That fight cannot be seen apart from our struggle to regain our humanity. We are, therefore, called upon to embark on the long and thorny road of transformation. We need to introduce this into our universities as much as to our national fora. To develop this world view, this irrepressible optimism, we must grasp concretely the inhibitive power of the common sense notion of identity. In this regard, we must insist that nothing is preordained.
Nothing is given in perpetuity.
Only then would the many structural problems associated with efforts at transforming our universities and our country respond more readily to our collective determination. To find the way forward, we have to turn back to what our people tried to build here at Fort Hare. First, there are the intellectual traditions pioneered here and carried to our country and the world by Fort Hareans. The best of these are inextricably bound with the national democratic project. Our social, cultural and political history has, as its leit motif , the affirmation of the liberation of humankind.