Njabulo S. Ndebele

The address joins Wesleyan’s ceremony to the University of Cape Town’s long history and South Africa’s ten years of democracy.

The invitation itself affirms relationships that cut across national, racial, academic, and personal boundaries.

He asks what a ten-year democracy and a two-hundred-year democracy might still have to teach each other.

The contending sides negotiated a future with two victors and no losers.

Both sides recognized, at the last moment, how much they needed one another.

Parliament, courts, schooling, housing, water, and electricity become visible signs of democratic change.

Both white and black leaders had to tell followers that old certainties about power and violence could no longer hold.

Each camp risked betrayal, weakness, and loss of identity in order to negotiate.

The deeper revolution was a transformation of attitudes, beliefs, bias, stereotype, and preconception.