On Sunday, June 30, President Obama will speak at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, 47 years after Senator Robert Kennedy helped crack open the door of apartheid at the same university with his “Ripple of Hope” speech. The president’s trip comes as Nelson Mandela is nearing the end of his long life of struggle and achievement. Kennedy’s trip in June, 1966 was undertaken while Mandela was only two years into his 27-year imprisonment, most of it at the notorious Robben Island.
Kennedy was invited by the National Union of South African Students (NAUSAS) to give the annual Day of Affirmation address at the university. He accepted the invitation and embarked on a five-day trip that would include speeches at Cape Town and three other universities, as well as a speech to the Johannesburg Bar Council.
The brutal apartheid regime was not happy about Kennedy’s visit, and responded by canceling the visas of 40 journalists who planned to cover the trip. Five days before Kennedy's arrival the president of the student union, Ian Roberston, was “banned” ---barred from meeting with more than one person---for the next five years.
Banning was a tactic that the government used to intimidate and silence opposition, done under the pretext of ‘suppression of communism’. Robertson’s banning order can be read here: Robertson banning order
A young white student, Margaret Marshall, became Kennedy’s guide since, as she later said “I was the vice president of NUSAS because all the men had been sent to prison."
Marshall later told Kennedy's biographer Evan Thomas, “Robertson’s banning terrified me. I was twenty years old, thinking about the threat of no work, no passport, and no university.”
Of course, it wasn’t just white university students who were banned. So were leaders and followers of the African National Congress---making that organization itself effectively banned. Leaders like Nelson Mandela who avoided being hanged for organizing against repression were either jailed as he was, or at the very least banned themselves. ANC founder and Nobel Prize winner Chief Albert Luthuli was also banned and living in internal exile near Durban.
During Kennedy’s trip he visited Luthuli in his home, and walked with him outdoors to talk more freely despite the presence of South African security officials. In an article he wrote later for LOOK magazine, Suppose God is Black, he said Luthuli was a “very impressive man” who asked Kennedy “What are they doing to my country, to my countrymen[?] Can’t they see that all men can work together---and that the alternative is a terrible disaster for us all?”
Kennedy’s LOOK article may have been one of the first times many Americans saw what it was like to live in the land of the banned. He described flying over Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela---unknown to most people outside (as well as inside) of South Africa---was imprisoned:
“…Robben Island is home for more than 2,000 political prisoners in South Africa---black and white, college professors and simple farmers, advocates of non-violence and organizers of revolution, all now bound in the same bleak brotherhood because of one thing: Because they believe in freedom, they dared to lead the struggle against the government’s official policy of apartheid…If your skin is black in South Africa:
You cannot participate in the political process and you cannot vote.
You are restricted to jobs for which no whites are available
Your wages are from 10 to 40 percent of those paid a white man for equivalent work.
You are forbidden to own land except in one small area.
You live with your family only if the government approves.
The government will spend one-tenth as much to educate your child as it spends to educate a white child.
You are, by law, inferior from birth to death.
You are totally segregated, even at most church services.
[He went on]….
The minister of justice can deprive a person of his job, his income, his freedom, and---if he is black---his family…
The capstone of this structure of repressive power is the “ban.” On his own authority, the minister of justice can ban people from public life, from leaving their villages or even their homes. His victims are prohibited from protesting the order in court. Once a person is banned, it is illegal to publish anything he says. A factory worker may be prohibited from entering any factory, or a union official from entering any building where there is a union office. A political party can be destroyed by banning its leaders----which is exactly what happened to Alan Paton’s Liberal party. They cannot legally communicate with each other, and the police watch them constantly.
…These things were on my mind as I walked through 18,000 students at the University of Capetown that evening. In the speech, I acknowledged that the United States, like other countries, still had far to go to keep the promises of our Constitution. What was important, I said, was that we were trying. And I asked if South Africa, especially its young people, would join the struggle:
‘There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets of India, a former prime minister is summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia, wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. These are differing evils—but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of the sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows…And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and of indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings…’”
Ironically, Kennedy did not quote the passage from his speech a few paragraphs later that perhaps is best remembered:
“Few of us will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
For more links to historical documents and media, as well as a film about Kennedy's South Africa trip, go to this page:
Robert Kennedy's Day of Affirmation speech---"A Tiny Ripple of Hope"