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Text of Speech by Evelyn Cresswell
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Richardsbaai Hoer Skool - speech day -7th October ‘04.
Good evening members of staff, parents, friends; Hello to the learners that I have the pleasure of meeting again.
My son once said to me, the recipe for a good speech is this:
Tell them what you are going to say
Say it.
Then remind them of what you have said!
I’m going to try and follow that advice now, and above all, to try and keep to the time I have been given. I wouldn’t be saying what I am if I didn’t really believe it.
A couple of weeks ago, I journeyed to Johannesburg to attend the funeral of the late Beyers Naude. Most of you are too young to know why he is famous and why he was given the honour of a State funeral, but it gave me the inspiration for this address today.
Our President, Thabo Mbeki inspired us all by what he said about this man, Beyers Naude, who was prepared to stand out from his own people and be rejected by the majority of them. He was largely looking at Beyers Naude’s great contribution towards our relatively peaceful transition to democracy and although we can be justifiably proud of that, we can’t forever coast on our recent past. I found myself wanting Mbeki to take us forward from there. However this gives me the opportunity to try and do so and to look at why a man like Beyers can be an increasing inspiration to us.
The writer of Proverbs said:
“Without a vision the people perish.”
What is our vision now, and what do we have to do to make it happen?
You’ll notice I am wearing a traditional Xhosa skirt. I chose to wear it tonight because it helps to illustrate my first point. I once bought it as a gift for my daughter in Canada. Her husband wouldn’t let her wear it as it made her stand out too much, so I reclaimed it!
There’s a fun poem that begins:
“When I grow old, I shall wear purple”.
I couldn’t find it but the gist of it is that this woman was looking forward to being old so she could wear what she liked and not worry about shocking others! Do you feel comfortable being yourself whatever you might be wearing?
But we don’t have to wait till we’re old before we can be free and courageous enough to enjoy being ourselves. And this is my first point. I found it written on a piece of paper recently:
“My deepest faith and belief is this,
it MATTERS what kind of human being I am.”
The vision that will galvanise us as a nation is not political. It doesn’t happen in the limelight. It happens in the workshop of our own lives, our own homes and places of work and learning and leisure. It starts with a belief and an assurance.
- I matter, and what kind of human being I am matters.
- My attitude towards every other human being matters because how I look at them or feel about them can make or break them as human beings.
- When I become a mother or a father, it matters HOW I look at my baby. He or she will know whether I hope and believe in him or not, and that will affect the very root of his or her consciousness, his growing up confident and being able to take the initiatives our developing society needs.
We have a rich and diverse and challenging society that will stretch us to the utmost of our capacity of being human.
(The worst I could imagine about life is that I become part of a stodgy, complacent society with no challenges to keep me on my toes, and keep me growing till the day I die).
Do I believe that our true wealth lies in our diversity? Mostly people are fearful of and try to put down those who are different from them. Can we turn the tables and be positive about difference?
If this can be our belief, it will then come across in our attitudes and in how we value, encourage and affirm others.
Our nation is not ‘fete a compli’ just because our constitution has changed, however marvellous that constitution may be. We must all take responsibility for nurturing our nation and help to make it happen. The way we believe in ourselves and in each other will determine whether our fledgling state can become a true ‘light to the nations’ by being pioneers of a fuller humanity, one that is able to accept someone who is not ‘like yourself’ and feel enriched by them.
Freedom is the fruit of giving freedom to someone else by believing in them - allowing them ‘to be’. We rise to trust; we fall before negation [negativity?] when we have no one to believe in us. [I think that you need to elaborate a little here to make sure that this, a central point of your talk, is understood.]
When we affirm others and show that we value them as people, then they come to trust us, and it opens the way for us to challenge them too.
This is where Beyers Naude comes in. We all need role models. He was so humble, and so honest with himself and so affirming of others, that people trusted him and responded to his example of what it meant to be human in our context, and were prepared to suffer too.
I was lucky enough to work for and with him and to learn from him. It is so wonderful to me to see his hope and faith in people justified and it gives me hope for the future that this great man of integrity who was once an outcast, is now recognised as one of our heroes. Indeed this country is rich in heroic human beings.
These are Thabo Mbeki’s opening words about him:
“He forgave wrongs darker than death or night. He neither lost his love for his people nor his capacity to bear the pain of their rejection. A Titan to the last, he was good, great and joyous, beautiful and free. That, alone, gave meaning to his life.”
Why do I choose Beyers Naude to hold up before you? Not because he has just died, but because our President honoured him for the very qualities I have been saying we need to take us forward. But there is more to it than that. It proves my point that we can be of different races, cultures, colours, rich or poor, but our hope lies in that we can still recognise the truly great and human qualities in another human being even if he or she belongs to a different group from our own.
However, it is a vision we have to appropriate and take responsibility for at every level of society and this means crossing the barriers to find each other wherever we happen to be! This is our mission now - TO FIND EACH OTHER
TO BELIEVE IN EACH OTHER
TO AFFIRM EACH OTHER
TO COME TO SHARE WITH EACH OTHER
Our prevailing world values express materialism and consumerism - THINGS matter more than people.
Imagine if we could all - ie the many indigenous people who have forgotten it and got caught up in Western materialism and also those who have not yet claimed their African heritage, come to value and own this proverb
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
Then it would be PEOPLE not things, that would define our wealth and happiness - who we are, and not how much we own! In this way we would be striking at the root of crime; we would have something to believe in beyond the culture that expresses our personal value in the things we have.
If we can appropriate a people-vision rather than a getting-rich-quick vision, then there’s hope we might become a miracle people to match our ‘miracle transition’. If we can pioneer a “more inclusive” way of being human, there’s a chance we may yet have gifts to offer the rest of the world that is crying out for a role model of what it means to be human enough to ‘connect’ with those who are different from ourselves.
I shall conclude by reading the poem that one of your matrics asked to have a copy of, because by doing so I shall be following my son’s advice - conclude by ‘reminding them of what you have said’.
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Learning to read
starts as soon as
my eyes catch your eyes
when focus happens,
and I discover my name
written in the soft
glow of their hope
and I begin to know
I am.
Perhaps I’m simply glanced off
your eyes’ polished glaze
and never see my name
that spells me into being,
or perhaps in depths of darkness
of eyes where I fear to look
I see nothing
and nothing am.
It’s not just literacy
or my IQ that counts,
when it comes to what I know,
first I need to be.
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