Politicians From South Africa

"For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born."

"Indeed, mother, you are always our helper."

"It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it."

"I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good for their country, come together to work for it. I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"For who can stop the heart from breaking?"

"Happy the eyes that can close."

"The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions."

"The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just."

"Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey,a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house."

"I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering."

"Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering."

"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much."

"...there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."

"The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again."

"And now for all the people of Africa, the beloved country. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, God save Africa. But he would not see that salvation. It lay afar off, because men were afraid of it. Because, to tell the truth, they were afraid of him, and his wife, and Msimangu, and the young demonstrator. And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger? That man should walk upright in the land where they were born, and be free to use the fruits of the earth, what was there evil in it? . . . They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love."

"The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions. Allow me a minute. . . ."

"This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. . . . Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end."

"I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men . . . desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it. . . . I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief—and again I ask your pardon—that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten."

"I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating."

"We had two masters of the spoken word in South Africa, General Smuts and his lieutenant J. H. Hofmeyr, whose life I wrote. Smuts spoke in a high-pitched voice, not the kind of voice that one would expect from a famous soldier, but he too could hold an audience in the hollow of his hand, partly because he was Smuts, partly because he could say nothing trite or shallow, partly because he knew how to speak to ordinary men and women."

"You don't have to carry a gun to be a freedom fighter."

"Revenge should not be our motivation."

"I have always been made out as a racist, someone who hates black people. I don't hate them. I grew up with them. I just know there are many differences between whites and the blacks and I will always believe it."

"[Self-determination] is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, the ability to rule yourself. They don't want to give us that. We are not free. We have everything a nation needs, except a land to call our own."

"Our nation is unique. We grew out of a desire to worship God in a certain way; we grew from a number of other nations who were being prosecuted because of their faith. We have a wonderful culture, a wonderful, vibrant language. I want my people to be proud of who they are again."

"The rest of my life belongs to my culture, my language, my God and my nation."

"We cannot use Western models of protocols for research and development. We should guard against being bogged down with clinical trials."

"His [Nelson Mandela's] death is irreversible, his legacy, undying. All of us, the government, the voters, civil society, the churches, are faced with an inescapable challenge: are we going to honor and sustain his legacy or deviate from it? Indeed, leaders across the globe ought to reflect on his legacy – particularly while they have the option to resolve disputes through peaceful negotiations instead of violence; abolish all nuclear devices or retain them to destroy our planet; take the quantum leap required to avert the lethal consequences of climate change and the depletion of the planet’s natural resources or enjoy our daily greed to such an extent that it forbids us to preserve our planet for our children to survive."

"A new era has begun in South Africa. My government is removing racial discrimination. We want to be accepted by our African brothers."

"Senator, some of us strongly believe that Americans are the last people that can go around the world preaching morality. What we are doing to the blacks in Africa today is what you have already done and continue to do to the American Indian."

"If we don't stand together, we will never catch up and the industrialised nations won't care. I predict it here today as your brother."

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

"It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die."

"The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity."

"You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway."

"Even today, we are still accused of racism. This is a mistake. We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior."

"Steve, with his brilliant mind that always saw to the heart of things, realized that until blacks asserted their humanity and their personhood, there was not the remotest chance for reconciliation in South Africa.... Steve knew and believed fervently that being pro-black was not the same thing as being anti-white. The black consciousness movement is not a "hate white movement" despite all you may have heard to the contrary. He had a far too profound respect for persons as persons to want them under ready-made, shop-soiled, second-hand categories...We weep with and pray for Ntsiki [Mrs. Biko] and all of Steve's family. We weep for ourselves. . . . Steve started something that is quite unstoppable. The powers of injustice, of oppression, of exploitation have done their worst and they have lost.... Many who support the present unjust system in this country know in their hearts that they are upholding a system that is evil and unjust and oppressive, and which is utterly abhorrent and displeasing to God. There is no doubt whatsoever that freedom is coming. Yes, it may be a costly struggle still. The darkest hour, they say, is before the dawn. We are experiencing the birth pangs of a new South Africa, a free South Africa, where all of us, black and white together will walk tall; where all of us, black and white together, will hold hands as we stride forth on the Freedom March to usher in the South Africa where people will matter because they are human beings made in the image of God. We thank and praise God for giving us such a magnificent gift in Steve Biko"

"Dictatorships fall not only when they have implacable opponents but also exemplary victims: Steve Biko in South Africa, Benigno Aquino in the Philippines, Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland. Through their deaths, they awakened the living to the conviction that it was the regime that should die instead."

"Much of Biko's energy is devoted to criticizing the liberal in both the condescending white and the idiotic black forms. The black liberal is idiotic because black people lack power in a white-controlled system. The white liberal, on the other hand, operates from the vantage point of having something—perhaps a great deal—to lose in the event of progressive social change. The white liberal's offer to help has an air of condescension because it masks a profound existential investment in the continuation of the racist system. Thus, the white liberal always insists on offering the theoretical or interpretive strategies against antiblack racism, but such strategies often act to preserve the need for white liberals as the most cherished members or overseers of values in their society. In Biko's words: "I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white man a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil (and a poor one at that.)""

"On June 16, 1976, schoolchildren in Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, South Africa, revolted. They pred into the streets to protest a new apartheid law requiring that they be taught in Afrikaans, "the language of the oppressor," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu once called the mother tongue of white Afrikaners. The students' act of defiance that day would change the course of their nation's history. "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed," said Steve Biko, leader of South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement and an inspiration to student activists. A cornerstone of oppression in South Africa was "Bantu education," the name given to the separate and inferior schooling that South Africa's black majority was forced to endure under the system of official discrimination known as apartheid. Biko charged that the objective of Bantu education was "to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country.'"

"We must realise that prophetic cry of black students: "Black man you are on your own!""

"In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift—a more human face."

"The system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit."

"The logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country. Not so long ago this used to be freely said in parliament, even about the educational system of the black people. It is still said even today, although in a much more sophisticated language. To a large extent the evil-doers have succeeded in producing at the output end of their machine a kind of black man who is man only in form. This is the extent to which the process of dehumanization has advanced."

"Apartheid — both petty and grand — is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority."