Indaba Durban - President Mbeki Opening Speech 2003.

President's Official Opening Address - Indaba 2003
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA, THABO MBEKI, AT THE OFFICIAL
OPENING OF INDABA 2003: ICC, DURBAN, 03 MAY 2003

Chairperson, Honourable Ministers, Directors-General, Chief Executive Officers of various stakeholders in the Tourism Industry, Members of the International and local Media, Delegates, both from home and abroad, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am happy to welcome everyone to this important event. I am privileged to spend a little bit of time with the men and women who lead and participate in this important sector of human activity and business - tourism.

A special word of welcome goes to many among us who constitute the small, medium and micro enterprises in this important industry, the majority of whom are attending this event for the first time.

Obviously, you know more about this industry than I do. I am certain you know all the statistics that relate to this sector, the challenges it faces and the opportunities, both locally and globally. Being business people, I am certain you have the obligation to respect the discipline of the market or face collapse as commercial ventures.

Even the Ministers and the senior government officials who are here, are expected by their bosses, such as the President of South Africa, to know their sectors well enough to be able properly to discharge their responsibilities.

If they fail, I am certain they know what might befall them - such as cabinet reshuffles, redeployment to supervise the digging and filling up of the same hole, and much worse.

It would therefore be very foolish for me to try to teach you, the delegates, anything about tourism. Rather, I would like to speak to you as a tourist - the beneficiary of the services that you offer. You will pardon me if I speak too much about South Africa. But it may be that what I might say might be of more general application.

To let you into a secret, with the request that all of you keep this strictly to those of us who are in this hall, I have been considering asking our government to give me sabbatical leave for one year. I would then use these 12 months to tour South Africa and Africa. I would travel incognito, necessarily using an assumed name, which would be Wolfgang Schmidt, born somewhere in Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany. This would rescue me from having to be met everywhere I go by high-level official reception parties, having to inspect guards of honour, enjoy cultural performances as
an official obligation, and generally carry a fixed grin, which is good for the cameras, even if my new shoes are pinching my feet, such that I have to tread the red carpet as though I was walking on eggs.

I have asked my legal adviser to consider this matter of my sabbatical leave, to determine whether such a proposal to the Cabinet would be permissible in terms of our Constitution and legislation. After all, we have to respect the public commitments we make every other day to respect the rule of law.

I do not know what the legal adviser will recommend. But I have told her that there are some unequivocal rulings that I have made considering the matter of my sabbatical leave, in the event that we stop dithering and boldly present this request to the Cabinet.

One of these is that she is not allowed to take sabbatical leave. Further, as a tourist, I do not need her legal advice. She will therefore not accompany me, using the excuse that I need such advice. Thirdly, while I am touring she will continue to work, to advise the Acting President.

In the event that the Acting President does not need her services, to keep herself busy, she will have to advise herself on all relevant legal matters. And, finally, I have told her that I will not consider any argument against my sabbatical leave, based on what she would describe either as "convention" or "internationally accepted practice", or both.

I have told her that my firm view in this regard is that we are perfectly capable of starting a new convention or internationally accepted practice, or both, provided that our initiative cannot be challenged on the basis of rational, and not knee-jerk assertions about the rule of law.

I await the advice of my legal adviser.

Everything I have said up to now, except the words of welcome, is, as people in the media say, "off the record". Since nobody objected, please take it that you are bound by the oath of confidentiality, which I persuaded you to accept earlier, democratically.

I will now go "on the record". You are free to report, misreport, or quote out of context anything I say from now onwards, unless otherwise advised. I say this to reaffirm our commitment to the protection of the fundamental human right of freedom of speech.

I would like to have time to break loose from my work environment, to rediscover myself as a person by being with people and things about whom and which I do not have to take decisions.

I would like to wander around in the great street markets of the pulsating African city of Lagos, and bargain with the street traders as millions of Nigerians do, being part of these teeming crowds. From here, I would visit the museums, to contemplate the Benin bronzes and the masks that speak of ancient African skill in the plastic arts, and marvellous craftsmanship.

I would like to go down into the extraordinary Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, to watch the animals of the wild and the Masai share the same space peacefully, as though they were natural born brothers and sisters and neighbours. From here, having passed through Serengeti, I would like to go elsewhere in Tanzania to buy at least one of the strange, startling, delicate and intricate Makonde sculptures that speak of African creative
activity, unbound.

