 Good afternoon, everybody. This is really a great pleasure to welcome everybody here to US Institute of Peace for the inaugural Nelson Mandela lecture. It's a very special event for us, and I'm delighted to see so many people, friends, friends of the Institute, people who have worked on these issues for so many years. I want to give a special warm welcome to Ambassador Malungu, the ambassador of the Republic of South Africa to the United States. Welcome. Welcome, Ambassador Malungu. Also, Ambassador Donald Yamamoto, who is the acting assistant secretary for Africa at State Department, holding down that portfolio. Thank you. And I want to also upfront acknowledge four really extraordinary people who have spent their careers building peace and are very special to us here at US Institute of Peace. One is Ambassador Checkcrocker, who for many, many years was our board chair, a member of our board, and on our international advisory council. He was here earlier today. Secondly is Ambassador George Moose, who is our current board vice chair and an ongoing wise council, former ambassador with the State Department and served in Africa. And our two wonderful wise senior advisors, Ambassador Princeton Lyman, our senior ambassador who served in both Nigeria and in South Africa and is a source of wise counsel for us, Princeton. And of course, Ambassador Johnny Carson, many of you know, who's been a stalwart on these issues and we'll hear a bit more about him in a moment. But the four of them bring constant inspiration to us as we continue our work in and around Africa. And finally, a quick note of gratitude to Andre Pinar, who is a dear friend of ours. He's a member also of USIP's International Advisory Council, who's really one of the driving forces and sources of inspiration for this lecture. And thank you to Andre and to all the members of the Mandela Lecture Advisory Council. Sir Mick Davis, Tom Boardman, Vincent Mai, Yanda Plessis, and also Chet. It's through their support and their efforts that we're able to inaugurate this lecture today. So thank you. So today is the culmination of more than a year of dreaming and planning as we sought to elevate the vision and the values of Nelson Mandela. And it's important to us because his life work really embodies the core mission of USIP, of preventing and resolving violent conflict. And he put into practice and demonstrated the power of those core skills of peace building, negotiation, bridge building, trust building, reconciliation. And most of all, President Mandela was the ultimate voice of unity. He understood the importance of inclusion to ensure an enduring peace. He understood the importance of inclusion. And honoring his legacy could not come at a more important time. Unfortunately, there are too few global icons today who inspire us with the same courage, the same generosity, the same great spirit that President Mandela represents, the push that he made for all of us to be our better selves. So USIP has a long history with South Africa. And I'm really honored to be here today, representing the many USIP colleagues who came before me, who were engaged with South Africa through the difficult decades of transition from apartheid rule. And over the years, USIP has supported South Africa through grants. We've awarded almost $3 million for education, training, research to assist South Africa with transitional justice, with truth commissions, with accountability. Through the 90s, we had half a dozen fellows and published three books, including one by Ambassador Princeton Lyman on South Africa. And in the mid-90s, as President Mandela really grappled with how to balance accountability with reconciliation, truth, and justice, a number of USIP colleagues were called to help consult, to help design what became the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And in fact, USIP's Neil Critts, who is here somewhere, there he is, sent to President Mandela a draft of the three-volume work that he edited on transitional justice, how emergency democracies reckon with former regimes. And when USIP published the book, President Mandela himself wrote the foreword. And in it, in those hopeful times, he described the immediate post-Soviet era as an astonishing time when various regions of the world were moving away from undemocratic and repressive rule toward the establishment of constitutional democracies. And he wrote that many countries, and especially South Africa, had to work to recover from the trauma and from the wounds of the past. That they needed to come up with mechanisms, not only for handling the past human rights violations, but also to ensure that the dignity of victims, of survivors, and of relatives was restored. I think we're all very clear that those sentiments remain very solid, very true. They ring very loud today. And even as we're seeing the persistence of repressive and authoritarian regimes and the continued existence of too many civil wars, we're also seeing where there's heartening progress. There's movement towards peace in places like Colombia, Iraq, where I just came back from, Liberia. And we're seeing that this progress is often happening at the local level, sometimes even when there isn't national level progress. And we see over and over again how ordinary people can do extraordinary things, which is very much in the spirit of President Mandela. And we're seeing that unplanned. But just two weeks ago, we saw the remarkable transformation that happened in South Africa. This lecture has been in the planning for more than a year. And the timing is wonderful. And we're here to doubly celebrate. But Mandela proved that individuals and entire nations are moved by ideas. They're moved by hard work. He was a connector. And he brought people together, black and white, rich and poor, athletes and artists. He really moved the nation through the power of the ideas that he put forward. And at a time when the whole country could have gone into greater violence, he steered the nation into greater unity and ultimately peace. He continues to inspire people from around the world to seek peaceful and just resolutions to conflict. He taught us that a nation can only heal when its people reckons with the past and with each other. This is a core belief that animates the work of the US Institute of Peace. So it's a very important day today to inaugurate the lecture series. We thank all of you for joining us today to honor and to remember President Mandela's legacy in this appropriate House of Peace. We're delighted to have everyone here. And we have a wonderful, very energetic keynote speaker with us today who has herself been a critical player through South African history. But first, we're honored to be joined today by a woman who has been a leader on the Hill. She has used her voice to keep many of these African issues at the forefront and brought her passion and compassion to this important work. So we're honored to be joined here today by Congresswoman Karen Bass. She serves as the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa Global Health, Human Rights, and International Organizations. And she has been a real leader in strengthening the relationship between the United States and Africa and throughout her career really been a voice for the kind of peaceful resolution of conflict that is core to us here. So I'm gonna prevail upon her and ask if she would come up and say a few words. We're very lucky that her schedule allowed her to join us. So Congresswoman Bass. