“Future, on canvas” | Congressional Forum Speech

“Future, on canvas”

South Africa-Washington Internship Programme Congressional Forum 2011

By Frederik Thomas de Ridder | Delivered on the 12^th day of the 7^th Month

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Room H-137 United States Capitol Building, Washington DC

Room inscription by Samuel Adams, Founding Father of the United States of America:

“Freedom of thought and the right of private judgment, in matters of conscience,

driven from every other corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.”

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Foreword

A good friend of mine here with us this evening, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, has been introducing himself to Americans as ‘Sees-where’. The group has teased him extensively about this, as have I.  Sizwe translates literally into English as ‘Nation’ or ‘People’ from Xhosa. This coincidence fits poetically into my message for this evening. The question is really, ‘where is the nation’?

"This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease." As it were, Robert Kennedy stated this in a speech delivered at the University of Cape Town, 1966.

I am Frederik Thomas de Ridder, an individual of Afrikaner birth and heritage, but I say this to you only in pre-amble, for in truth: I am South African. By which I mean I reside within the bounds of that beautiful country.

I will spare you the journey through my personal struggles growing up in South Africa, in the humbling knowledge that others have experienced far worse and far greater.

I am the product of a difficult history and triumph of liberty in my country, of my parents and of those who entertain my existence on a daily basis, many of them here with us this evening.

I am no different from any of you in the following sense:

I share the dream of a bright future with my fellow South Africans. In the same way that each of you share that very same spirit with your fellow countrymen and women. A shared vision for peace and prosperity and the conquest of good over evil.

I am a small part of the whole, as such; I cannot claim to be all that it means to be South African in the knowledge that a once divided country will never really find itself a perfect representative.

That said, I am inseparable from my ideals…my beliefs and outlook defines me. In so far as I am a product of my environment, these beliefs, ideals and outlook speak to the South African story.

In telling this story…bear with me as I try to unshackle the oppressive bounds of history and craft the world to which, I awake.

Allow me to begin…

Esteemed Members of the Congress of the United States

Your Excellencies, Members of the Diplomatic Corps,

Board Members of the Washington Ireland Programme, New Story Leadership and the South Africa-Washington Internship Programme,

Programme Directors and Managers

Distinguished guests,

Comrades, friends,

& Fellow South Africans

I believe that a realist painter cannot paint what she has not seen, but an abstract artist can establish nothing short of a new reality.

A painter recognizes her unique conditions and circumstance, the unique time and her place in history in progressing her understanding…of herself and the world around her, so that she may fulfill her destiny and best depict her observances to benefit the wider world.

Tonight, by whatever course we have followed, we find ourselves in this room.

We have different histories and yet, we share a common future.

We are at the apex of the arch of history. Once upon a time each of us used to face our own canvas.

In this 21^st century, however, we are amidst the onslaught of the age of globalization and inter-connectedness so much so that we are now inexcusably bound to a common canvas.

A canvas that stretches from the emerging east to the prosperous west.  From the long established power of the north to the new burgeoning potential of the south. It is a canvas that allows each and every human being on the planet, to assert themselves and stake their democratic claim.

We cannot afford to think that our destinies are not tied or that our futures are mutually exclusive. Global discourse will be the collective product of our thoughts and beliefs and actions…now, more than ever.

At times, and in fear, I think.

I consider myself in relation to the world, the stars, the planets, the streets, the poverty, the war, the diseases and pandemics and, the hopes and the dreams all in the passages of time and fear the possibility that we may not emerge victorious.

I fear that we often forget that the pictures that we bring to this communal canvas may be torn or battered, or burnt and incomplete, but are all equally valid in their honest form. Where there are no honest stories told…there is little hope to be had.

I am not alone in the knowledge that for as long as there is oppression and violence anywhere in this world, our communal future is compromised.

To paint the future we seek, together, we must relent and become abstract painters.

Letting go of our realist tendencies and conformist ways.

Our world systems have been established by people of a certain mind and will, through this very birthright, reward that same mind into the future of their existence.

When ideas different to that original mind enter the structure, seeking change, it is termedrevolution or anarchy.

It is called a revolution because these institutions rely on history to derive function and form rather than true and comprehensive necessity for the future.

The world needs us to be that original mind, to be unreasonable and disrupt the accepted norm. It is not enough to simply enter these structures and conform to be rewarded.

It needs us to be abstract revolutionaries and exert an unimaginable force on these systems, for the greater good of humanity.

It needs us to fight and ensure that the future is not an extension of the present…because you and I know the future – our canvas – can be so much more than this.

Realists would profess in analysis that it is not possible to build new futures from scratch.

They would have us believe that if tomorrow the world will go to pieces, we should not plant our apple trees today…but we have learnt to be better.

The leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States were abstract painters and revolutionaries. They drew the future as they believed it to be and not as they saw it.

Painting the future…

Each of us, as free agents of this world, is each faced with this spectacular opportunity and it is up to us to work to ensure that our fellow human beings can join the ranks of the truly free.

Creation and innovation is an ultimate freedom and dignity, respect and truth are sub-sets of that self-determination.

These are not self-standing concepts; they are all bound to each other. There can be no truth, where there is no freedom.  No dignity where there is no respect.

That we will live to see our creative visions become self-actualizing prophecies and establishment, realities no longer distinct from our own, but real; so real that we can feel it in our daily lives and in the palms of our hands.

That we search and search and find that non-racialism, the end of discrimination and peace, do not merely represent the end…they represent a beginning.

That the prosperity following the attainment of these goals is what we truly seek.

Albert Camus once said that, ‘Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.’

The divine aspiration to reach for that, which is greater than himself.

It is the appetite that moves a white farmer to embrace a land-claim from a community, forcefully displaced decades before, to establish a mutually agreed partnership, producing the fruits of tomorrow, together.

It is what moves a young Palestinian National to come here to the United States and learn from an Israeli sister and vice-versa, and find the human being behind the ‘enemy’.

It is what leads a young Catholic embrace a Protestant brother and vice-versa, envisioning a new future, for a country in many ways still torn.

It is that very appetite that moves an entire people to choose reconciliation and peace over violence and retribution and establishes a world precedent for contemporary political, social and democratic ideology at the Southern tip of Africa.

Even the face of the greatest adversity, “nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man”.

It is an appetite that leads humankind to enterprise into the unknown and reach just beyond what it believes attainable, only to find it possible to go even further.

It is this pursuit of divinity, captured in the hearts of each and every man, woman and child that come together to form the soul and spirit of a nation.

In this pursuit, no case can be made for failure; victory is our only option.

Victory in the evolution of our thinking and in the ultimate expulsion of the colonial consciousness from our collective spirit.

For this we should be progressively attacking each day…knowing that it builds to the next and that it is dreams that bridge our current reality with the one of tomorrow.

Acknowledge that the space to dream is an absolute necessity.

No system lends more space for mankind to dream and pursue its freedom, interests, religions, and happiness and divinity…than that of progressive democracy.

The democratic state is best described through the lens of holism: a system, which cannot be truthfully analysed by considering its parts on an individual basis, but one that can only be judged by considering that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Albert Einstein, Jan Smuts and Nelson Mandela understood this principle to be true.

The democratic silhouette is one that continues to be painted and history is waiting on us to fill in the blanks.

As is the case with nations: they will rise and they will fall, but the most significant values they espouse…will live forever.

In the earliest days of the very first millennium BC, Tunisians established one of the longest-lived and largest states at the top most tip of Africa…Carthage.

In the 1800’s human ingenuity established a modern economic and industrial complex, we know its consequence today as the world we occupy…the Industrial Revolution.

In the middle of the 20^th century…human beings stepped onto the Moon.

In the aftermath of their struggles for peace, justice and democracy, against unimaginable forces of evil and oppression, let it be said that South Africa, Ireland, and Palestine and Israel rose to the challenge.

There are no hidden painters waiting for a cue to spring to life. Our generation of painters is in this room tonight and, through inspiration, in shacks, apartments and settlements around the world…the time is now.

Mankind is in need of moral leaders and painters, not by way of force, but by way of example. It needs us to be that example.

It needs us to understand that our universal democratic canvas is under-pinned by a simple idea: Ubuntu.

An insight by Baron d'Holbach from the year 1770, sheds light on Ubuntu:

[A person] perceives that it is other people who are most necessary to the welfare of man…to procure real advantages to the beings of the human species, is to have virtue; the reasonable man, therefore, is obliged to feel that it is his interest to be virtuous. Virtue is only the art of rendering himself happy, by the happiness of others.”

Baron d'Holbach was French. Ubuntu is a product of African minds. We are living in a global village.

The pursuit of happiness, bound to the deepening of democracy, proliferation of broader and substantive social justice, equality, and peace and the rule of law, rooted in the principles of Ubuntu, is our pursuit.

This is our Moon…our Carthage…and our Revolution.

When we reach these goals, we cannot stop.

We can stand back all but a second and reflect, knowing that in the aftermath of our success, we will once again need to pick ourselves up and seek out our next greatest challenge.

For such, is the plight of man:

He is destined to conquer the insurmountable, knowing that beyond each great victory …an infinite array of challenge awaits, keeping the faith...nonetheless.

Inkululeko…Vryheid…Freedom.

I thank you.