Farewell Speech ^Featured

I can’t believe I am standing here with our five weeks in DC behind me. I feel as though I should give some amazing summary of my time here: of all I have learnt, of all the people I have met, the things I have seen, the friends I have made and how much I have grown.

That is an impossible task – but I will do the best I can.

I’d like to start off with some thank you’s.

A unique feature of this programme is the opportunity to slot into the lives of ordinary families. To my host family, the Sacks and to all of the rest of you: thank you for having us to stay. It was wonderful to get to know you as well as our schedules would allow and to spend the little spare time we had with you. Thank you for putting up with the mess in my room (which managed to swallow an entire stipend for a few days), my irregular comings and goings and for being my source of vegetables for the last five weeks. Without our host families the programme would be a something completely different; thank you for opening your homes to us.

Claire, Kim, Viv, the board and everybody else involved in the programme in one way or another, thank you for the work you do. The opportunity you have given to all of us is a life changing one. We are ever grateful for all that you do, much of it behind the scenes.

And to my fifteen companions; to those rowdy Irish and the middle Easters. It has been a privilege to share this experience with you. We have done some incredible things together; cried together, seen and experienced so much. I know that we have laid the foundations for a life-long friendship and I already feel the stirrings of the incredible things we will achieve together.

I have been fortunate -- I scored fairly well in the lottery of birth and by raw chance was born into the loving family and the world in which I grew up. I was educated at some of Africa’s finest schools and lucky enough to have had many opportunities that most South African’s are deprived of. Beyond that, I was lucky enough to fall into the tiny percentage of the population that receives tertiary education.

Six months ago there was a very real chance that having graduated and gained professional affiliation I would have slipped into the bubble of comfortable complacency in which many of South Africa’s relatively privileged citizens live. I would have wound up as a hedge fund manager in Westminster or an investment banker on Wall Street. A statistic of the brain drain. I loved my country, but had by no means resolved to tie my fate to hers. I was uncertain of my standing in South Africa and nervous about what the future held – in some regards I still am.

But this is where SAWIP has done me the greatest service. Where it has and will have the largest impact on my life. SAWIP has served to change the direction of my goals and the dimensions of my dreams; shifted my attention towards making a lasting difference in South Africa. I now know that I cannot jump ship. South Africa is the county that shaped me and turned me into who I am today. Our fates are inseparable. I have a role to play, whatever it may be, in helping South Africa to realise the dream that the leaders of old envisaged. We are a long way off, and are seriously at risk, now more than ever I think, of straying from the path.

The 15 of us are representative of the South Africa population. But at the same time, we are not. We will all graduate with a degree and find jobs. Our children will enjoy better lives than we did. A huge number of people our age have no hope of a better life. It is to that we owe an alternative.

The grossly unequal socio-economic landscape in South Africa is a feature that we cannot sustain, a blemish that we cannot in good faith ignore, and something that I doubt the people will let it be ignored for much longer. This, I believe, is the definitive struggle of our time; that this classist inequality, and not race, is the essential characteristic in the divisions we battle with. So things have to change. It took some time for me to come around; thinking that you are to stand on the receiving end of this change is an uncomfortable prospect. It is a tough pill to swallow for many people. But it must be taken.

I am proud of my English heritage and my family but I too have to own the position that my being white has entitled me to.

I will never apologise for being white. And having seen how hard my parents worked and witnessing the sacrifices they made I will never apologise for the privilege of my education.

In the same breath, I realise that I have benefitted, directly or indirectly from my whiteness. Had my parents been black and worked just as hard and sacrificed even more it is unlikely that they would have been able to afford their children the same privileges. And it is this situation that I am sorry about, and which I hope to tackle in my lifetime – that someone born to a black family has just the same opportunities as one born to a white family – that both are able to realise the idea that through hard work you can be whoever you want to be; the African version of the great American dream.

In achieving change I would hope that we have learnt enough to avoid achieving it by the same means in which those before us created the situation. Expropriating mines and farmland will not solve these issues; indeed this approach and rhetoric threatens to tear South Africa apart. The 15 of us and our generation are young enough to remember nothing of Apartheid’s laws yet old enough to carry the burden of its legacy; I pray that we would be wise enough to approach things differently.

On the subject of the youth -- we have had the opportunity to interact with an amazing array of people in our time here. We have absorbed much of their wisdom and learnt from them. I am dissatisfied though and would ask – why is this kind of interaction not commonplace? Why in South Africa are older leaders so removed from the youth? I wonder, had we not been on this programme, would most of the people we met have been so willing to interact? It is not good enough that we have had to travel across the Atlantic in order to meet our political leaders. A constant thread run through many of our discussions has been that the youth is too quiet. That we need to challenge the power structures; confront the status quo. I agree with these criticisms, particularly coming from Stellenbosch and its apathetic student body. But I would also appeal to you, the older generations: the leaders we look up to and long to engage with; we are here, we are eager, and, to be blunt, sometimes our ideas are better than yours. So I implore you: venture to lend the youth an ear, do not dismiss us, take our thought and ideas seriously and give us a chance.

I would like to end off with an extract from a speech that Thabo Mbeki delivered in parliament in 1996 and would suggest that there is much we need to draw inspiration from and much we need to remember again.

“The constitution whose adoption we celebrate contains an unequivocal statement: we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by race, colour, gender or historical origins.

It is a firm assertion made that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

It recognises that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and a goal which cannot be separated from their material well-being.

It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social group by another, the fear of tyranny.

It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals.

It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than by force.

As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without conceit.

Whoever we may be, whatever our interest, however much baggage we carry from the past, however much we have been caught by cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us not err today as we say - nothing can stop us now!”