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you, Nancy, for the invitation to be here at USIP for this occasion. And I really just want to honor and acknowledge and congratulate the work that is done here. I would also like to acknowledge the South African Ambassador and members of the African Diplomatic Corps. I also want to acknowledge Acting Assistant Secretary Don Yamamoto. It is such a pleasure to be here at the inaugural Mandela lecture series. My introduction to working on African issues was via the anti-apartheid movement in Los Angeles. As a young activist in LA, I was very much involved in the anti-apartheid movement. We identified with the struggle in Southern Africa as we fought against racism and to expand opportunities for people of color in the United States. As we fought for Mandela's freedom, we were inspired by his fortitude. When he was freed, we were amazed as we watched him lead with grace and we were humbled and astonished when he led the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a nonviolent process to resolve horrific crimes against humanity. Can you imagine how such a process could be useful today in some countries on the continent of Africa? As a member of Congress in 2013, I authored a bipartisan resolution that unanimously passed the House to honor the life of President Nelson Mandela. The resolution recognized President Mandela's defiance of injustice and commitment to peace and reconciliation, remembered his many years spent in imprisonment and honored his presidency. Mandela was an extraordinary human being. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, he noted, as I walk out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison. His ability to forgive and move past those 27 years allowed him to unite a country that was deeply divided. This remains an important lesson for African heads of state, leaders around the world, and our own country, no leader benefits from dividing its citizens. What we have to remember and other presidents should take note of is that Mandela could have stayed on as president because he was loved by South Africans and the world, but instead he served his country proudly for one term and then stepped aside. Term limits have become such a problem across the continent as leaders attempt to hang on to power, but they need to realize that there is a role for them after their presidency. After the end of his presidency, Mandela became a leader across the continent. Africa today needs such a leader to address the current political crisis and conflicts. For example, the DRC is experiencing humanitarian crisis and increasing insecurity while the Kabila regime is focused on hanging on to power by delaying elections. Protesters are being shot down in the streets and imprisoned. What is required is for one of the African leaders to negotiate a political settlement so that the DRC could return to addressing the challenges and making the lives of its citizens better. What leaders can learn from Mandela is that bringing all sides together to address grievances can in fact lead to progress because people are heard and feel included in decision-making and dispute resolution. Nelson Mandela was also a firm supporter of democracy and human rights and African leaders should return to those principles. Right now there is a combination of progress and backsliding on the Democratic front. President Mandela was so much more than the first fully democratically elected president of South Africa. He was a global leader who taught the world the meaning of social justice and he was a leader who showed the world the power of compassion and reconciliation. Ambassador Sherrow Corollus, thank you for being here to reflect upon the life and work of President Nelson Mandela. And thank you Nancy and the USIP staff for putting together this lecture series and for recognizing that the life and work of Nelson Mandela continues to serve as a model for exemplary leadership across Africa. Thank you very much. And now to introduce our speaker, it's my great pleasure to introduce somebody that I wager most of you know very well, Ambassador Johnny Carson, who had a long and distinguished career in the government including serving as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Uganda and Kenya and is now here with us as a senior advisor at USIP. Through his career and certainly here, he's maintained a relentless tireless focus on preserving democracy, respecting the dignity and the human rights of people around the world and we are so lucky to have him here. He's been wise counsel, a good mentor and instrumental in making this event happen. So please join me in welcoming Ambassador Johnny Carson. Thank you Nancy and thank you Congresswoman Bass and thank you all for being here this afternoon. I am extremely pleased to have this opportunity to introduce our guest speaker today, Ambassador Cheryl Corollis. For 30 years, she walked and worked alongside Nelson Mandela. To be able to hear her today on her history and her journey with Mediba is a great honor for USIP and a very appropriate way to inaugurate the Nelson Mandela lecture series. We are also very pleased to be hosting this event on the centenary of Nelson Mandela's birth. 100 years ago in June of 1918, he was born. As we all know, South Africa is going through a period of transition and as a young nation is facing a number of social, economic and political challenges. With former president Zuma out of power and Cyril Ramaphosa installed as the nation's fifth president, South Africa is moving into a new chapter in its political history. And many of us here today are interested in knowing what is next for South Africa and how will Nelson Mandela's legacy influence the country's new president and the future direction of the country that he leads. Fortunately for all of us, we have someone here today who might have some answers to the questions that are most on our mind. Ambassador Cheryl Corollis began her political activism at age 13 and before she was 21, she had already been detained and tortured by the Bureau of State Security. She was a freedom fighter with Nelson Mandela almost from the beginning. A leader in the women's movement, a co-founder of the United Democratic Front which was in effect representing the ANC which was in exile. She was later a deputy general of the African National Congress and I might add a partner and close collaborator with the current president of the country, Ceo Ramaposa. She is a former South African ambassador to the United Kingdom and today is a very distinguished businesswoman and civil society leader in South Africa and a board member of a number of well-known international organizations both in the United Kingdom, in the United States and across South Africa. It is my great pleasure and honor to ask Ambassador Cheryl Corollis to come to the podium and speak to us this afternoon. Ambassador Corollis. Thank you very much Ambassador Carson. Ladies and gentlemen, I should start off by acknowledging all the honorable guests who are here but it's too long a list to go through. So I'll do what we do in South Africa and we just say your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, under guests all protocols observed. We've learned the art of shorthand in South Africa and I'm sure my ambassador will forgive me for that. But it's wonderful to be back again with friends, many of whom have walked the long walk to freedom with us. As Congresswoman Bass said, many of you, we were all young ones, we are people with the past and many of us have matured in life, walking this long