Perhaps we manage to learn as we go along. Perhaps our children will be wiser than we in realising and acknowledging that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, as the famous Shakespearean quote goes. The confluence between two experiences that are in some ways quite dissimilar are, I am told, quite evocatively demonstrated in this exhibition. Confluence, I may tell the American youth gathered here, is an important term on my continent. We are by and large a water-starved continent.
Rivers are crucial parts of our geography and topography.
They are life-giving resources. They also serve to indicate divides and borders between countries and regions. They can be life giving as much as they can be markers of division. Confluence marks the manner in which we bring those two aspects of life-giving and division together. At the confluence of the river we meet, acknowledging that old African adage that we are people because of other people.