"...YOUR LEGACY OF INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM IS AN UNQUESTIONED, inevitable and inalienable heritage. Your challenge is to create a new ?Africa based upon the oneness of all her diverse people, and their united growth and development in happiness and prosperity. If you, the young generation of today, work hard and maintain a high standard of morality and discipline then you will be proud of what you have to pass on to the next generation.

...Africa desperately needs her youth. She needs skilled, courageous, adventurous and responsible young men and women in ever increasing numbers. She requires that they apply the education which she has bestowed upon them at great cost, and the intelligence, strength and energy which are theirs by gift of God, in disciplined and devoted fashion to the accomplishment of the great African future which is theirs for the effort but which will never come to exist without it.

To the youth of Africa has been entrusted the great task of shaping and forging a united continent free from oppression, committed to the principles of the individual dignity and worth of all her peoples, and to the preservation and propagation of the great cultures of Africa and of the world to which these youth are the rightful heirs.

It is a magnificent and wholesome task. If you fail in it we who have hoped and planned and struggled in other ways would have also failed. You have a commitment to us and to the generations which came before and which will come after us. You are part of an historical chain which is no stronger than its weakest link. We hope that you will not disappoint us and that the youth of Malawi and you young brethren throughout Africa will rise to the great task which awaits you, and will fulfill it to the utmost in the spirit of the age into which you were born.

The legacy, freedom and independence which is yours is also a legacy of courage and devotion. If you are truly worthy of that legacy then from your efforts will come greater unity, greater strength, greater hope and greater accomplishments than generations past have ever dared to dream..."

His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I - Malawi State Visit 1965