journey. And I think one of the things which has come to mind during this period in South Africa when I'm very proud to say it's an exciting period, it's a period for reflection, but the period perhaps reminding us that building democracy and constitutionalism is not an event and that I'm sure goes for your democracy, your mature democracy as well. One has to just keep on paying attention all the time. And it's wonderful to be walking with trusted friends from individuals like Congresswoman Bass and indeed institutions like USEP and it's just great to be back amongst friends. And so under guests, we come together today to honor one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime. Nelson Holi-Khlatla Mandela. We gather to honor him, not only for his resilience, nor only for his courage. We are not here only because of his wisdom and his principled leadership. We are here especially because of the overwhelming humanity that was the very essence of his being. Nelson Mandela valued his own humanity and throughout his life, he remained resolute that no one would deprive him of his humanity, his sense of self or of his dignity. He was a man who refused to allow his soul to be taken or destroyed. He was a man who acted in response to the hurt that apartheid and colonialism inflicted on him. But he understood that his own humanity and his own dignity existed only in the context of humanity and dignity of all of his people and indeed of humankind. So we stand here today in this Nelson Mandela centenary year to honor and to celebrate, to learn and to teach the values of this mensch that was given to the world 100 years ago. I was blessed with the opportunity to serve with him and to work with him in different ways. I guess from about 1998 directly, when I was one of the leaders of the liberation movement, he asked to consult with him when the apartheid regime started negotiating a possible transition in South Africa with him. By then the national party, ruling party and apartheid had tried over quite a few years in many ways to get him to accept conditional release of himself as a means to ease the rising tide of resistance mounted by the people of South Africa. Our country at that stage was gripped in a civil war. Our defense force, our national army was deployed and present in large numbers in every single township, every single city and in the deep rural areas. Tens of thousands of activists were in detention without trial, thousands were killed, some were brought to trial and some were sentenced to death by hanging for acts of treason, which was largely, which were largely the things that sadly are enshrined in our constitution and which we use today with much pride to guide our everyday life. The price for standing for those in those days was death by hanging and it's almost unreal to imagine how much and how deeply things have changed in a very short space of time. Ours is a young democracy, our freedom came in 1994 and that's something we have to remind ourselves of just how short a time we've had, but also to remember how much we could achieve when we were focused and united, a nation in concert with ourselves and in concert with democratic and freedom loving people throughout the world. It is necessary to remember how much we've gained, not to be boastful, but in fact, because we need to take comfort in that when we look at the long journey ahead and the fact that we know some tougher challenges than what we had. Because in many ways, it is almost easier to destroy things you don't want than it is to figure it out how you build things you do want. And that's why we hold close to our hearts the sense of victory and achievement in a short space of time in order to embolden us and to get us to understand that. It's also important for us to understand where we've come from because we can never go back there. And that's also why it's important that we just note where we've come from and at what cost we got to where we got it. And how did we do this? Hans is quite simple. We did it because we had good leaders. And yes, we did do it because we had this magical weapon called Nelson Mandela. And no, it wasn't only because we had Nelson Mandela. Madiba was in fact the first to always acknowledge that he would never have been freed himself if the resistance movement had not become so strong that the apartheid government knew that they had no choice but to release him and to negotiate a different future. When ordinary men and women, particularly young women, were again prepared to live out those famous words of Nelson Mandela when he stood in the dock for treason, expecting the death penalty. And in the face of that expectation of the death penalty, he said. And I quote, these are the ideals for which I hope to live for. But if needs be, these are the ideals for which I am prepared to die. And it was in the 80s when young people in particular, but South Africans across the board, rose up and said pretty much the same words that the apartheid regime knew. They had lost all power they had and which they had retained through the might of the military, judicial and extrajudicial means. But wars are nasty things. They take lives and they break lives. They create scar tissue. They create psychosis and emotional memories which last for a very long time and are very difficult to break out of when you want to start afresh. And even when you start, the scar tissue is so delicate. It is so easy to pull it off and to pull off a scab of a wound that has not healed fully or properly. And we're beginning to see some of that in South Africa. And we in South Africa and on the African continent are enormously grateful that we had Nelson Mandela and that he found counterparties like F.W. De Clark with whom he could lay the basis for foundations, for peace in South Africa and stop the war that was waged against the entire African continent in pursuit of white supremacy. And my journey with Madiba, during those very fragile times, was a time of huge personal and political growth. Nelson Mandela was a strong leader. He led from the front. And he often got into trouble for it on many occasions. But mostly he won and mostly he was right. It was very difficult for him to accept defeat, but he actually always did. I remember the fight we had about the voting age in South Africa, for example. Madiba had a very strong view that the voting age should be 16. Well, the rest of the ANC disagreed with him. I see many smiles because I think many of you were probably in South Africa at the time and you remember the spat we had. Well, and you will also remember Nelson Mandela is a tough fighter and if he needs to be a street fighter, remember he was a boxer. He takes off the gloves and he goes, he has a good go for it. And he used fair means and foul to convince us. Well, in the end, he lost the argument. And there are many lessons in that. It demonstrated to us, particularly us, because I think he knew this, but we didn't quite, but it demonstrated to us that Nelson Mandela is not God. Now, those of you who know South Africa, who know South Africa is a deeply religious country. It's a country where even most members of the South African Communist Party, and we have a thriving Communist Party there, but they would go to church, to the mosque, or the shoe. So if you took a vote between God and Madiba in South Africa, you know, it would be very close call, but God would probably win if by a narrow majority. But there were some more serious learnings from that process. Madiba's motivation was that very young people