Mamphela Ramphele
Africa: Cradle of humanity
Our highly praised political settlement has brought enormous benefits to us as a country. The world admires us for choosing the path of reconciliation over retribution.
But our political settlement has not delivered the freedom from poverty, inequality and unemployment that the majority of black people continue to endure.
To consolidate our constitutional democracy we need to strengthen it with emotional and socio-economic settlements. Emotional settlement is about acknowledgement by white people that they are recipients of the benefits of white superiority and affirmative action that protected them from competition from black people in jobs, skills training, and business development.
Emotional settlement is also about black people shedding the imposed inferiority complex that has seen them undervaluing their culture, language and contribution of Africa to human civilisation.
Africa is the cradle of humanity, because Africa had the primordial mother instinct to nurture human evolution. But Africa also had the intellectual capacity to give to the human race governance, literacy, mathematics, cosmology and trade and industry.
Indoni: A shining example
Indoni is a shining example of what active civic engagement can achieve with very little but sustained effort.
We have set in motion the unfolding of a generation of young artists who are like budding flowers opening up to the rising sun.
We are setting an example of how to heal wounds of assault on the dignity of many by being a presence on their lives and affirming the strong healing capacity of families.
We are also setting an example of bridging the divides: race, class, gender and age.
We are onto a great start and need to build on the success of the first 18months to aim high and demand only the best from and for these very talented young people.”
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