SPEECH BY FORMER PRESIDENT FW DE KLERK
AT THE 12TH EUROPE LECTURE THE HAGUE
25 OCTOBER 2013
EUROPE IN THE WORLD – A PERSPECTIVE FROM AFRICA AND SOUTH AFRICA
I wish to speak to you tonight about Africa’s perception of Europe. I would also like to discuss Europe’s search for greater internal integration on the one hand and its wish to play a more coherent role in the international community on the other.
First I wish to talk about my own relationship with Europe as the descendant of one of the many peoples throughout the world that trace their roots to your continent. My ancestors were Huguenots from France who came to South Africa via Holland in 1688. My language, Afrikaans, has its roots in the Dutch, Flemish and German spoken by the employees of the Dutch East India Company and by the first settlers in the Cape. It also draws richness from the Malay language that was brought to the Cape by slaves from the East Indies. My religion derives from the Dutch Reformed Testament of Dordt in 1619. My culture, like the cultures of so many peoples throughout the world, is suffused with the unparalleled literature, art and music of Europe.
And yet I am an African. For centuries my ancestors have identified themselves with Africa – from the moment more than 300 years ago when Hendrik Biebouw, a Dutch settler in the Cape, proudly proclaimed “ek ben een Afrikander!” – I am an African!
One hundred and fifteen years ago my people fought one of the first and greatest anti-colonialist wars in the history of Africa. The Anglo-Boer War was the costliest of the more than 40 wars that the British fought between the Napoleonic War and the First World War. It involved the deployment of more than 430 000 British troops and ended in the destruction of our country, the burning of our farms and the death of 27 000 of our women and children in concentration camps.
So, despite my deep roots in the rich culture of your continent, I regard myself as an African. I identify with my continent; I strive to promote its interests in its relationship with other parts of the world – and I support its sports teams when they are playing teams from other continents.
I mention all this because you Europeans sometimes forget the enormous impact that you have had on the rest of the world during the past 500 years. In that period you colonised and populated three of the world’s six inhabited continents – North and South America and Australasia – and conquered much of the rest of the world. Only 12 significant countries escaped European rule – and the sovereignty of the greatest of them, China, was severely limited by the imposition upon it of 62 treaty ports by the European powers and Japan.
Southern Africa was deeply affected by the rising tide of European imperialism. Modern South Africa was forged in the wars of conquest that the British fought during the 19th century against the three dominant peoples of the sub-continent – the Xhosa, the Zulus and the Afrikaners. At the beginning of the 20th century Britain found itself in possession of a ragbag of vexatious territories in Southern Africa – that one historian quipped it had acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness.
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Wilhelm's space 