in South Africa were forced to take on very adult responsibilities and should have the right to decide who leads them through those responsibilities. His motives came from a very deep, good place of empathy, and it came from his enduring passion about how our decisions impact so profoundly on those who are most vulnerable and who do not have voice. Now, we understood that in the ANC, but we felt that we needed to strive to change that and not to further embed that. We felt we should not make our children co-responsible to get us out of the mess we had created for them. And that decision endured. And Madiba accepted it. He used that same street fighting strategy for another round, one that he won and for which we are grateful. Somewhere along the line in the negotiations process, Madiba proposed that the ANC should unilaterally suspend the armed struggle. Now, the ANC never saw the armed struggle as the primary way in which we would be free. We didn't believe it was just gonna be a seizure of power. It would be crazy. I mean, the apartheid government had the most powerful military machine on the African continent. And at this stage, the armed wing of the ANC in Konto Wessis, we still existed. We had not disbanded our camps or the structures. And most of us thought that doing this unilaterally would be at best unwise and probably a complete sellout and prove that finally, we now understood that the old man had gone completely soft through all this talking to all these dreadful racists. Well, he went into street fighting mode and he called us in one by one and talked to us. And one by one, he actually convinced us that he knew it was a gamble. But he knew, he felt it was a calculated one. And then as he convinced us one by one, good old divide and rule strategy, he sent us off to be his foot soldiers. And it worked because he just gave the liberation movement a huge moral advantage. And in any case, we knew that we were never gonna be able to be a match for the military map of the apartheid regime. And it became harder for the apartheid government to openly deploy official and unofficial armies against the citizenry. And it created the space for us to mobilize on a mass scale more easily and which was what we needed throughout that process. But most importantly, it made us remember that fighting was not our goal. We were fighting, including using arm struggle as one of the means to create conditions to build peace. Peace was actually our goal. We wanted peace so that we could build prosperity for our people and it would stand us in good stead if we could start to turn the economy around in parallel with the negotiations. And it has, as our economy grew and our black middle class grew, more and more citizens felt they had a vested interest in peace. But in our journey, we also learned that you cannot have peace if there is no justice. And you will not get there. You will not get to peace if there was no integrity because you can't build your foundations on sand. And so we set off on a somewhat convoluted process. And this convoluted journey was about building a sustainable peace that would enable us to build a different future. And the journey was the writing of a new constitution, a constitution that would go beyond redress, a constitution that would rise above the pain of our past, above the hurt and the division and that would take us to a shared future. Because, as I said earlier, it's so easy to know what you want to destroy. But it's a lot harder to imagine a goal that takes you beyond your pain and beyond your anger and to shape the hope. So we started off having talks about talks where I was one of only two women in the talks. And both of us were from the ANC. And in fact, I was enormously proud to be Nelson Mandela's delegation, because our delegation, the short supply of women in the delegation, not supply, the short presence of women, not withstanding. But in our delegation, there were black people and there were white people. There were men and there were women. There were people from different religious backgrounds and some atheists. So there were Muslims, Christians, Jews, hardcore atheists. And on the other side of the table, and there was literally two sides to a table, we sat across a table like that. In FWD Clarke's delegation, it was just aging white Calvinist men. Then we had the negotiations process of coming out of this talks about talks. And that negotiations process created an interim constitution, which then enabled the first ever democratic elections to happen. And in the negotiations process, which brought about this election, there were 14 parties participating and everyone had an equal vote, because you couldn't really say we had so much important, you had so much. So everybody just had an equal vote and an equal say around the table. And we then had our first elections and the first election gave us our first parliament, which doubled up as a constitutional assembly and that constitutional assembly wrote the final constitution, which now creates the umbrella for life in the Republic of South Africa. And I say the umbrella because one of the complications we're still grappling with is that now we had legal and judicial continuity. So every single one of those horrible apartheid laws remain on the statute books until parliament goes through a process of revoking them. Now, there's a lot of those laws. There are hundreds of thousands from the size of the caps of screw top plastic bottle tops. There's a law for that to things relating to same-sex relationships, to things relating to the rights of women and the traditional laws. And every one of those laws had to be revoked. And the only way in which you could challenge this was either through parliament, going through the whole process of public participation and removing it or by invoking the constitution and declaring them unconstitutional. And that's why the constitution is the umbrella of life and how we live it. And during the negotiations process, there were many trying times where the caliber of the two leaders, Mandela and the clerk were severely tested. There were times when they had to stand together against actions by forces which may have been part of either of the wider constituents at some time as they did. And then there were times when they had bruising public disagreements. And when they did those, both they had to find the wisdom and the humility to get back to the table and to forge ahead. And every single time when that happened, they actually did find the wisdom and the humility to get back to the process. And some of you may recall that very public dressing down Madiba gave to the clerk when he felt there was no integrity in the way he was behaving. And to both their credit, they got back to the table. And during that time, I got to know Madiba really well and I feel hugely privileged for it. I got to know and respect his remarkable intellect. His kenny ability to assess very tricky situations, think on his feet and just figure out how you keep things moving ahead. And those tricky situations required the most enormous generosity of spirit, but also the most incredible ability to be courageous and strong and not forge ahead with the process simply because you were caught up in it. I got to know a man who also felt a huge guilt about the fact that his brave leadership, which saw him incarcerated for the better part of his adult life, took him away from his young wife and their children. He tore him apart that he was mostly not there for those important moments in their