24 September 2004

The Honourable Mr Buddy Wentworth, Deputy Minister of Basic Education, Arts and Culture, of the Republic of Namibia and Mrs Wentworth,

Your Excellency, Mr Frans Engering, Ambassador of the Netherlands to South Africa,
distinguished guests,
ladies and gentlemen.

The event this evening is a most significant one as we are celebrating South Africa’s Heritage Day during the 10th anniversary of the birth of our democracy. We are also joined as partners in this celebration by representatives of our longstanding friends and sister nations – Namibia and the Netherlands.

Namibia is our neighbour and we are linked by a common history of struggle and oppression and common ties of blood and culture. We are celebrating these links tonight.

The Netherlands is a former colonial power in our country, but the people of the Netherlands also played a most supportive role in the struggle to liberate our country. We are also celebrating that aspect of our common past.

The reason for this evening’s partnership is the theme for the event – namely, the Restitution of Cultural Property. This sounds a mouthful of bureaucratic gobbledygook - but it is actually a concept with great significance not only to us in South Africa but to the cultural life of humanity in general.

Tonight cultural property from the Netherlands is being returned to South Africa and we South Africans are restituting cultural property to Namibia. The distinction is that the Dutch material relates to South Africa, but was not forcibly or illegitimately obtained from South Africa. We are returning to the Namibians, library and archival material which came to South Africa through force or the bureaucratic actions of an illegal South African occupation regime in Namibia. This is an act of restitution.

Human beings, and particularly, men, have given vent to their warlike passions since the dawn of history. Ancient Rome was a great imperial power in its time. The very word, imperialism, is derived from the Ancient Romans’ language, Latin. One of the great spectacles of the times was the triumph celebrated through the streets of Rome by victorious generals and later emperors. They paraded through the streets to the cheers of the Rome’s citizens, past the Capitol, dragging their defeated enemies in chains behind their chariots accompanied by creaking wagons laden with plunder.

The Venetians stole the golden lions now adorning St Mark’s Square in Venice from the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. These lions were in turn stolen by Napoleon and taken to Paris. As the 19th American President Andrew Jackson said: `To the victors belong the spoils’.

The golden lions were returned to Venice after Napoleon’s defeat (as were various archives looted during his campaigns of conquest). So the theft of other people’s property during times of war has an ancient, though dishonourable history.

In these hopefully more enlightened days, such plundering has been made illegal and the current the debate focuses more on the return of cultural property plundered in the past by colonial powers and others.

Perhaps the best known and most heated debates centres around the return of the Parthenon Marbles of Athens now in the British Museum in London, to Greece. These exquisite and famous sculptures were `bought’ during the 19th century from the Turkish colonial rulers of Greece by the British Ambassador to Istanbul, Lord Elgin. They were not even taken as conqueror’s plunder. Greece has been trying to have them returned for decades and Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek Minister of Culture characterized the debate in these terms:

`The request for the restitution of the Parthenon marbles is not made by the Greek Government in the name of the Greek nation or of Greek history. It is made in the name of the cultural heritage of the world and with the voice of the mutilated monument itself, that cries out for its marbles to be returned.’

Some weeks ago I had a conversation with the minister of a government of a former powerful ex-colonial power who told me that Third World countries should get over their `hang-ups’ over the return of cultural property. I retorted that we would do so as soon as they stopped “hanging on” to our property.

Unfortunately the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property does not have real teeth and relies heavily on negotiations between parties and on the power of moral suasion.

Less than two years ago the French Government returned the remains of Sarah Baartman, whom the Europeans called the `Hottentot Venus’, and we have now reburied her remains with honour and the dignity, denied to her in life and for more than a century after her death, near the Gamtoos river in the Eastern Cape. The French President, Jacques Chirac, also returned the royal seal of the Bey of Algiers to the Algerian President when he visited Algeria in early 2003. So things are now moving.

I have sketched this background so that we can better appreciate the international significance of what is happening this evening. Let me move on to the more specific issues we are going to address now.

The struggle against apartheid was an international struggle and the Anti-Apartheid Movement of the Netherlands (AABN) was one of the south, and southern, African liberation movements’ strongest allies. The gesture being made by the Dutch tonight in sending the video material of the former Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement is deeply appreciated and a fine example of the type of moral pressure that needs to be brought to bear within the international community. The fact that Dutch people have remained committed to southern Africa even after our liberation speaks volumes about their principles and their integrity. When the Anti-Apartheid Movement closed down it established the African Skies Project to look after its archival material and to negotiate the finding of a suitable home for this material in South Africa. This has now taken place.

The significance of the work of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid movement in the context of the international struggle against apartheid was profound. As you saw in the video clip, Dutch activists took up cudgels against apartheid in the 1960s and early 1970s, long before it became fashionable elsewhere. Many South African exiles were welcomed in the Netherlands and many Dutch people worked tirelessly to fight against apartheid through boycotts, propaganda activities, mass action and cultural activities. Some became activists of the liberation movement in more practical ways.

In the video we screened, you may have noticed the presence of Thami Mnyele in one scene of a rally in the Netherlands. Comrade Thami was a dedicated cultural activist and freedom fighter who was murdered in Botswana by the forcesof apartheid in 1985. His remains were reburied in Tembisa earlier today.

The liberation movement was able to use Dutch support to mobilise thousands of people through cultural activities – the Conference on Culture in Another South Africa (CASA)that took place in the Netherlands in 1987 was a milestone in the development of a cultural policy that now informs the way in which culture is governed and cultural activities are conducted ten years after our democracy was attained. As a result of the groundwork done by exiles and activists from South Africa in the Netherlands we came to the negotiating table as the only movement with a clear cultural policy. All the other parties used culture negatively or reactively.

One of the most important weapons we fashioned against apartheid was the cultural boycott and the principles of the boycott were thrashed out in debates that again took place in the Netherlands.

Omroep Voor Radio Freedom was another Dutch initiative I was personally involved with. It entailed Dutch radio and television workers raising material aid and providing training for the broadcasters of Radio Freedom. By 1988 they had built and equipped some eight studios, scattered across Africa, from which we beamed the movement’s message to our people everyday.

I am very happy tonight to be able to accept from His Excellency the Ambassador of the Netherlands, the donation of the video material of the African Skies Project and I thank the people and the Government of the Netherlands, and particularly all our comrades from the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement for their solidarity, their generosity and their humanity.

Let me now turn to our relations with our neighbours. I have mentioned the attacks on Botswana in 1985 and the death of Thami Mnyele. The former apartheid regime of South Africa had a well deserved notoriety in our region. The longstanding, but illegal, occupation of Namibia is one of the worst examples of its criminality. In the camps South African and Namibian militants lived, worked and struggled together. In the prisons of apartheid they suffered together. The shared imprisonment on Robben Island of Andimba Toivo ya Toivo and Nelson Mandela is just one of the best known examples of our shared struggle history.

At a bureaucratic level, Namibians were forced to comply with local South African laws. In the cultural field these included legal deposit and copyright legislation which meant that our libraries were enriched by material that should have remained in Namibia. This did not happen because there was no suitable institution before independence in 1990 when the National Library of Namibia was established. So the distorted legacy of apartheid is such that some libraries in South Africa have Namibian material not available in Namibia itself. Tonight we are rectifying this injustice.

Many archival records, important for the history of Namibia, ended up in South Africa. These included records of the occupation regime – such as the office of the Administrator General, of regional commissioners and of birth or human status records. These are not the records of the liberation movements (such as you have seen in the short video extracts we have shown you earlier), but they are still vital historical records from the Namibian perspective and essential records of governance and for the assertion of Namibia’s national interests.

The Government of President Mandela responded to a request from Namibia and authorised the return of archival records in 1997. Many of these were returned by 1999 and the remainder is being returned now. I hope that this evening’s ceremony will bring this matter closer to conclusion as we uncover and restore to the Namibian people what is rightfully theirs.

In addition to the material not returned in terms of the decision of President Mandela’s Cabinet, we are also including in the current transfer, the archives of the court and the local authority in Walvis Bay. As you will be aware, Walvis Bay was annexed by the British, not the Germans, during the 19th Century and it was administered by the Cape Province after the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. The records that are being copied now for return are from the Cape Town Archives Repository and were omitted from the previous transfer.

We know there is more material that relates to Namibian history in our libraries and archives and I pledge that we will continue to work with the Namibians to locate and copy what is relevant for you.

Let me give you one example:

Because of the brutal absurdities of apartheid some of the minority groups in Namibia were classified as “other coloured”. Consequently for a period were administered by the House of Representatives of the sham South African Tri-Cameral Parliament. This means that Namibian records are buried within what are essentially South African administrative records and, while they cannot be excised from these records, we would be happy to enter into a copying project so that Namibians can access some of their archival heritage presently not readily accessible for them.

Honourable Deputy Minister Wentworth, we hope that this return of material to Namibia will be seen as some restitution to your people and their government for the injustices of the past and that these materials will be useful in the intellectual and cultural development of your nation. I understand too that there are new developments planned in the Walvis Bay region. I am sure that having the local authority records available in Namibia will assist with the planning of these developments.

In conclusion, let me say that I hope that news of this evening’s event will circulate widely in the international media and that the moral example we are setting tonight will influence other countries to return cultural property in their possession to its rightful homes and owners.

I note that you travelled here by car, Mr Wentworth. I don’t want you to think that we expected you to put all the books and documents in the boot and drive back to Windhoek with them – there would not enough room. However, it is now my honour and pleasure to present you with specially bound catalogues of the library and archival material that are being sent by container to Windhoek. I hope these will fit comfortably on your back seat.

Thank you.

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