Question
At the beginning of his speech, Mandela mentions “an extraordinary human disaster”. What does he mean by this? What is the “glorious … human achievement” he speaks of at the end?
Solution
By human disaster Mandela means to say that coloured people have been victimized by the system of racial discrimination. The glorious human achievement is the welcome of a black person as the president of a country where the blacks had never been considered as human beings.
