RE-EMBRACING THE BEAUTY OF OUR DREAMS

Keynote address at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Tuesday March 3, 2026

Thank you for the kindness of your invitation to this 12^th Annual Conference of your great Genocide & Human Rights Centre. Your reputation precedes you. It is an honour to be here with you.

Our world needs to hear the wisdom embedded in the theme you have chosen for this conference: Breaking Silences: From Remembrance to Prevention. We are experiencing existential planetary crises that are generating unprecedented climate crises, inequalities, inequities, conflicts, and wars across all levels of our human existence. These planetary crises are plunging many into anxiety and despair, especially young people whose futures have become uncertain. Planetary crises upon us are calling us to rise to our responsibilities to ourselves, to generations here present, and to those yet to be born.

In this talk I would like to contribute to the breaking of the silences and the despair in our world by remembering Eleanor Roosevelt’s words of wisdom: The Future Belongs to those Who Believe in the Beauty of their Dreams. My aim today is to inspire us to Re-embrace the Beauty of Our Dreams.

My Talk will explore the following:

-             Why are Dreams Important to being human

-             Turning Dreams into Reality  

-             Leading and Dreaming as a Lifelong Endeavour

Why are Dreams Important to Being Human?

We live in a world that has diminished our sense of what it means to be human. The essence of being human is to be interconnected interdependent within the web of life. This is what enabled our common human ancestors to evolve into who we are today. They understood that our wellbeing as a species depends on us being connected to, and interdependent with, others within the web of life, and embracing all life forms.

Ubuntu/Omenala/Hunhu/Botho are expressions that go beyond the physical connections of our essence. Ubuntu invites us to see our human beingness as being enabled by the human beingness of other humans. There is no “I” without the “We.”  We are a relational species. We are one human family. We are at our best when in loving supportive relationships. Our ancestors understood that there is only one race – the human race. Our diversity of appearance, results from adaptive features to different ecological contexts. Diversity adds to the beauty of the human family. It is not a sign of distinctions between us. Think of a rose garden – its beauty lies in its diversity of colours and smells.

Our ancestors understood these truisms. They were good students of Mother Nature. They observed the universe as being an integrated whole, with the ebbs and flows of the seas, the Nile River, and other cycles of life, to be related to the cyclical positions of celestial bodies such as the Moon and stars. These observations, done initially without instruments, led them to pronounce that “as above, so below.”  Quantum scientists have only been confirming these truisms in the last few decades. Our ancestors elaborated a living systems values framework, Maat, to guide them in their relationships within the web of life. The Seven Principles of Maat are: Truth, Justice, Propriety, Order, Harmony, Balance, and Reciprocity. These are elaborations of Ubuntu values.

So how have we come to believe the pseudo-science that we belong to different races? The invention of the idea of ‘race’ by European colonialists was to justify the dehumanization of those defined as being of inferior races by a self-defined superior race. We now know from neuroscience today that traumatizing another human being traumatizes the traumatizer too. The pseudo-science about different races was invented as an anaesthetic to enable European conquerors to “other” their fellow human beings as a precursor to dispossession, humiliation, enslavement, abuse, and more. This ‘othering’ of human beings continues across the world to date.

Another devastating impact of the invention of ‘races’ is the acceptance over time of the validity of these definitions by those defined as inferior races. The acquiescence to the roles designated for oppressed people as inferior beings continues even after the departure of the oppressor. In post-colonial Africa the aftermath of colonial divide-and-conquer persists under our current leaders. They have simply slipped into the shoes of their departed colonisers. The behaviours of post-colonial leaders are the outcomes of the intergenerational trauma inflicted by racist colonial extractive socio-economic and political systems. Internalised racism gives permission to post-colonial leaders to disrespect their fellow citizens. It gives them permission to discount the entitlements of citizens to good governance and provision of essential basic services to ensure human dignity for all. Unacknowledged Intergenerational Trauma by both traumatized people and their descendants, as well as traumatizers and their descendants, lies at the heart of the planetary crises humanity faces.  