I would go to Timbuktu in the deserts of Mali, to see an ancient mosque built of mud bricks, which still stands after hundreds of years, and take off my shoes willingly, to enter this place of worship that has served the Moslems of Mali for hundreds of years.

I would visit the library in Timbuktu, which houses books and manuscripts dating back eight centuries, which were used in this ancient African university town to teach mathematics, physics and chemistry, astronomy, medicine, law, history and other subjects.

I would go to Goree island, just off the Senegalese capital of Dakar, and see the place from which African slaves were transported out of Africa to the Americas, and see the manacles that were used, and the whips, and hear the cries of the damned, even though they are too dead to cry.

I would visit the great traditional healers in the hinterland of Senegal, to hear them tell of how they heal the sick and ward off the evil spirits. I would ask the Senegalese to tell me their stories about great African minds such as Leopold Senghor and Sheikh Anta Diop and Ousmane Sembene, who spoke of the colonised of Africa as "God's bits of wood". I might even ask myself the question, am I still, God's bit of wood?

I would visit Namibia and marvel at the majesty of the deserts, the sand dunes and the Skeleton Coast and the lions of the desert. If the season is right, I would cross into the great expanses of the Northern Cape to see the dry land known to the Khoisan as the Karoo, to see the miracle of a festival of colours, when the baked soil gives birth to a multitude of flowers, as the early rains give Iife to seeds that are unseen, but have not died.

I would walk the pretty and evocative streets of the capital city of Namibia, Windhoek, and rejoice at the permanent urban monument left by the German colonisers, even as they left other, and bitter memories.

I would have time to ponder the extraordinary dresses worn by Herero women, preserved from the 19th century fashionable clothes of German frau's and fraulein's. I would listen to the language spoken by the Nama with its clicks, whose speakers were almost wiped out in our country, during the cruel period of our colonisation, when they were derogatively renamed Hottentots, rather than Nama and Khoi, and described as sub-human.

I do not know whether I would swim in the cold Atlantic Ocean, enticed by the white beaches of Namibia, and risk being carried away by the waves to the lands in the Far West that were once joined to Africa, before the phenomenon of continental drift created the continents, and certainly before the winds and the waves carried millions of Africans across the Atlantic from the Senegalese island of Goree. I do not want to be a slave again.

I would go to the Eastern Cape province of our country, to visit the grave of a Khoi woman, Sarah Bartmann, whose remains were returned to the country of her birth, almost after two hundreds of her death in Europe, to where she had been exported from Cape Town for public display in London, Paris and elsewhere, as a freak and an item of public curiosity. I would commune with the Khoi who live still not far from where she played as a child, two hundred years ago.

I would visit the museums of the Eastern Cape to see the embalmed body of a Khoi person who died 2000 years ago. I would call on places that have names that are strange to me as an African, such as Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, King Williamstown, Berlin, Stutterheim, Fort Hare, Fort Beaufort and East London, and try to understand who Graham was, such that a town must be named after him, and why we have a small town in the Eastern Cape that shares the same name as the great city of Berlin.

I am certain that as I walk around these places with strange names, I will learn much about the great dramas of times past, when British men and women and soldiers, and German men and women descended on the Eastern Cape and constructed towns and forts that they named after their heroes and heroines, and sovereigns and places of origin.

In the process I will learn something about what happened, then. Who fought whom, and who lost and won? Who owned this land, and who took it by force?

Who were the commanding officers that led the contending sides? Who showed courage, and who succumbed to the natural impulse of cowardice, arguing that it was the better part of valour? How many died and how many lived? Why am I ignorant of the drama of the battles that were fought, unable to talk about the strategic brilliance of generalship, the tactical skills of the majors and the captains, and the courage of the foot soldiers, as I can about those who fought at Stalingrad, and El Alamein and the Allied landings on the European coast, to contribute to the destruction of Nazism?

Where should we build a monument to pay tribute to those who fought to defend our independence? If the British colonel Graham, who gave his name to Grahamstown, was a merciless butcher of the Africans whom he helped to subjugate, why should I accept that an important university town of our country should be named after him?

Why did the African poet of the Eastern Cape speak of the mountain of Hoho? Where is it, so that I can see it and understand why it awed this artisan of beautiful words? And why did my grandfather fight on the side of the colonial army, when he was such a man of courage? Or perhaps he was what the learned call a pragmatist. Where did those who lived bury him?

