I remember being present at the time of the announcement of the results of the first democratic election when President Thabo Mbeki — then not yet president nor even deputy president — spoke, seeking analogy from a line from Wordsworth’s poem on the French Revolution: ”Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. And indeed it was, and for many of us it has been since then. But not for us all. And as we rightly and joyously celebrate 10 years of democracy, we need to acknowledge that despite all the progress that has been made over the decade, the struggle for freedom and dignity is not yet over.
Our Constitution provides the framework for the democratic revolution that has taken place in our country. Its preamble identifies four primary goals that we set for ourselves when we adopted the Constitution. They are, though not in the order in which they appear in the Constitution, to ”lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by the law”.
That has been done and done well. Another is to ”build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations”. That, too, has been done — and done well. The status this country now enjoys in the international community is ample testimony to this. And the third is to ”heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights”.
We have laid the foundations for such a society, but we still have much to do to entrench those values as part of the culture of our country, and to heal the divisions of the past. Related to this is the last of the four goals, to ”improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person”. Although the process has begun, there is still a great deal that remains to be done before we can say that this has been achieved. The enormity of this task and the difficulties that had (and still have) to be overcome in pursuit of this goal should not be underestimated.
It is only by acknowledging and confronting this, and committing ourselves to the hard and difficult tasks that lie ahead, that we will be able to achieve the vision of our Constitution and build a just society. What is needed for that purpose is for the energy, the commitment, the willingness to make sacrifices and the sense of community that drove the struggle for freedom to come alive again to infuse our attitudes and actions as we move forward to complete the revolution.
Arthur Chaskalson is president of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and Chief Justice of South Africa. This is an edited version of his speech at Unisa last Saturday at the award of an honorary doctorate