lives. And more so that his choices left them subjected to the most cruel acts of retribution by the apartheid police. And it made him proud that his young family never bowed to the campaign of terror, visited upon them by the police in order to break him down. But it pained him to witness the painful personal consequences in his family and in his family life that were triggered by his absence as a father and as a husband. I was privileged to see him lead with confidence and humility. I saw him enjoy the joint soft leadership triumphant. He enjoyed throughout his life with Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. I got little glimpses of how they had worked together as young men, young Turks in the African National Congress's Youth League and the radicalization that they sought and brought about in the ANC. And I was privileged to see when they were reunited in the newly elected ANC leadership in the last years of their lives. And I understood by watching them why the ANC remained resilient through the very difficult years of exile, prison and brutal repression for those when ANC structures inside South Africa and how it is still today resilient and able to survive some pretty grueling times of late and how it managed to land on its feet tottering a bit precariously, I will concede by electing a new president who was in fact the midwife of our constitution. Our new president of the ANC and the Republic of South Africa, President Sillorama Pausa was the person closest to Madiba during the negotiations and he chose. He's smart, he's tough and he's decent. He knows how to play a long game. That's partly how we got to where he is today, even in the ANC. He has learned very well at the feet of Nelson Mandela. And I'm confident that like Madiba, Sillorama Pausa's quest will not be to seek retribution. He's well equipped to know how to draw a line beneath impunity, very firmly, but he also knows how to focus on liberating the good that human beings are so unfailingly capable of when they have good leaders. And in this centenary year of Nelson Mandela, we find ourselves in a very troubled world. There are several intractable conflicts, most of which we've become so immune to and often it just passes right over our heads until something dastardly happens in our backyards. We all sit up and notice when a bomb goes off on a public square or on our subways, yet we've become so numbed to the daily bomb blasts in the marketplaces in Iraq or Nigeria. What all of these have in common is that they no longer wars waged by one nation against another. They're wars waged internally amongst nations who will have to find one another and walk a common journey again. Sadly, many of these wars were started or given impetus by sometimes ill-considered and sometimes cynical interventions by external forces. Without going into too much detail, the situations in Iraq and Syria are perhaps very good examples of these. Then there are signs of nations engaged in different kinds of internal trauma. And I don't want to oversimplify by putting very complex problems all into one pot. But perhaps we ought to look at some very warring indicators inside countries that seem to come from very similar feelings of alienation from substantial pockets in our populations. What is it that makes a kid who grew up with us, with people like us, what is it that makes them go out and strap a bomb to their bodies to blow us up? What makes a kid who grew up with us and shared pimple remedies for pimples? What is it that makes a teenager like that walk into a classroom and shoot up and kill a whole bunch of people? Why has it almost become the norm today? In current day, democratic political processes like voting, where substantial numbers of populations have gone with anti-establishment choices to use euphemism. Maybe instead of judging them for being so stupid, maybe we should look at ourselves. I'm taking huge license here to say that all of us in this room probably can be considered to be this thing they call the establishment. Well, maybe we should just take a hard look at ourselves and actually say like we used to when we were young, that actually the establishment sucks. That's what people think about us. It was a lot easier to be self-righteous when this satisfaction manifested itself through people we could call nasty or crazy. Now there's huge swaths of people who go to the polls and actually tell us and cock a snook at us. And when the majority votes for things like Brexit or choose to put it mildly, decidedly odd characters as presidents or prime ministers, maybe it's time for us to democratically accept that the system as it stands is failing our people. The levels of exclusion, the levels of poverty and inequality that this exclusion creates has created monsters and a huge powder keg. And maybe it's time for us to take a few fresh looks at power, what it looks like and how it is exercised. Maybe it is fortuitous that we are confronted with these challenges in the centenary year of Nelson Mandela. Maybe it can sensitize us again to what made him a good leader. Maybe we can be reminded that social cohesion is only possible when there is social solidarity. Social solidarity inside our borders and with those outside. Maybe we'll remind ourselves that peace can only reign and endure if there's justice and equality. Justice and equality inside our borders and in relation to other nations, nations we trade with and nations we engage with. We in South Africa are beneficiaries of one of the most powerful solidarity movements in the world, one of the most powerful, exemplary and enduring many of the relationships as we can see today, still stand many years after we got formal freedom. And we want to thank those of you who are present and we in fact were part of those movements because often you also got beaten up and chucked in jail. But we want to remind you about that especially because now more than ever we maybe need international solidarity movements again to stand with people who are marginalized and in fact we're at the receiving end of tyranny. We need to rebuild those movements and we need to in fact strengthen people to people relationships again in a way that I think we have fallen a bit behind. It's perhaps also a good time to look at how we interact as equals in a new world order. It is a good time for powerful nations to embrace the fact that leadership has to be earned and not decreed. And this business of going around the place and saying we really cannot go around saying mine is bigger than yours actually. And maybe the multilateral systems that institutionalizes our interactions as nations need to better reflect the realities of a changing world. In its current form these institutions have been incapable of responding and leading the biggest crisis facing us. They're not capable of ending the modern day kind of raging wars we have. They are floundering to create a global economy that support the closing of the gaps between the haves and the have nots. If anything they've in fact entrenched conflict and entrenched the gaps between the haves and the have nots. Individual nations ought to recalibrate what it is that makes them a nation. What are the values and aspirations that bind them as a nation and that links them to other nations and the world. Because we all know that globalization is here to stay. There are such huge possibilities if embraced well. As we see too often there is disaster if abused for the benefit of a few. And we have had another Damascus moment in South Africa. We just got