Fifty years later – revisiting Robert F. Kennedy’s ‘Ripple of Hope’

Two years – almost to the day – before his tragic death, on 6 June 1966, Robert F. Kennedy visited South Africa. As the foundations of apartheid were being used by the National Party in the 1960s to erect the scaffolding of white supremacy in South Africa, Kennedy spoke to the National Union of South African Students at the University of Cape Town, along with visits to Albert Luthuli, Soweto, and the University of Stellenbosch and the Witwatersrand, and delivered his “Ripple of Hope” address, about the overlapping struggles for freedom and just societies in the United States and South Africa – a visit representative of the spirit that his politics and short career inspired in so many people.

It’s common for people in the United States and South Africa to see parallels between the two nations. Our politicians are compared with one another as well as our histories of slavery and colonialism. Kennedy skilfully made this point to begin his speech:

“I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”

For all of these similarities though, there are differences that limit attempts to compare the United States and South Africa. For starters, Kennedy visited South Africa at a time when the vast majority of people couldn't participate in politics. Indeed, as Kennedy later explained:

“All do not develop in the same manner, or at the same pace. Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers.”

While he acknowledges differences that exist between the United States and South Africa, differences which make the feeling of visiting either country a distinct experience, what he understands to be important is “that all nations must march toward increasing freedom; toward justice for all; toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own people, and a world of immense and dizzying change”.

At the centre of this worldview is a liberal sense of the individual, the locus of which free and just societies should be oriented to. He stresses that while we might live in different nations with different histories, we share similar hopes, goals and concerns for the future that can unite the many threads of our common humanity – the challenge is seeing and treating others as individuals.

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

“... deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programmes – that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems”.

“There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru […] These are different evils; but they are the common works of man.”