Promoting Understanding and Peace
BULAWAYO SOUTH ROTARY CLUB
Ladies and Gentlemen
Rotary has a proud history of promoting understanding and peace in the world and as I understand the position it is one of your prime objectives. I first had a taste of Rotary’s role of promoting understanding and peace in 1985 when I was fortunate enough to be a member of a group study exchange team to the United States. Two South Africans, two Zimbabweans and one Malawian made for an interesting combination.
One of the South African team members was extremely conservative, just right of Attila the Hun. Our team leader as well was not particularly impressed by any notions that there was life after apartheid. There was one black Zimbabwean and one black Malawian and I was very much wet behind the ears having recently graduated from the University of Cape Town, or little Moscow on the hill as it was quaintly described by the Bureau of State Security in South Africa, and thus was a lily livered liberal.
At the time South Africa was in great trauma. Whilst we were in the United States there were daily reports of violence and increasing unrest. Because of this the Americans wanted to know what was going on and we very soon had to agree on the tour that we would not comment on each other’s internal affairs. Accordingly the analysis of what was going on in South Africa was left to our South African team members who insisted that 99% of the people were happy and that the unrest was caused by a small clique of agitators. Of course it was untrue and history has borne that out. Truth is stubborn and will come out. It cannot be silenced permanently like a person. However at the time it required immense restraint on behalf of the non-South African members of the team to keep quite.