rid of a president who took our country down such a scary road. And across political parties we stood together again as they did in Zimbabwe for the sake of our country and voted unanimously for a new leader. Cyril Ramaphosa was unanimously endorsed as the new president for South Africa. Unanimously all parties in parliament rose to give president Cyril Ramaphosa a standing ovation when he delivered his state of the nation address that speaks to the values that we all hold dear and which unite us on a common journey again. And the work has already started to put his metal to the test. Both within the ANC where people are in fact engaging in a very robust way with him and amongst parties, as everybody says right, we agree with the line of march and the values, tell us how. And it's very robust and you would have seen the debate on this thing. And that is how it should be. In South Africa and indeed in the world as we enter this Mandela centenary, it's important that we have and we craft the common script again but we have to be able to have robust debates about how we achieve these very ambitious goals. We have to have a diversity of opinions and we have to create once again a wider rather than a narrower space of engagement. We have to reignite the sense of power of ordinary citizens when they feel they have the ability to help to create change. Because when they have that, they will build it and they will defend it. And I think we've lost a lot of that. And let us remember very importantly that half the feet on the ground to create this new stage of our futures, I in fact women. Let us push back on this creeping misogyny that has become so rampant in our societies. And not only to deal with women as survivors or victims of the most awful abuse, discrimination and exploitation, but also as full human beings with great potential that contributes greatly already and can do even more so when allowed to flourish. Let us re-dedicate ourselves to liberate both women and men to respect and to celebrate diversity in order to use 100% of our potential to build a new society. Let us also see our growing populations of youth as our future. Let's see them not as a responsibility. Let us not look upon growing numbers of youth as a burden. Let us look at them as assets for our future. And let us invest in them accordingly. Let us give them hope as we were given hope in the most difficult times when we were young. We were given the hope and the temerity to dream of a better world. And that gave us the courage to go right out there and to build it. The world today is actually a very different world to the one of our parents. And it can be a much better world. But only if we, the creators of today, take responsibility to deal with the Frankenstein elements that manifests in this world that we have created. Only then can we fully reap the benefits of globalization and technology. Only when we assert and institutionalize the interrelated benefits of the mobility of capital, goods, skills, and people will we reap the true benefits. This can only happen when in the words of Madiba, and I quote him, our choices reflect our hopes and not our fears. So I end off with much thanks to the United States Institute for Peace for courting me this honor to do this first annual Nelson Mandela lecture. I hope that every year this lecture will seek to not only remember a great man for his great contributions. My hope is that it will seek to be an annual occasion to remind us of the power that we have to stand for justice, equality, and dignity for all in our world. I hope it will become an occasion to strengthen us all through tough times and that it will enable us to celebrate our successes big and small in building a better world. I thank you. Ambassador Corolles, you have kicked us off of our inaugural lecture with exactly the kind of hope and inspiration and challenges that we all need. There's a lot out there in the world that challenges us every day and so we appreciate the reminders, the challenges, and for sharing your own personal story and the lessons that are so important from the whole journey that South Africa has taken for the world. We have time for a couple of questions and we'll be turning to the audience. I wanna start off with one, you talked a lot about youth, both the activity of your youth, you personally and others, the global youth. I know that like so many countries that are dealing with the importance of getting back on that pathway to hope and peace, two thirds of South Africa's population is under the age of 35 and these are people who have grown up under the nine or as you said, maybe even 15 years of the last 15 years which have been problematic for South Africa. What does President Ramaphosa need to do to ignite and activate that population of youth the way that President Mandela did with such power and such positive effect? Thank you Nancy. I wouldn't want to speak for President Ramaphosa, I think myself and his excellency, our ambassador here, we have a few plans to bring him to Washington sooner rather than later, in which case I will invite you. We'd be delighted to welcome him. But I think we obviously have to draw a line under our past and I think that President Ramaphosa has already started to do that, to just say that there isn't gonna be any corruption, we've got the investigation on state capture, that's a parliamentary process and President Ramaphosa must step back from that. So that process will run its course, our institutions are robust and I have no doubt it will come out with a process that will be good. The second thing is President Ramaphosa has to rebuild the functionality of many parts of our state that had either been captured or in fact just froze. But I think that you can't do that unthoughtfully because whilst it's been a difficult 15 years there's also been some good things that has happened in the last 15 years. One of the important things that I think does come out in the last 15 years under President Jacob Zuma was just the whole rollout of the anti-retroviral campaign for people living with HIV and AIDS. That's been for me personally because it's an area I'm very active in has been a huge thing. So there would have to be a lot of thoughtfulness of the rebuilding and the capability of state institutions. One of the first ones was what has happened yesterday and that's getting a new cabinet together and everybody and their dog has at least three opinions on what the cabinet is. The proof of the pudding is gonna be in the eating. All I can say is that a big part of dealing with issues like youth unemployment is about getting our economy back on track because one of the problems which has happened in the last 15 years is that there's been a global world situation where economies were really hard pushed but a country like South Africa that has so much going for it, we missed huge opportunities and so rebuilding the capabilities in the economy and I think President Ramaphosa has already, those were the economic ministries. He's actually put credible people that I think the whole world looks up to in respects. And so I think that that's for me a big part of dealing with youth unemployment and then of course we have to get around to our education system. I think that, but that I think will be a longer whole process and I must say again what President Ramaphosa has been very good at doing is just reigniting the confidence of the private sector so that you have good public-private partnerships because the beneficiaries of education is not just the