I speak to you today as a member of a generation that woke up during the colonial/apartheid era to the tragedy of the disempowering impact of acceptance of inferiority complexes. We came to this conclusion after many weekend conversations during 1969. We were then students at the Medical School of the University of Natal, now University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. We had up to then simply accepted being labelled as non-Whites/non-Europeans. Our searching conversations were triggered by the anomaly of more than 90% of our country’s population being indigenous, yet subservient to less than 10% of the population designated as White/European. The mathematics did not add up! There were only about 15 of us engaged in these earlier defining conversations over weekends lubricated by a little beer and cheap wine. We were all from poor families on state loan/bursaries and could only afford the least costly drinks.

It is then that we realised that by agreeing to be named non-Europeans/non-Whites we signalled acceptance of Europeans as a standard against which we were measured, andmeasured ourselves. We decided to wake up to the liberating power of self-definition. We declared ourselves Black and Proud. We danced the night away with the lyrics of the 1968 James Brown’s song: “Say it Loud, I am Black and I am Proud.”  Wow! What power! We never looked back.

We asked two of our number to meet the Vice-Chancellor/President of our university early on the next Monday. No appointment. Just show up. Our colleagues were taken aback by the Vice Chancellor’s response to our request: the label of our Medical School must be changed from non-White/non-European to Black. We had expected resistance, but there was none. He simply asked by when we wanted that done. Our delegation said by end of the week. They also said that the letterheads had to similarly change. He said: Sure! Wow!!! The fight we expected did not happen.

The lesson was loud and clear – we had for far too long given permission to Europeans to treat us as their negative “other.”  By withdrawing that permission, we changed the game. Our sense is that the Vice Chancellor thought that we were at last seeing the light! That we were no longer aspiring to be European but to be proud of our Blackness and Africanness. The apartheid dogma that we were inferior and not capable of creating anything beyond what we had been made to believe about ourselves, had blinded him. Little did he realise that this encounter was the herald of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) that ultimately re-awakened the majority population to liberate themselves in 1994.

We were the first ever generation in South Africa to understand the importance of recognizing the entrapment of mental slavery and the power of self-liberation. We were driven by the beauty and the power of our dreams. We dedicated ourselves to mobilise fellow university students, high school students, workers, religious leaders, and our parents to wake up to the beauty of their dreams. We took inspiration and strength from the Black Power Movement in the USA. We read smuggled forbidden literature by Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Negritude Writers from West Africa. Our dreams were also enlarged by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King’s fiery speeches.

As one of the few women in that first cohort of young leaders, I promptly added a rider to the self-liberation of black people. What about my womanhood? Discomfort all around! Attempts to silence me by suggesting that I was introducing a risk that could divide the struggle, were quickly abandoned in the face of the determination written on my face. I dared them to explain how I could be free as a black person without my womanhood being free too. I decided to simply act as a free woman without asking for permission from anyone. Freedom is indivisible. I was free. So too were the other sisters who were inspired to be courageous advocates of freedom at all levels within the BCM. But patriarchal cultural practices stayed a challenge. Patriarchy like racism, is a convenience to its purveyors. The liberation from both requires the determination of those on the receiving end, and the modelling of egalitarian behaviour for next generations. Patriarchy like racism, traumatises both men and women.

Our parents and elders at the beginning of the BCM warned us that we would be killed by the apartheid regime. We understood the basis of their fears given the brutality of the regime, but we responded that: “It is better to die fighting for freedom than die as slaves.”  The beauty of our dreams helped us overcome the fear of death. Stephen Bantu Biko, the intellectual leader and inspirational force of the BCM, in his 1979 book:  I Write What I Like, challenged the idea of the fear of death. He regarded it as irrational. Fear does not stop death. Fear immobilises one from pursuing one’s dreams long before death comes. Stephen was amongst those brutally killed. He died on 12/9/1977. The killing of our leaders failed to kill the Dream. The dream lived on in the liberation struggle that continued until our country’s freedom in 1994.

