Democratic South Africa is progressing steadily towards its tenth anniversary, designated as Freedom Day, 2004. This date, April 27th, will also be the day when a great African liberator, Toussaint L'Ouverture of Haiti, died in miserable conditions in a French prison, 201 years ago.

Earlier during the year of our Decade of Liberation, on January 1, 2004, we will join the people of Haiti to celebrate the Bicentenary of the proclamation of the first Black Republic in the world in 1804, the Republic of Haiti.

The Haitian Revolution was a revolution of African slaves against slavery and the dehumanisation of Africans. In 1791, inspired by both the American and the French Revolutions, the African slaves of Haiti rebelled against their enslavement by French plantation owners in the Caribbean island of Haiti.

Against all odds, they defeated three of the major European powers of the day, Spain, Great Britain and France. When they proclaimed the Black Republic of Haiti on January 1, 1804, this was the outcome of a protracted military, political, economic and diplomatic struggle.

The African slaves of Haiti waged this struggle to extend to themselves and all the African slaves that had been transported to the Caribbean and the Americas, the rights won for the people by the American and French Revolutions.

The African slaves of Haiti laid down their lives to ensure that the democratic and republican ideals of the American and French Revolutions truly applied to all human beings. They made enormous sacrifices to give universal meaning to the prescriptions of the American Revolution that "all men are born equal", and those of the French Revolution, incorporated in the Declaration on the Rights of Man, of liberty, equality and fraternity.

The sacrifices they made established their place in human history as true democrats and republicans, even surpassing those in America and France who are celebrated in school textbooks as the global architects of democracy and republicanism. Because of what they did, they had to pay a price imposed on them by those who claimed the right to describe themselves as the world's best democrats and republicans.

As a result, and because, as slaves, they had no experience as determinants of their own fate, the Haitian Revolution failed to produce the successful societies represented by the United States and the France of our day.

Accordingly, the 2004 Bicentenary Celebrations of the Haitian Revolution will also focus on the challenge of development and a better life for all, which presented itself to the leadership and people of Haiti, even as they celebrated their freedom from slavery and colonialism on January 1st, 1804.

When we celebrate our own Decade of Liberation, we too will have to focus on the challenge of development and a better life for all, which presented itself to our leadership and people, even as we celebrated our freedom from colonialism and apartheid on April 27th, 1994.

As happened with the liberated African slaves of Haiti, there are some in our country and the rest of the world who do not accept that we can make a success of our project to transform our country into a truly democratic, stable, non-racial and prosperous country.

These are not satisfied merely to make a prediction that we will fail. They go further to make certain that we do not succeed to achieve the objectives we have set ourselves. They act in a manner that translates into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As part of this effort, they do the best they can to present themselves, as they did to the victorious Haitian Revolution, as the unique representatives of what our own revolution should legitimately seek to achieve.

Those who did nothing or very little to secure the victory of the slaves, positioned themselves as the best friends of the liberated slaves, the best advisers of what the free slaves should do with their freedom.

We too have received all manner of advice and prescription about how we should conduct ourselves. This has encompassed almost everything.

We have been told that everything we do should be governed by the perceptions of potential foreign investors about our country, regardless of what we have to do to address the interests of the masses of our people, and as though the interests of these investors and those of our people were necessarily in opposition, each to the other.

We have been told that there are established international rules of behaviour, prescribing the deregulation and liberalisation of markets, to which we must abide, with no regard to the welfare of the poverty stricken masses who sacrificed everything to liberate themselves from apartheid oppression, poverty and underdevelopment.

We have been told that we are confronted with a dangerous brain drain, which can only be stopped or minimised, if we allow those who have these brains to determine the conditions that will persuade them not to emigrate to countries that offer them what they believe are greener pastures, leaving us brain-deficient.

We have been told that there are some, at home and abroad, who know our country, our people and our interests better than we do, being better representatives of what is good for our people than those freely elected by these people to govern them.

Among other things, this has resulted in some seeking to instruct us what we should do about such issues as the health of our people and our relations with our neighbours. Fortunately for them, they have the means loudly to propagate these instructions internationally, thus creating a global constituency that, because it knows no better, will pose the question to us - why do you not act as you are told!

Recently, as part of this campaign to instruct us about what we should do, a determined effort is being made to oblige our movement and government to release names of members of the ANC and our government who allegedly served as agents of the secret intelligence services of the apartheid regime.

In 1993, at our instance, and during the negotiations to move our country from apartheid to democracy, the representatives of all our people agreed that all of us had the responsibility to let bygones be bygones. Among other things, we agreed to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that would consider all gross human rights violations that had taken place during the more or less thirty-five-year period preceding our liberation.

The TRC did its work as best it could. It submitted its report to our government, which the government released to all our people without alteration. Our movement and government responded to this report as the finalisation of a particular chapter in the history of our country.

