Greatest Anti-Colonial Speeches of the Independence Era

Nelson Mandela’s speech at a special meeting of the UN Special Committee against Apartheid in 1990 

It was an expected speech considering the fact that South Africa’s apartheid had finally begun to collapse after decades detaining, torturing and incarcerating Mandela and countless other liberation fighters from the African National Congress (ANC). Here is an excerpt of that memorable speech by the man who would become South Africa’s first indigenous and first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, upon his release:

“It will forever remain an indelible blight on human history that the apartheid crime ever occurred. Future generations will surely ask – what error was made that this system established itself in the wake of the adoption of a Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

“It will forever remain an accusation and a challenge to all men and women of conscience that it took as long as it has, before all of us stood up to say enough is enough. Future generations will surely enquire – what error was made that this system established itself in the aftermath of the trials at Nuremburg?

“These questions will arise because when this august body, the United Nations, first discussed the South African question in l946, it was discussing the issue of racism. They will be posed because the spur to the establishment of this Organisation was the determination of all humanity never again to permit racist theory and practice to dragoon the world into the deathly clutches of war and genocide.

“And yet, for all that, a racist tyranny established itself in our country. As they knew would happen, who refused to treat this matter as a quaint historical aberration, this tyranny has claimed its own conclave of victims. It has established its own brutal worth by the number of children it has killed and the orphans, the widows and widowers it can claim as its unique creation.

“And still it lives on, provoking strange and monstrous debates about the means that its victims are obliged to use to rid themselves of this intolerable scourge, eliciting arguments from those who choose not to act, that to do nothing must be accepted as the very essence of civilised opposition to tyranny.”