens sometimes in Africa. In African terms you say "as if you are invited to come and see how the other people eat and what kind of nice foods they enjoy." I speak as a black South African. To see how people can celebrate freedom when you yourself are living in slavery is not a joy, it is a bitterness.
Looking back on the words of the Ambassador of the United States of America to the United Nations when he spoke here; he knows better than others, and having been so very close to the man we are commemorating, we must take his word that we in South Africa, the black indigenous people of South Africa, have not been impervious to the principle of nonviolent resistance. He is right. Mahatma Gandhi thought out and made perfect his system of non-violence while he was living in South Africa. When we honour Martin Luther King, Jr. the way we are doing, some of us ask questions why have we not been able in our own South Africa and in other places in the world to honour people like Albert Luthuli?
No, I don`t say we haven`t honoured him, I don`t begrudge anybody; all I am saying is that we have known this way, we are not impervious to this way, and the honourable Ambassador did say that we have learned these things from Mahatma Gandhi; we have learned it from people like Albert Luthuli; we practised it. The question that must be put to you today is: why is it that this thing that has been learned from South Africa and has been successful in other parts of the world is not in the place of its birth, where Mahatma Gandhi did it? Where Albert Luthuli did it together with others? Why is it? I think we have got to be realistic.
Those who are often so very much taken by these philosophies; very good indeed. However, we who have been trying to put them into practice, have come to a realization that the success of a strategy is not only in the strategy itself, it is not intrinsic in the strategy. The success or failure of a strategy really often depends on the adversary with whom or against whom the strategy is being put. It is high time that diplomats and world leaders are quite clear of the fact that the adversary that we are dealing with in South Africa is not the same as the adversary that Martin Luther King, Jr. dealt with here; or that Mahatma Gandhi dealt with in India when he was dealing with the British colonial regime. These men were dealing with adversaries perhaps who had certain principles in them and therefore who could respond to the kind of principle and the kind of strategy to which they were devoted.
Let us not be naive. People here have spoken about the hydra-headedness of apartheid. More than its hydra-headedness, some of us in Africa have become aware, and become very bitter and frustrated to the extent of seeing all beautiful words as lies. We have realized its multi-tentacled roots. Apartheid, the regime in South Africa, could long have been taken off the face of the earth if it did not have roots in various parts of the world - in America, in Britain, in Japan - and all over. Nobody here can tell me that he is not my oppressor.
We are tired, we Africans of South Africa, to be coming to nice international organizations and hearing wonderful words being said about apartheidand against apartheidby the very people who go around and go back to entrench the very system that kills us and our children.
We are thinking of the economic systems of the Western world. We are thinking about how when you speak about economic sanctions against South Africa, it lends a lie to the whole thing. It is not even the first time we have talked about these things. We have talked about them in the early sixties. I myself have come up this way through the World Council of Churches. I have been involved with them for ages and I have been in all kinds of discussions on apartheidand racism; how to break it down, all over the world. This question of sanctions does not convince me when it is being said so very nicely as if it is the panacea. The question is: Who is going to apply it?
Who is going to apply it when we know that today we have multinationals spread throughout the world. These multinationals, right in South Africa today, are only debating on how to give autonomy to the local affiliate in South Africa. There are corporations, for instance, like General Motors which have become so very much bound by the legal system in South Africa that they can now forego the whole question of not supplying arms to South Africa, by producing the very arms and things right there, on the spot. They use a patent that has been supplied by people whose representatives come and speak against apartheid.
We black people of South Africa want to say this to the world, and we say it without any excuses: we are tired of being used as pawns in the big Power game of the world. We have been used as pawns all the time. The time has come now for things to be counted down. Years ago, 10 to 15 years ago, it was Z. K. Matthews and Sir Hugh Foot who taught the continent of Africa, and taking it out from our mouths came and told the world what we already knew and what we knew was that is where the Third World War is likely to be fought. Furthermore this Third World War being fought on South African ground is going to be a war of ideologies and it is going to be a war of colour, black versus white. They became great on that.
One wants to feel that as affairs are going on today in the world, we are coming closer and closer to that point, and one standing here in Atlanta gets tremendously worried. When I have come to this occasion which is predominantly a black occasion I ask myself, at that time, when it comes, where will my black brothers be? This raises the point, and this is what I would like to say to my Afro-American brothers; the policy of this country towards us is very much dependent upon your shoulders. Don`t play the big game with them. Either you are going to think with your blood and be black with us, or you are going to think with your money, with your adoption, and be of this country.
One fears; I can`t say that I have dreams like Martin Luther King, Jr. My dreams are all nightmares and they have been nightmares for the last fifteen years. My nightmare is the day when that war that I have always feared on the southern part of Africa comes, and it is an ideological war, and my brother`s son from the United States standing on the other side of the ideology, goes out and fights in order to prop up apartheid. When the son of that very Martin Luther King, Jr. has to shoot my son and my people because he belongs to a country which feels that the ideology which my son and my people have taken in order to get freedom is a wrong ideology. That will be genocide.
To my brothers in this country with whom I rejoice, I say in the words of your own American poets, can you really be free if there is on earth a slave, can you really be free?
United Nations