I will wander further and away from the Eastern Cape, perhaps with a million questions in my head, without answers. These will be questions about my shared past with the British and German people.

I will ask what we may teach one another about what we might do today and tomorrow not to repeat the bloody relationship that gave birth to Fort Hare and a South African Berlin, and gave birth to common reference points that we should all visit to understand what they did, whom we call kith and kin.

I will wander away knowing that their bones lie side by side in the bowels of the many coloured soils of the Eastern Cape. I will ponder this reality too, that their blood was long carried away by the rivers of this little corner of Africa into the vast Indian Ocean, there to mingle and dissolve, with no consideration of the fact that this one, who died, was a harmless indigenous peasant, and the other, a ferocious soldier of fortune who came from other lands.

I would visit the old city of Omduraman in Sudan, and hear about the defeat of the British general, who though he was defeated and died in Khartoum, is still called Gordon of Khartoum. I would follow the route that Emperor Menelik II and Empress Taitu took to reach Adwa in 1895, there to defeat the Italian armies and preserve Ethiopia's independence even as the rest of our continent fell victim to the scramble for Africa. I would stand on the hills and plains where the Battle of Isandhlwana was fought in 1879, where the British expeditionary army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a
patriotic army of the Zulu people.

I would travel to Aksum in Ethiopia and see the ancient monuments of stone, and to Egypt, to gaze at the pyramids, and wonder at the African genius that created these wonders of the world. I would pass by the ruins of the Roman cities in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, recall the furious destruction of Carthage by the Roman Empire, and contemplate on the times when the Moroccans became Spaniards.

In my mind, there will be Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor, and Hannibal - part of a wonderful voyage of discovery that allows the mind to tour lands beyond the oceans and personal experience.

I would go to the places from where humanity emerged - in Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa - to understand why Africa is the cradle of humanity. I would walk up the Barberton Mountains of South Africa to see this earliest evidence of the formation of the earth and life.

I would visit the still and silent Karoo, and listen to the story of the great flood that drowned all life and turned everything into stone fossils, before Noah was born, the Karoo that harbours the remains of generations of dinosaurs, and silently tells the story of my emergence from nature's doing, so that, today, wisely or not, I can claim to be homo sapiens.

I would visit Uganda to hear about the foul deeds of another African, Idi Amin Dada, who did everything to dishonour all of us who are African. I would travel to Rwanda to see the mounds of skeletons of the million Africans who were butchered by other Africans in a 100-day orgy of genocide that is still difficult to understand.

The English poet, Shelley, wrote about a much smaller massacre at Manchester in England, and said in the "Mask of Anarchy":

"I met Murder on the way - He had a mask like Castlereagh, Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven bloodhounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Eldon, an ermined gown; His big tears, for he wept well, Turned to mill-stones as they fell,

And the little children who Round his feet played to and fro, Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them."

Those who commanded the killers in Rwanda looked as smooth as Castlereagh. They too fed human hearts to their fat dogs. They too wept well, and their tears knocked the brains of the African children who played around their feet.

I will wander through Africa to hear about those who wore the mask of anarchy and killed the children of Africa, even as they wore ermined gowns of state, fervently claiming to be the men of the people. I need to know all this because the smooth ones who wept millstones were Africans like me. I must trouble myself with the question - how could we produce such monsters?

I know that if I do not ask this question, the monsters might take advantage of my involuntary attempt to black out their monstrous deeds, to return again, weeping big tears again.

I would march through Africa to hear her musicians and poets, to see her dancers and her clothes and the varied ancient games she plays. I would strive to hear how the Africans laugh, and the funny stories they tell, and richness of expression in the languages they speak, and experience the taste and variety of the food they eat, and acquire the handicrafts they produce with their hands, with reeds and beads and bits of wood and animal skins.

I would gaze at the elephant and the leopard, the lion and the giraffe, the buffalo and the jealous mamba and the crocodile, the tall trees of the indigenous tropical forests, the primates in their natural habitat and the eagles, the owls, the falcons and peregrines, the secretary birds, the vultures and the butterflies, and the ants.

I would want to know the rivers and the lakes, the Nile the Congo, the Niger and the Zambezi rivers, the great water expanses we call Victoria, Tanganyika and Chad, marvel at the shooting spume of the waterfalls, regard the Atlas, Kilimanjaro, Ruwenzori and Drakensberg/Ukhahlamba mountains, the baobab, the yellow wood, the mahogany, and the unique flora and fauna of the
Seychelles and Madagascar, the Sahara desert, and the oceans that surround Africa.

