He experienced dispossession. He fought against it. He foretold the bleak future of repression and resistance through which generations more were condemned to pass until liberation day. We have heard the stories of President Thabo Mbeki describing how he learnt the social realities that informed his politics in his parents' shop in the rural Transkei, by reading and writing the letters that passed between illiterate migrant workers and th e families they left behind. I am sure many members of this House recall interpreting the world for adults who could neither read nor write.
Literacy is about retaining dignity and self-respect in a lettered world.
It is about functioning to the full as a human being among one's peers. It is about the empowerment of the spirit, the informing of judgement, the development of skill and understand ing, fulfilment of citizenship. Above all, literacy is a prerequisite for the achievement of true equality in a country that remains viciously segmented by educational deprivation even when the apparatus of discriminatory laws has been swept away. Everyone has the right to choose their profession freely. Everyone has the right to privacy.