Elizabeth Furse: “I was a South African, and I can speak from experience how total was apartheid, how brutal was the regime. I was…”

“I was a South African, and I can speak from experience how total was apartheid, how brutal was the regime. I was privileged while in South Africa to participate in the struggle against apartheid and then later in my life as an American citizen to work with individuals and organizations to assure that the boycott against the apartheid regime continued. Throughout my life, Nelson Mandela has been a beacon, a beacon for peace, for justice, for reconciliation. Like Gandhi, like Martin Luther King, Jr., he rose from personal pain to become a hope for all of us. But Members do not really need to hear my words, because President Mandela himself describes himself and his humility, the humility of this man who spent 27 years in jail, 27 years for the crime of believing in democracy. How does he describe himself? He says, ``I was simply the sum of all those African patriots who had gone before me. That long and noble line ended and now began again with me. I was pained that I was not able to thank them and that they were not able to see what their sacrifices had wrought.''”