I would want to walk along the sandy beaches of the African coast, swim in her oceans, ferret with my eyes through her coral reefs and commune with the fish that guard her shores, and sit alone listening to the dialogue of the waves.

Everywhere I go, I shall ask for your help. I will ask you to transport me and provide me with a place to rest and sleep. I will request you to feed me and provide me with water to drink. I will plead that you look after my health and remove all obstacles on my journey through Africa.

I will ask you to tell me where I should go, to see, to hear, to relax and to dream. I will come to you and say - I am a tourist. Please take me where I need to go. I will pay you, because I know that what you will do for me carries a cost for you.

The question that I must ask, as you meet at this great Indaba, is whether you will take me where I should go. If you undertake that you will, I will tell the whole world - please come to Africa. I will tell my fellow Africans, make certain that you discover Africa.

No human being is born to labour without rest. Modern life that turns all of us into little cogs tied to virtually or actually automated processes, makes it imperative that occasionally we break loose, to live outside the alienating regimentation of the workplace.

The atomised individual washed along the wide streets of the great cities, with no possibility to be seen and heard by the multitudes around will, in the end, hear the voice of rejection by society and understand the loss of his or her humanity. In time, this person will see no reason to live. He and she will also fall victim to the diseases induced by the way we have to live
in order to live, surviving to make money so that we can make more money.

Millions across the globe share the need and the means to go somewhere other than where they live and work, to rediscover that they are human beings after all, rather than mere automatons within the objective processes of the creation of the material conditions for the reproduction of human society.

Rest and recreation is not a luxury. Neither is it a sin punishable by a life sentence in hell or purgatory. It is a human necessity, without which we cease to be human.

My request to you is that you give me the possibility to have rest and recreation, by enabling me to be a tourist in Africa. I undertake that as Africans, we will do everything we can to protect our flora and fauna; to protect our rivers and seas; to develop our roads, ports and airports; to protect the great African heritage in the arts, culture and architecture; to
oppose wars and terrorism and crime; to ease immigration restrictions; to fight corruption; to maintain our sense of humour; to continue to sing and dance and create a believable world of the imagination; to value our guests, knowing that it is a crime to poison the kola nuts with which we welcome our friends; to say to those who come from outside our continent, that you are
welcome home, to the continent that gave birth to all humanity; to offer you clean water and healthy food that will not make you sick; to share with you what little food we have, because we still do not know how to eat alone and remain human.

All this is what the important African initiatives of the African Union and NEPAD are about. We took them to help ourselves to lead decent human lives. We would be honoured if others from elsewhere in the world, including our guests who are here, joined us in these great endeavours, and stayed with us to enjoy the fruits of our common efforts.

I request you to help all of us, and others outside our continent, to claim our human right to rest and recreation, by giving us the possibility to be tourists. We will pay you so that you receive what is due to you. But what you will do for us, will help us to maintain our humanity and individuality.

In a year's time from now, as South Africans, we will celebrate the First Decade of Democracy. It is clear that for the tens of millions of our people, this will be a great moment of joy and celebration. However, it is also clear that millions across the globe, in all countries, who played such a critical role in helping us to emerge out of a long night of despair, are
intensely and justly interested to join our celebrations.

These celebrations will salute the capacity of human beings to find negotiated solutions to their problems, voluntarily to uphold the same human values, to sustain loyalty to the principle and practice of human solidarity, and to live peacefully in the same neighbourhood, regardless of racial, ethnic and other differences. We are convinced there is no better place to reaffirm all these than on the African continent that is the cradle of humanity.

By the end of my sabbatical year, I have to be back in the country to join these memorable celebrations. You will have to ensure that I do not miss this rendezvous with an historic moment, by unnecessarily perpetuating my life as a tourist.

Off the record, I must tell you that, in any case, I dare not be absent both before and during this time, next year. This is because during that period, we will also have our general elections. In this regard, there is a small matter that the people of our country have to resolve.

This is to determine whom they want as their President. I would like to hear what they have to say on this matter, given that I have been told that there are a few South Africans who are interested in this position, for reasons I cannot understand, unless, of course, they want to take a year's sabbatical leave.

I wish you a most successful and memorable Tourism Indaba.

Thank you.