Turning Dreams into Reality

The attainment of political freedom is only the beginning of turning dreams into reality. My own country is still one in which most people are poor and marginalised, whilst a small elite, both black and white, are obscenely wealthy. 70% of privately owned land is in white hands. 70% of shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange are in white hands. Political freedom without socio-economic transformation is meaningless and demeaning. It is not yet Uhuru in much of post-colonial Africa. Why? Largely because post-colonial leaders under-estimated the importance of acknowledging and healing the Intergenerational Trauma that all sides of the freedom struggle bring into the post-colonial space.

My country has failed to honour the commitment in the preamble of our world acclaimed Constitution that enjoins us to follow through with our Beautiful Dream to:

“Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human rights. Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law; Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and build a united and democratic South Africa to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.”

The question before us today is why have we failed to live this beautiful dream? SouthAfrica’s adoption of a neo-liberal economic framework designed with World Bank and IMF support, was a crippling wrong policy choice. It was a policy designed to protect existing white privileges, strategically lobbied for by white elites in the name of creating an investment-friendly environment for foreign investors. What was achieved was to legitimise South African corporates to rejoin the global socio-economic system after having been ousted by the successful sanctions campaigns of the anti- apartheid struggle.Western powers ensured that they continued to benefit from South Africa’s rich natural, mineral, and other resources, to fuel the global extractive economic system. The promise of foreign direct investment has not yet delivered on enabling the realisation of our dream spelt out in our Constitution.

To add insult to injury, President Mandela’s government agreed, no doubt under strong pressure from the Western powers, to take over the Apartheid Debt. The cruel irony is thatthis was domestic debt owed to South African-owned companies that supported apartheid. The debt had been incurred by the repressive Apartheid system to buy arms andequipment to kill and maim liberation struggle activists. The post-apartheid government was either too naïve to understand how the global power system worked or it lacked the courage to challenge it. The global neo-liberal economic system is a determined machine that sustains its dominance at all costs. South Africa fell into the well-laid trap.

What South Africa needs now is total political, economic, and social transformation to give effect to the ideals of the preamble of our Constitution. We need to establish a democratic system governed by the will of the people, for the people, and by the people, to promote social justice. Such a transformation process would require the dismantling ofstructures designed by European colonists to privilege themselves at all levels of society at the expense of indigenous people. Redressing the dispossession of indigenous people of their land, their livestock, and natural endowments, including trees and wild animals that were ruthlessly cut down. These urgent tasks did not make it on the priority list of the first post-apartheid government. Nor that of any other government since 1994.

The dominant global socio-economic and political system is underpinned by a narrative that has entrapped humanity to lower its expectations of itself. European thinkers over the ages have propagated not only the invention of ‘race,’ but other pseudo-scientific ideas. One of which is the idea that human beings have a selfish gene that drives competitiveness, and winner takes all behaviour. This is a falsehood that negates our essence as a relational species that thrives best in supportive loving relationships.

Alfred Miller in Victorian England added another related falsehood, that human beings were utilitarian at their core. That human beings thrive by maximising the utility derived from others and from the  environment. Utility maximisation justifies greed and abuse of others in pursuit of extraction of value anywhere, anytime. Another falsehood is the idea that humans have dominion over nature to extract what they need from it. These pseudoscientific ideas about who we are as humans: different races, selfish gene, utility maximisers, and having dominion over nature, power the narratives that sustain the global socio-economic system today. Mother Earth’s generosity is wearing thin. The onslaught of the continuing extraction of value from essential ecosystems by human beings, is threatening life as we know it today.

Dreaming and Leading Are Lifelong Endeavours

Our human nature has designed us for Dreaming and Leading as lifelong endeavours. Our dreams propel us to undertake the journey of life with hope, courage, joy, and gratitude for all the blessings. Even in tough times Hope, Courage, Joy, and Gratitude see us through. Leadership starts with the self, extends to family, community, nation, and the wider world.

One cannot lead unless one’s ‘self’ is liberated. Self-liberation is a pre-requisite to leadership. I have been on this journey now for 58 years. Leading is also about self-care. One cannot lead without recharging one’s batteries. Self-care enables one to care for others and help them to embrace self-care. I have had to heal the multiple traumas and losses suffered over the years of activism to restore myself to myself. The journey does not get boring. There is always something new to learn. Dreams of a world of wellbeing for all on a healthy planet drive me every day. My grandchildren at 17 & 5 years are the strong motivation that keeps me going. I long to see them inhabiting a world free of human imposed planetary crises.

