availablein 10years time."Ah,"said the Sovietpurchaser, "but you see I have the plumber coming in the morning." It is necessary to state that the commitment to equality which we will need as a passport to the new South Africa, should never imply or mean a levelling down.It must be an upward impulse.We must preserve the centres ofedu cationalexcellence,and we mustimbuethem,whetherthey are private schools or universities, with a need for a genu ine reaching outto other communities and to people whose circumstances have not made it possible to be among the normal intake. In the new South Africa, as in other places in the world, there will be an inevitable tendency towards political cor rectness.Butit is worth noting the words ofBlack Ameri can academic, Shelby Steele. He wrote of the American experience. "Blacks did endure victimization for centuries at the handsof a race that insisted on black inferiority as a means ofits own power.There is a negative aspect of this innocence and victimization. It is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to a status as victim. And this,I am convinced, is the tragedy of black power in America today. It is primarily a victim's power,grounded too deeply in the entitlement derived from past injustices and in the in nocence ofthe Western Christian tradition has always associated with poverty. We,blacks,have a hidden in vestment in victimization and poverty." This observation needs application here and now if we are to avoid the pitfalls and the perils ofsimply replicating the racism of the old South Africa in the guise of a levelled down equality in the new South Africa.We musttherefore build on sure foundations.And the surestfoundation ofall is to preserve and extend the centres ofexcellence in our society, especially civil society. None is more important than education. That is why in the months and years to come, schools like Kearsney College have an enormous role to fulfill. Institutions like this one are the cornerstone ofcivil society.Although enormous effort and expectation hinges around the next election,we must neverforget that democracy is not an end in itself. Neither is it simply a promise. It is also a challenge. It is a promise that free human beings, working together, can govern themselves in a manner that will serve their aspirations for personal freedom,economic opportunity and social justice. It is a challenge because the success of the democratic experi ment rests upon the shoulders of its citizens and no one else. Government ofand by the people means not simply that in a democratic society we share the benefits, but we also share the burdens.By accepting the task of self govemment,ourgeneration will haveto preserve the hard won legacy ofindividualfreedom,human rights and the rule of law in South Africa for the next generation. JosefBrodsky,Russian bom poetand Nobel prize winner, once wrote: "Afree man,when he fails, blames nobody." Thatis achallenge to every boy at Kearsney.To help build the new South African democracy and to preserve and ex tend our place in it. This is not easy. Some of you will simply despair-and say, given the outlines ofthe future, "I want no part ofit." You might wish to contemplate life in Perth,Toronto or Auckland.And that is one option.But your choice to leave South Africa,will mean the choice of living a small life. Not a large life. The Gonzojoumalist. Hunter S.Thompson,asked an existential question which only each ofyou can answer:It applies with interestto our time in ourown peculiar,devastated but beautiful country: "Who is the happier man,he who braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed on the shore and merely existed." Retuming to the theme ofeducation in the new South Af rica we must realize that it is going to be subjected to the mightiest forces of opposition. The recent demonstration bySASCO atthe Wits University campus wasreally about power,not aboutsubstance.It loudly demanded the disso lution ofthe University Council and called for a quota of at least60% ofthe students admitted to the University of the Witwatersrand next year to be African. Wits, and no doubt Kearsney,can take a limited number ofeducation ally under-prepared students in any year. But this requires a massive diversion ofresources into support programmes -ranging from special tuition to residential accommoda tion and counselling. It can and must offer such students the chance to realize their academic potential that segre gated schooling has denied them.Indeed places like Wits University have been doing that right back to 1984.Butif Wits and any other institution were to take more underprepared students than it could cope with,and certainly,if the bulk or somewhere near the bulk of the student body were unprepared for teaching at the particular level which the institution provides, that kind ofteaching would sim ply cease to be possible.Andin the rush ofdemands which are attendant upon the new South Africa, we should re member that we must nottrash the educational capacity of our institutions even more effectively than SASCO's ef forts to bury the Wits campus in refuse. And the costofthatlevelling down ofour institutions will be borne by all South Africans,from all communities.All of us depend on the centres of educational excellence to supply a major part ofthe immense educational contribu tion necessary to flatten the mountain ofdisadvantage left by apartheid. In a word,then, we must not destroy better than we know. And there will fortunately always be people in South Af rica who will stand up for excellence, not as a disguised form of racism or perpetuation of a false privilege, but because they have a vision ofthe glorious country which our South Africa can become. Very recently the press has had a lot to say aboutthe ques tion of leadership and my own particular role in it in my political party. One of the joys and burdens of politics is living with endless speculation, sometimes misinformed, occasionally maliciousand often wrong.However,for what itis worth,let meconclude by sharing with you a vision of thatleadership whichIthinkis applicabletoevery Kearsney boy in this hall especially the school leavers who have to confront a hostile world in the most uncertain times we have known in this country.This advice has an ancient but impressive pedigree. It is the words from President Theodore Roosevelt's speech to the Sorbonne in 1910: "It is notthe critic who counts;notthe man who points out how the strong man stumbles,or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is 19
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