But Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng said in his 17th Mandela Annual Lecture on Saturday that South Africans could not blame all of the country’s problems on the past.
Chief Justice Mogoeng said: ‘Anybody who says don’t blame anything on colonialism and apartheid is being mischievous. Most of the problems we have to deal with right now are a consequence of colonialism and apartheid.’
It was ‘therefore absolutely necessary that we never stop talking about colonialism…and apartheid’.
He added, however: ‘What we cannot do is blame it all on colonialism and apartheid.’
The Chief Justice said South Africans needed to unite, as ‘unity is essential for what Madiba calls “the vision enshrined in the Constitution”’
‘We will be betraying the legacy of Madiba if we don’t give practical expression to the injustices of our past.’
The theme of Saturday’s lecture at the University of Johannesburg Soweto Campus was ‘Constitutionalism as an instrument for transformation’.
The Chief Justice said it was ‘a shame that 25 years down the line we still have so much of our people suffering as they do’, and that ‘inequality has become sharper during constitutional democracy’.
‘We need unity now more than before,’ he said.