Bridgetown.
A park on the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies was recently named after the great South African leader and freedom fighter, Nelson Mandel,
Minister of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, Ronald Jones, in his address at the ground breaking ceremony welcomed the idea of a park for students, and asked that it be a place of "spiritual reverence and peace", so all who visit would celebrate the legacy of Mandela.
Acknowledging that the slow walk made in February 1990 had persons from all walks of life all focused on the television screen and waiting with bated breath, he said, “There were many awaiting the first words from his lips – ‘let us take up arms and fight’, but they never came.”
Noting that Instead, the world witnessed the emergence of this anti-apartheid revolutionary leader who suffered the indignity of the separation of races and the brutality visited upon a people and a nation, Jones said Mandela would be greatly remembered for his slow walk to freedom, after being jailed for 27 years and for his pursuit of not only freedom and equality, but for peace.
Commending the University for the Freedom Park, Jones noted that Mandela must be celebrated in life and in his ultimate departure of death.
And, he stressed the legacy must live on as Mandela caused people everywhere to examine themselves and to rise from the lowest points man could fall to, through the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by the former South African President himself.
"We can only calm ourselves and reflect on what manner of man was this and is this not to have drawn his swords and not to have mobilised his guns… There is none other to whom we can compare him, particularly at that period of time," Jones remarked.
The Minister urged that the Park not be consumed by loud music but rather be seen as a place of reverence and peace, so that all who visited would know the spirit of Nelson Mandela.
