Kader Asmal, founder of the Irish anti-apartheid movement and a former minister in South Africa, has dedicated a guest lecture in Derry to John Hume and all peacemakers in Ireland.
Prof Asmal was invited to give the annual Tip O'Neill Chair in Peace Studies lecture last night at the University of Ulster's Magee campus in Derry and used it to hail the political settlement as a remarkable but all too uncommon success.
"My lecture is therefore dedicated to John," Prof Asmal said, "and all the peacemakers, including the politicians, civil servants and negotiators involved, for their persistence and courage in ensuring that the community is at peace with itself and stability has been achieved through '. . . an extraordinarily complex yet workable institutional model'. Bravo."
He said that the history of Derry city on this, the 40th anniversary of the civil rights movement, stood as an inspiration, which was reflected in the new democratic South African constitution. Referring to the question of division and national identity, Prof Asmal spoke of South African efforts to build a new form of unity out of the separateness that was enforced apartheid.
"What we did in fact was to replace the bogus nationalities created by apartheid with a single citizenship for all South Africans, a revolutionary step which we hoped would provide a basis for a durable peace and an understanding of our common humanity," he said.
"We hoped that the 'core' values of our constitution - freedom, equality, justice and dignity, which do not belong to any one culture, would provide what Fintan O'Toole has called 'a map of integration, setting out the relationship between rights and duties in a way open to everyone'."
He emphasised the need for a new multiculturalism to embrace difference rather than attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all cultural outlook.
"Multiculturalism is also necessary because a society in which each is able to demonstrate his or her difference and diversity equally is a society much more likely to encourage its members to see beyond signifiers of religion, race, ethnicity as the sole markers of identity," he said.
South Africa's constitutional embrace of multiculturalism can be demonstrated by pointing to the large number of provisions that guarantee the individual's right to belief, language, culture and the rights of communities, he said, no matter if they are cultural, religious or linguistic, and to practise those activities.
He called for a specific Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, openly defying many in the unionist community who have publicly questioned the need for such a Bill. "I have saluted your political arrangements which have brought peace to a deeply divided society," he said.
"This form of political settlement is what writers describe as consocial, allowing for weight to be given in the structures of government to ethnic, or in your case, community, representation. In other words, administration is by consensus, not majority rule.
"In the same spirit, it has been suggested in the Good Friday agreement and elsewhere that a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland should be enacted: binding human rights rules would encourage development towards a shared future based on what must not be seen as simply restraints on the government but as instruments of empowerment of citizens."