Abdullah Ibrahim - Proud Capetonian, South African Icon, African Genius, Global citizen. For all this, we honour you. We pay tribute to one who speaks a language - the language of music - that unites, that includes, that inspires, that heals. A language that defeats the demon of racism.

By allowing us to honour you, you help us to put your history and your talents at the service of building a "HOME FOR ALL" in the Western Cape, a home that invites to the common ground, but cherishes the difference.

You allow us also to reinvent Leeuwenhof - a symbol of colonialism and apartheid - so that we can begin to heal the experience of slavery and hold out the hope that indeed the future can only be better.

I want to thank the Provincial Honours Board for departing from normal processes to allow us to recognise Abdullah Ibrahim on his seventieth birthday today. For rendering outstanding meritorius service in the interest of the people of the Western Cape, the Order of the Disa: Officer is awarded to Abdullah Ibrahim.

The song 'Manenberg' became an anthem of struggle against forced removals, the conditions on the Cape Flats and apartheid in general. In Abdullah Ibrahim we can see a person who learnt from the best that the world has to offer and fashioned it into a dissidence against the worst evils that the world unleashes on the vulnerable.

It is only now after ten years of democracy that we can truly begin to appreciate the full array of weapons used in the fight against apartheid. Before we tended to celebrate only the outright political heroes who went to gaol or into exile or were killed. But if the struggle was only political our humanity would have been incomplete. The fact that we find icons and forms of struggle in the arts, music, culture, literature, sport and poetry is a great characteristic of the achievements of the struggle not only politically, but in enriching the soul of our nation.

Enquiries: Redi Direko
Cell: 082 805 9119