A three-year partnership the Nelson Mandela Foundation has signed with Facebook Africa will help the Foundation build a values-based society, its CE, Sello Hatang, said on Monday night.
The partnership, announced on Tuesday morning, comes with a R3-million donation to the Foundation, earmarked for bringing together into a single online collection geographically dispersed archives that pertain to the life and times of Nelson Mandela.
“The partnership with‚ and the support from, Facebook will allow the Foundation to achieve its objective of reaching different parts of the world‚ with the aim of building values-based societies‚” Hatang said, thanking Facebook.
A group of Facebook employees at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory after Facebook Africa donated R3-million to the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
(Image: NMF)Nunu Ntshingila, Facebook Africa regional director, said the company is “proud to be associated with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the work it does in not only preserving the legacy of Madiba, but helping facilitate dialogue around key issues. Our contribution will be to ensure that this work can continue, while making his life’s works and learnings accessible to all.”
Facebook will also support the Foundation via its social media channels, including Facebook Live streams of key global events, throughout the Foundation’s marking of the centenary of Mandela’s 18 July 1918 birth.
There are many projects the Foundation is rolling out throughout the centenary year. These are aimed at moving beyond simple celebration into continuing the work Mandela did in an attempt to make the world a better place.
There are three main thrusts: fighting poverty and inequality; striving to eradicate the scourge of racism; and reckoning with South Africa’s oppressive pasts.
“It’s about human solidarity,” said Hatang. “For as long as there is some child starving, some person out there struggling, we can’t claim our own freedom.”
Hatang led a Facebook delegation through the Foundation’s physical archives, where visitors can view items such as the first post-1994 cartoon that showed Mandela in a negative light and many of Mandela’s personal papers and letters.
Hatang said the Foundation had recently spoken out against a loss of values across the world, and voiced its concern that corruption is increasingly systemic.
“It’s not a Zuma problem,” he said of former President Jacob Zuma. “For all of us [in South Africa] this experience has been a lesson. We are not exceptional as South Africans.”