“The richness of our world”

At a garden party on Senate House Lawn following the Honorary Degrees congregation, Professor Njabulo Ndebele, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, gave the following speech on behalf of his fellow graduands in reply to the Chancellor’s Toast.

"It is impossible to grasp the full richness of our world. But there are moments when we are privileged to glimpse a little piece of that richness. That happens everywhere around the world in institutions of higher learning, when once or twice in a year, we experience timelessness. We feel it when the thought strikes us that where we are during that moment of privilege, countless others have been, not just yesterday, or last week, or last month, or last year, or, to take a leap, the last century, but in a few rare cases, many centuries before.

"Indeed, some of that richness is to be celebrated in the little piece of the world we have with us right now in the form of three continents: Africa, Europe, and North America, represented by those I am so honoured to be a part of today. These remarkable people in turn represent other worlds the human intellect often takes us to: through the disciplines of theology, economics, education, literature, mathematics, science, and engineering.

"Some 33 years ago I arrived at Churchill College just in time for the Michaelmas Term, a recent graduate of the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland at the Roma campus in Lesotho. I still smelled of undergraduate milk at the start of a programme to do the English Tripos in two years, coming from a country where every day was an assault on one's self-confidence. I remember agonising over whether I was good enough even to write a letter of application for admission to a world university such as Cambridge. And so it was that one was conditioned to self-select oneself out of seemingly improbable opportunity.

"That is why the letter of admission, when it came, was simultaneously an experience of self worth and an opening up of the world. To then go on to qualify for the Southern African Bursary Fund at Churchill College for deserving victims of a country against its own people, was an act of unimaginable validation. It could not be otherwise that coming to study at Cambridge was for me and my family, a most liberating experience.

"You can well understand why in the very first letter to my father after my first practical criticism session, where a senior doctoral student had given us some passages to discuss, I announced to my father that I too had said something during the session, and that it seemed to have made some sense!

"It has been a long journey since then up to this blissful moment. It has been a journey during which I met remarkable teachers who have forever been present in my professional life; of life-long friendships, and the abiding membership of a special institution.

"Since then, my country has known freedom and democracy, and all of us South Africans remain grateful to all who have given us strength and support through our difficult history. It is good to have friends who know we still have many obstacles to overcome. We count Cambridge among such friends.

"Well beyond a simple letter of admission which profoundly changed a life, it would appear that one's confidence is always being helped along by fresh acts of recognition, with each efficacy of recognition lasting until the next challenge comes along. If such an experience is shared by others, then it makes of us all perpetual undergraduates always graduating. One is always writing a letter home, saying: "It looks like I'm there with others after all", a tribute to all my distinguished fellow graduates in whose glow I too manage to catch some light, and who give me, and all of us, faith in the richness of our world.

"And so to this timeless moment, yet another graduation, which binds us to all who have been here centuries before, and to whom we feel bound together by an institution, in its various manifestations, as permanent as human society, and one in whose honour I invite you to raise your glasses: to 'The University!'