Africa's best-known elder statesman, President Nelson Mandela, was given a tumultuous welcome as he stepped up to the podium yesterday to bid farewell to the African National Congress as its president.
Mr Mandela (79), now white-haired and stiff-legged, formally assumed leadership of the ANC when he was elected president in 1991 in place of the ailing Oliver Tambo.
But long before that he was its moral leader as a prisoner of conscience whose endurance over 28 long years in prison inspired a generation of South Africans and won admiration around the world.
Since his inauguration as South Africa's president in May 1994, Mr Mandela has made racial reconciliation the central theme of his presidency. But his valedictory address to the ANC's 50th annual conference contained many tough passages.
Its underlying message was that Mr Mandela did not subscribe to reconciliation if it meant pandering to white anxieties without addressing the grievances of the black majority.
In a speech which appears to have taken cognisance of the views of his successor as ANC president, Mr Thabo Mbeki, Mr Mandela gave notice that the transformation of South African society had only just begun, however uncomfortable that notion might be for whites.
Referring to undefined "counterrevolutionaries" he accused them of wanting reconciliation without transformation, of "wanting to compensate the white minority for the loss of its monopoly of political power by guaranteeing its privileged position in the socio-economic sphere".
He accused the National and Democratic Parties, as well as the Freedom Front - all still largely white political parties - of protesting vigorously whenever measures were taken to "end the racial disparities which continue to characterise our society".
Mr Mandela accused the "counter-revolutionaries" of seeking to establish a network to launch a campaign of destabilisation characterised by "subversion of the economy".
His speech was particularly critical of the newly launched United Democratic Movement (UDM), an organisation headed by Mr Roelf Meyer, a former National Party cabinet minister, and Mr Bantu Holomisa, a former ANC leader expelled for publicly criticising his co-leaders. Mr Mandela predicted that the UDM would "draw into its ranks some of the most backward and corrupt elements in our society", citing the "presence of the leaders of criminal gangs" at its founding conference as evidence.
Mr Mandela had kind words for the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which he once characterised as a surrogate force of the apartheid regime.