"Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another"
About this Quote
The phrase "this beautiful land" does quiet rhetorical work. It turns South Africa from a legal entity into a shared home worth defending, an aesthetic and emotional object that can belong to everyone at once. In a country engineered to fracture belonging by race, calling the land "beautiful" is a bid for common ownership, a way to recruit even former beneficiaries of apartheid into a future that isn't built on vengeance.
Then comes the deliberately plain cruelty: "the oppression of one by another". No ideology named, no group singled out. The subtext is restraint. Mandela refuses the tempting symmetry of "now it's our turn" and rejects the logic of reversal that has derailed other post-authoritarian transitions. He frames apartheid not as a feud between factions but as a moral condition the nation must renounce permanently. The intent is both inspirational and preventative: to bind a new state to a promise of non-domination, and to warn the victors that power, unchecked, can easily start speaking apartheid's grammar again.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Nelson Mandela, Inaugural Address, Pretoria, 10 May 1994; line appears in final paragraph. Transcript available from the Nelson Mandela Foundation. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mandela, Nelson. (2026, January 18). Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/never-never-and-never-again-shall-it-be-that-this-9235/
Chicago Style
Mandela, Nelson. "Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/never-never-and-never-again-shall-it-be-that-this-9235/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/never-never-and-never-again-shall-it-be-that-this-9235/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.




