a hostile frontier.....................

A "Day of Affirmation of Academic and Human Freedom" was proclaimed at the University of Cape Town for June 6, 1966.  It had been organized to assert the student's commitment to human freedom and opposition to the oppression of black and mixed-race South Africans.  Invited by the National Union of South African Students - whose president at the eleventh hour was banned from attending - to deliver a speech for the occasion, Robert Kennedy found eighteen thousand people waiting outside to welcome him when he arrived at the majestic Jameson Hall.  It took him half an hour just to make his way through the enthusiastic welcomers.
     His procession into the building had been led by a student holding an unlit torch to represent the extinguishing of academic freedom.   According to those observing him, the American visitor had tears in his eyes as he climbed the stage.
    "I came here," he began, "because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage."
      Then he paused.  "I refer, of course, to the United States of America."
     
-Chris Matthews,  Bobby Kennedy:  A Raging Spirit

full RFK speech here