As he limped towards the podium to speak on the occasion of another school in South Africa being improved because of his initiative, Nelson Mandela stopped to shake the hand of a young boy and asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. "A doctor," the boy responded. "You must live up to that," Mandela told him.
Speaking during the unveiling of Sappi's restoration project at Inanda Seminary
in KwaZulu-Natal this week, Mandela said: "I want to go to bed feeling strong
and full of hope that my children will grow to know how to fit themselves in and
have a good life."

Mandela said black parents had to spend more time supervising their children's
schoolwork and monitor their progress. " In white communities, parents quite
often check on the progress of their children at school and discuss with them
where they encounter problems."
But he said black people had a "parental inferiority complex" because of their
past. "White children are taught in their home language which is much easier for
them to understand, while black children speak different languages after school
hours," he said, giving another reason why black parents did not help their children.

Mandela said it would be difficult for black parents to teach their children
about the Internet, for example, when most of them never used it.

He said the disparities between blacks and whites were a result of poverty. "The
greatest assault on human dignity is poverty. While most whites are taught in
good classes, blacks still endure the pain of learning under trees where it would be difficult for them to go to school during rainy days. He added that
while most blacks still lived in shacks without electricity and running water,
whites were exposed to these necessities and this contributed positively to their development.

"Unlike blacks, whites, because of their past experience, have a lot of expertise and therefore we need them to advance transformation."
He urged parents to teach their children about HIV/Aids as well. "Parents must
be part of the modern world and teach their children to condomise, otherwise we
are going to lose a generation of our people." He said the most recent statistics on HIV/Aids indicated that the most young and energetic were the most
vulnerable, with an increasing number of teachers also infected.

Mandela jokingly used his own experience as a parent to illustrate the problem
of integration at schools. He said he had to resolve a conflict between two of
his grandchildren when one insisted she was white and the other tried to show
her she was black.
"I told them that neither of them is right or wrong and that they are all South
Africans not black or white."