public sector, it's not just the government. In fact, one of our problems of our education system is it just doesn't churn out the kind of people who can run a sophisticated economy such as ours optimally and we need to fix the education system and the private sector as beneficiaries are once again inspired to become partners. So I'm feeling much more optimistic about it. We take that optimism, happy to have it. I wanna open up for questions. We have a couple of mics going around Eileen over here, yes. For your talk, it was so inspiring. Just in visiting Cape Town fairly recently, my question is can the township system survive if you want South Africa to be truly democratic, free and prosperous? Especially as Cape Town runs out of water. I'm from Cape Town, my mother lives there. I have a lot of focus on this rotation. You know, the spatial consequences and that's the thing is that the system of apartheid was entrenched not only institutionally, but judicially. And it's going to, you're not suddenly gonna find huge swathes of white South Africans wanting to live in those townships. And nor you're gonna find masses, numbers of Black South Africans who are suddenly gonna be by the means to live in the formerly white suburbs. And so those remain and that's where things like our education system and fixing of schools in those townships remain an absolute priority because you just keep on reinforcing those sort of inequalities and exclusion. And we've had to go through things where town planning, for example, you have to start thinking about that when you build low cost housing which is mainly for Black South Africans, not exclusively, do you just build them right next door to townships or do you actually bring them into the middle of the cities which of course is white South Africans suburbanized and they have a lot of complaining to do about that sort of thing. So that in itself is a challenge but you look at cities like London where they are interesting models where every time you want to have a large commercial development you have to subsidize a low cost rental stock building. And so you put in the middle of very well resourced suburbs. You actually build pockets of poor people where the kids are able to go to the school and where people can walk to work. There are some interesting examples in Jobuk where some of you might be familiar with it. There's this thing called Brickfields near the Market Theatre. And what's amazing about it, it's actually rental stock. And often people think that kind of people would just not look after a place like that. Well, it is actually speak and span and the man who's now the treasurer general in the ANC Paul Machatile was the man who pushed that thing through in the inner city. But it's right next to a taxi rung anyway. So I think one's gonna have to start doing more and better than what we've done until now to push those boundaries. In the Western Cape, you know, there was some very unfortunate remarks with the Premier, for example, at one stage spoke about economic refugees and just the use of words like that was quite difficult but reflected the mindset where there were very few houses that was built outside of the townships and very few houses. So yes, it is one of those learnings that I think we're gonna have to tackle ahead on. And again, the question about social cohesion, you know, everybody's worried, the service delivery protests, this crime in South Africa. Well, you know, the point is just that as somebody wise this afternoon over lunch said that you get poverty in itself is a problem but it's not a massive social challenge unless it's accompanied by exclusion. And in South Africa, poverty is still hugely overlaid by race and reinforced. And the global problem with growth of economies, the nature of economies now and economic growth globally is that it's just widening the gaps between the hares and the have nots. Well, in South Africa, that also says between white and black. And so I think we're gonna have to pay a lot more attention to that and be much firmer about it. Thank you, thank you for your thoughtful comments today. I'd like to ask your reaction to a hot button issue relating to this inequality and that is land policy. There's been talk recently of appropriation, land appropriation without compensation. Can you tell us how much that is part of the president's Ramaphosa's policy and how you're going to navigate that since that policy was a disaster in Zimbabwe? I must be very honest with you and I hope that my ambassador will bear with me and accept that I'm, I don't speak for government. I think it was unfortunate and unnecessary because there was actually legislation presented to parliament. Parliament's gonna have to debate it and so on. Because expropriation of land without compensation is actually internationally possible. For example, if there's a national interest like there's a road or a railway or there's been unjust, whatever. So it's not unusual in South Africa, but quite frankly, I thought that the constitution allows with taking into the constitution as it stands, you don't need to amend the constitution to have an extra law, but it does accord protection for both parties and it places an onus on both parties to in fact justify either why they do it or why they're entitled to protection of the land. And I can say that, I can say with absolute confidence and I think that everybody will know even in our most difficult times in the last period in South Africa, thank God for our judiciary. And it is sophisticated. It is underpinned by very solid laws and underpinned by our constitution and our Bill of Rights. And so I am quite confident that sort of random confiscation, unfairly and unjustly of people's land is just not gonna happen. It's not possible in South Africa. I can say that absolutely categorically. And that's why I think it's unfortunate that it came to that way. It's now back in Parliament for debate. But I think we must maybe look at the other side of that coin, that in South Africa, there are a lot of black people who feel that in the last over two decades of since change, their lives haven't changed. And in fact, in some ways, their hearts of the pinch is harder. And unless we start to across the racial divide, start looking at ourselves as South Africans and the notion that there can't be social cohesion without social solidarity, I think we are gonna head more and more into trouble. And I think we're gonna have to start looking at how do we do this? And I think there's a conflation between two things and that is dispossession. How do we deal with dispossession? That was unlawful to start off with. And how do we deal with just land hunger? Where there is an entrenched pattern that to be able to buy land, most of the land in South Africa is still in white hands. And people see this as a huge injustice. It's very difficult for emerging black farmers, for example, to acquire land. And that's the whole thing about how banks lending policy works and a whole range of things. But all of this has in fact contributed to this crazy cocktail of people feeling well then we must maybe just move down this track. But I have no doubt that there will be a due judicial process and there will be proper debate and we land in a good place because in fact the public discourse has been opened up. And so let's people's feelings come out and I think our parliament is mature enough to have that robust debate. And I think it's good. Instead of suppressing it when it's bubbling under the surface, let it come out and let