Leading in the family context is more challenging now than ever before. The breakdown of the extended families we grew up in, is robbing young families of the support systems needed to navigate the complexities of life. Technology imposes risks that must be actively managed. Technology is both an enabler of, and a risk to keeping multigenerational networks of family together. I am grateful for ‘FaceTime calls’ to stay in touch with my family. Leading and modelling family as part of the larger Human Family, challenges us to remain attuned to intergenerational conversations. We need to learn to listen, not to lecture.

The African family at home and in the diaspora has been subjected to unspeakable traumas across generations. Intergenerational Trauma of descendants of enslaved people in the diaspora must be acknowledged and addressed through intergenerational conversations. Bygones are never bygones unless they are given a decent ritual funeral. My own country exhibits the worst signs and symptoms of Intergenerational Trauma. We have the highest gender-based violence in the world. Most men in my society grew up without fathers (70%). They have no role models of what it means to be a man. We have high levels of inter-personal violence triggered by minor disagreements. Violence of this nature reflects unacknowledged trauma that makes people hypersensitive to humiliation – real or imagined. Violent crime in our country results from being the most unequal society in the world. Inequality hurts both the poor and rich (Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level, 2010).

Descendants of European colonial settlers are also suffering from Intergenerational Trauma. Toxic masculinity is common across class and cultural divides. Patriarchal values are at variance with the values of Ubuntu embedded in all humans. Unlearning white superiority is tough when one continues to enjoy the benefits of ill-gotten wealth. Rationalisation is very tempting. The bizarre situation of Afrikaners asking for asylum in the USA, can only be understood to be manifestations of unacknowledged IGT.  Afrikaners have benefitted the most from colonial/apartheid dispossession of indigenous people’s lands. The guilty are afraid. Nothing short of living up to the Beautiful Dream spelt out in the preamble of our constitution will suffice to douse the fire of violence and abuse in South Africa.

Leading as citizens at community and national levels is a major responsibility that many fail to discharge. The excuse of citizens being too busy to engage in the duties of citizenship is unacceptable. One cannot be too busy to be a responsible informed citizen to hold public officials accountable. The Human Family requires us to be present. Being present means ensuring that the living systems values framework of Ubuntu/Omenala/Botho is passed on from generation to generation. How do we as elders show up at this level? My experience is that young people love being taken seriously and affirmed. They love being listened to. They also thrive from help to avoid getting ‘stuck’ in their lives. Our dreams must be wellsprings from which younger generations can drink and dream bigger knowing they are supported and respected.

The entire education system from K-tertiary levels must be transformed. The epistemological foundations of the current education systems reflect the pseudoscience narratives to promote the dominant global extractive socio-economic and political system. Africa as the cradle of humanity and of the first human civilisation, must lead the charge in the transformation process. We must embed the living systems values framework, Ubuntu, into every aspect of education and training. Ubuntu is the healing balm that heals our broken relationships and reconnects us to our essence. Imagine an Africa with Ubuntu inspired education systems feeding into socio-economic and political systems that are empowering! Imagine the hope, courage, joy, and gratitude that would sing from the highest hills and mountains, and from the lowest valleys of our beautiful Africa! It can be done.

Africa would then enable the world to face up to our collective failure to develop a credible sustainable global governance system post WW11. The idea of a United Nations system remains a brilliant one. It stood us in good stead over decades despite its design faults that privilege a few at the expense of many. Decision-making on protection and promotion fundamental human rights has been, and is still complex, and often unattainable. It is time to stop pretending that the current UN system can be reformed. We need to have open conversations and a willingness to learn from the last 80 years. What has worked and why? What has not worked and why? The world needs a 21^st century fit-for-purpose Global Governance Platform to serve One Human Family inspired by the Ubuntu values of our common ancient ancestors.

We dare not fail generations of our children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born. We have the science, the technology, and the Ubuntu values system to mobilise humanity to rise to its noble call to be interconnected and interdependent within the web of life.

Thank You

2/3/2026

Mamphela Ramphele