Rivonia Speech

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Except of Mandela speech known as the Rivonia speech.
If you read Singaporeans for the African people and Lee Kuan Yew and PAP for the whites, Mandela could have been speaking for Singaporeans.

Google and read rest of that speech.

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One of Nelson Mandela's most famous speeches was made at the start of the 1964 trial at which he was found guilty of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment. It is known as the Rivonia trial, after the Johannesburg suburb where some of the defendants were arrested. Here are selected excerpts from his three-hour defence - his last public words before he was released from prison in 1990.
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“Start Quote
Nelson Mandela in 1962

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities... If needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die”

Nelson Mandela

I do not... deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the whites.

I admit immediately that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto we Sizwe [armed wing of the African National Congress], and that I played a prominent role in its affairs until I was arrested in August 1962.

I, and the others who started the organisation, did so for two reasons.

Firstly, we believed that as a result of government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war.

Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government.


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