Time has the uncanny knack of making cynics of us. What was once revered so easily degenerates into worthlessness amid the grind of time and bitter circumstance. It is imperative therefore that we cast our weary memories back to that noble promise that gave birth to our nation. It is a promise that won our allegiance against the impassioned threats of our fears and anger.
We have much to contribute to the community of nations, none of which compares to the promise that lit our hearts once upon a time. This is the audacious promise that a diverse people can overcome their differences and build a thriving multicultural society.
Though the promise was simple, intervening years have taught us that it is far from easy. It was for this reason that the world applauded, as it did, at the improbable genesis of our democratic order. It marvelled that we even dared to envision a path that had eluded and continues to elude so many, in light of what seems an inherent human proclivity towards exclusion and sectarianism.
A combination of necessity and idealism had impelled us to chart a different path from the familiar human story of ethnic division and strife. Faced with centuries of bitter animosity, we chose to scorn our inherited frame of references and to yield instead to the hope that we, a people of diverse cultures, can learn to forge a shared sense of nationhood.
Time has made us wise to the reality that the Rainbow Nation was a promise rather than a reality. Amid the exhilaration of civil war averted and the elation of a nation reborn, we had succumbed to the spurious hope that the journey would be easier than what reality demanded it should be. We would yet be painfully denuded of our naivety.
The march of time has shown us that our chosen path was one that demanded of us to reach for virtues uncommon among men. We had not been afforded the luxury of a middle ground. We were either destined for summits of greatness or the abyss of oblivion. United we would stand but divided, our ruin would be certain.
This solemn choice still confronts us today, precisely because a nation divided cannot but collapse under its own weight. The combination of inequality and bitterness in a country with a history drenched in violence from its inception, as we have come to experience, does not make for the kind of harmonious society any of us wish for our sons and daughters to inherit.
The intervening years since our improbable beginning would introduce further complications that would feed our loss of innocence and growth of cynicism, not least a political establishment of endemic corruption and incompetence. Increasingly, we came to see flagrant displays of conflicting interests of those in power to those of broader society. In some senses they have fed some of our deep-seated fears about each other, which have cajoled us at times to seek refuge in our cultural laagers where beliefs that militate against our better judgement continue to thrive.
This crisis of leadership presents us with the task of reclaiming our power as South Africans from elements bent on furthering their own interests at enormous cost to ours. This crisis poses perhaps the greatest threat to the long-term survival of our nation and thus demands our most pressing attention. Nevertheless accomplishing that goal does not take away our arduous historic task of forging a united and cohesive society founded on tangible justice for all.
We must contend with the spectre of cynicism that confronts us and reclaim our deflated idealism, lest our unfulfilled longings congeal into a deathly despair that incarnates its fears. Perhaps we underestimated the extent of our woundedness and the complexity of the task before us. We miscalculated the extent that spatial, social, developmental and economic imprints of our inherited historical injustice, along with deeply entrenched mind-sets that afflict us all, would be perennial competitors with our idealism.
Despite our many stumbles and the multiplicity of difficulties that continue to confront us, our collective self-interest and the enduring debt to future South Africans compel us to choose principle over expediency, hope over despair and idealism over cynicism. Though the full manifestation of the Rainbow Nation remains yet a promise unfulfilled, let us reclaim our idealism, taking heed the counsel of history that instructs that great nations are not made in a day. Not a few, like us, were forged in the fiery furnace of bitter adversity.
Let us remember once more the grandeur of our destiny in the grand drama of history. That of demonstrating a venerable ideal, for the witness of all posterity. The sacred promise that a diverse people can indeed unite!