us arrive at a sensible place. I think we will. So we have time for one final question right here. Go ahead, sir. Thank you very much for such a wonderful and uplifting speech ambassador. We're known to each other. I'm Kole Lama, I'm from South Africa. We've been here before and I speak here as somebody who's a columnist, who's a critic, who speaks a lot back home. And we were here with Tabo Beghi and there was all this euphoria that Tabo, the Renaissance man, we are on our way and he didn't turn out that to be what we had expected. Same with Jacob Zuma. How do we stop this dynamic from repeating itself? And I'm asking this question as a rhetorical question actually because I'm making a suggestion that perhaps we need an institutional way of engaging with the South African public, of the president engaging with critics and changing this dynamic where it's us versus them. So thank you for that question. Kole Lama, Mr. South African and for those of you who don't know him, he's an academic and he's in fact at this, Smithsonian, where are you now, Kole? Yeah, in fact, doing a book on Madiba. I think you'll write that we, not only in South Africa but in the world, I think we need to understand that building democracy is a project that you can't lose your hand off the tiller. I also think that there's a much stronger awareness of the need for a strong and a vibrant civil society. But in South Africa, you know, Kole Lama, one of the things which a lot of people have said when our president, Senor Lama, said send me. There's a huge sense of excitement. It's electric. It's palpable in South Africa. It's actually wonderful. And I say to people, no, don't ask. Don't wait for the president to pick up the phone to call you. In fact, very wrong if the president decides we should go where. That's how Jacob Zuma got us into a lot of trouble by deciding who should go where. But people don't use things like parliamentary processes in South Africa before anything becomes the law. There's actually a very public process of parliamentary yearings. The only people who go there and infuriates me mostly are dreadful, right-wing people who want to stop change from coming. And that's the only views that parliament has and parliament has to take on board views of people. I have been party on two occasions that I'm very proud of, where we use the parliamentary process and I think in our own way we managed to stop those two things right in their tracks. The one was the media bill and the other one was the traditional courts bill which was gonna set back women's rights substantially. We got a red tag bunch of two days notice and off we went to parliament. But we know how to call a press conference, how to write articles, you know the story. And we actually got parliament to sit up and refocus but they were able to put our evidence as part of that. And I think South Africans don't use that. I don't think we as South Africans do enough to nominate people. I mean, I often ask my friends who are hopping mad, have you ever nominated somebody for the Judicial Services Commission, for example? No, they haven't. Have you ever nominated somebody for the Escom board? Have you ever put yourself forward for this because you can nominate somebody or put yourself forward? And I think that needs to become part of our civil society discourse for Lela. We need to institutionalize those things as well. And so I think it's been very sobering for many of us how we landed where we did. Because it's that thing where also we as ANC people, and this goes for anyone of us with our political loyalties anywhere in the world, you often don't want to take this spat in the family outside, and it's wrong. Especially when you are in power. Because the importance about a party in power is you do decide for society what's gonna happen or not happen, and that's why you need to do that. And so I think this nonsense of debating things only internally is just wrong. Especially when there are bad things which are happening because then you develop the Toad in the Pot syndrome. We have a candle flame under the pot. And your tolerance level for wrong just changes. Incremental, you get used to it. Well, if you do that frog in the pot, by the time you realize you're gonna get cooked in the air, it's too late to jump out because the fire has grown so big under you, you're gonna jump right into the fire when you try to jump out, so. Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador Corollus. We are very, we are very lucky to have you here with us for this inaugural lecture. Thank you for the frankness, for the vigor, for the energy that you brought to today's conversation. And we hope that you'll come back and visit us and we'll see how those Toads are doing in all the pots. But we just, we cannot thank you enough. It was moving, it was inspiring. And to close us out, I want to invite my good friend, one of the driving forces behind this lecture. The, somebody who's a valued member of our international advisory council, Andre Pinar, who's the founder of C5, a limited company that works on technology and big cloud data and cyber security and has been a wonderful partner with us on PeaceTech Lab and the accelerator that we host. Andre, thank you for vision and all the things that you've done for us to make today a reality. Thank you, thank you, Nancy. And on behalf of the Nelson Mandela lecture advisory committee, I just want to record our thanks to Nancy and to Steve Hadley, the chairperson of the USIP for supporting this lecture, making this lecture possible. As Ambassador Corolla said, this is an inaugural lecture and we hope to have this lecture on an annual basis. The USIP is a unique institution. It has very, very deep Africa expertise and we have many of the expertise and the wise men and women who are some of the most experienced on Africa policy today here with us present. So it's a great privilege to have the USIP host this lecture. In the back of your program, you will see a wonderful quote from Mandela, which says, it always seems impossible until it's done. And in pulling this lecture together, there were moments when it seemed impossible. But fortunately, this is a place in a building where people don't get daunted by the impossible. And so we were delighted that the lecture was able to come to pass. And I also want to record our thanks to everyone on the USIP team and Shari Carter's team who worked very hard to get it done and to my own team for all their support. Thank you. Andrei, Andrei, Andrei, what do you have? And so please join us in a final thank you and we'd like to present Ambassador Currell as a small token of our appreciation and to commemorate the first of many lectures to celebrate President Nelson Mandela. Thank you once again. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We'll look for you next year. Yes, yes. Go. We have a band here and a singer. And they are going to have a musical tribute to the late Hugh Masekela. Some of you may know that Ambassador Barbara Masekela, who served at the South African Embassy as the first South African ambassador after apartheid ended, was the sister of Hugh Masekela. So this tribute is for Hugh Masekela and it is also a tribute to Ambassador Barbara Masekela. After they finish their tribute, we invite all of you to go up to the International Women's Common, which is just above us, and to enjoy some refreshments and a drink. We are extremely pleased that all of you have been able to join us this afternoon at this inaugural lecture. We'll turn it over to the band.