What remained was the implementation of the recommendations of the TRC, further to advance the goal of national reconciliation that had informed the decision to establish the TRC.

In its response to the report of the TRC, our government made an irrevocable commitment to implement the recommendations of the TRC to which it agreed. It openly stated which these are.

Despite all this, now, there are some who are trying to undo what our movement sought to achieve when it proposed and supported the establishment of the TRC, and fully cooperated with it. Effectively, these are arguing that some list of members of the ANC, who were allegedly recruited by the apartheid intelligence services, should be published.

Quite why this should apply only to members of the ANC is not explained. The fact is that there are many people active in various walks of life in our country, including some who argue for the "outing" of suspected former agents of the apartheid system within our ranks, who worked to sustain the apartheid system, event as agents of its secret services.

When we took the decision to achieve reconciliation rather than retribution, and thus established the TRC, we decided to forgive all those who might have caused unjustified harm to anyone in our country and elsewhere, in pursuit of the objectives either to perpetuate apartheid, or to achieve the liberation of the oppressed. We created the possibility for all to explain their actions.

And yet, today, there are some in our country who are acting in a manner that seeks to destroy this effort at national reconciliation. They are fishing in muddy waters to allege, with no effort to prove their allegations, that various members of the ANC and the government worked as members of the apartheid intelligence services.

They do not seem to understand that members of the ANC and our government, are equally capable of asserting that various South Africans and foreigners, including journalists, intellectuals, other professionals, politicians, business people, and others, served as agents of the intelligence services of the apartheid regime, and naming these.

We have avoided this route because it would undermine and subvert the objective of national reconciliation and stability. It would deny our country and people the possibility to advance beyond the conflicts of the past, to establish the conditions for a united response of all our people to our national challenges, in favour of a people's contract for a better life for all.

Everyday we work with people who were an integral part of the apartheid system. Some of these serve in our legislatures and other state institutions. From 1994 to 1996, we worked in the same government with the very captains of apartheid. Voluntarily, our movement and government have elected to work with people who belong to a political party that, historically, was the party of apartheid.

We have done this because we are determined to put the past behind us, by promoting the unity of our people to engage in a common struggle to address the legacy of colonialism and apartheid that is not of our making.

For this reason, we have also unequivocally opposed actions taken by some, to prefer charges against various South African and international companies in United States courts, ostensibly to get damages for whatever harm these corporations are alleged to have caused by failing to isolate apartheid South Africa.

We have the possibility everyday to denounce all those, at home and abroad, who, in one way or another, and at one time or another, stood against the movement of national liberation that freed all our people from the apartheid crime against humanity. This includes those who, at one time or another, attacked Nelson Mandela and the rest of our movement as terrorists. Despite the available information, we have not done this because we have been and are determined to ensure that the past should not define our future.

There are some who pretend that an authentic list exists of ANC members who served as agents of the apartheid intelligence services. No such list exists. Those who claim that such a list exists are telling an outright lie. They make this claim for the sole purpose of defeating our efforts aimed at the reconstruction and development of our country.

Apart from this, and interestingly, those who claim to have superior knowledge do not ask for a similar list of the many who belong to other political formations, who served as agents of the apartheid intelligence and other services.

We will not allow that our movement, government and country are torn apart by the agendas of those who have no interest in the success of our democratic and anti-racist revolution. We will not create the opportunity for the mischief-makers wilfully to label whomsoever they wish as secret agents of the apartheid system.

In time, all those who feel free to charge others in our ranks with having been agents of apartheid, will have to answer for the charges they have made. The masses of our people will not forgive them for what they are trying to do, to undermine our country's movement forward, towards the genuine and all-round emancipation of the ordinary working people of our country.

Those who are peddling false stories about enemy agents in our ranks will be defeated, in the same way that the African slaves of Haiti defeated the combined forces of European reaction, that fought to deny them their liberation.

Our successful struggle for liberation from apartheid and white minority domination imposes an obligation on us to fight to defend our right and duty to determine our future. This places a duty on all of us to be true to our consciences in everything we do, to do what we believe is right, and to be loyal to the injunction that we should serve the interests of the people of South Africa.

Our opponents will oppose us, presenting their case with the greatest eloquence and erudition. This includes and will include painting our leadership as being made up of traitors who worked for the perpetuation of the apartheid system. These are the same leaders who guided our movement and country in the successful struggle for the defeat of the apartheid system.

These opponents remain our opponents, however much they now pretend to be interested in the integrity and revolutionary purity of our movement and government, and the welfare of the masses of our people. Their task is to use all means at their disposal to oppose and defeat us. As long as we remain liberation fighters, so long will we refuse to be told by others, including these historic opponents and others, what we should think and do.

With acknowledgements to Thabo Mbeki and ANC Today.