The 5th of December went by without much acknowledgement of the founding president of our democracy, Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela, who left us in 2013 amidst profound expressions of sorrow resonating across the country and the world.
If our universal legend, Madiba, is fated to be simply forgotten or ignored in a mere 11 years, who amongst us will break this collective lapse of memory and shameful lack of appreciation for such a widely acclaimed leader?
Of course, Madiba was the first to concede that he was not a saint, but a mere mortal, a sinner who had flaws, when he was gushed over and praised uncritically.
Coincidentally, the 5th of December marked the centennial of the birth of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
A key mover and shaker in the ANC Youth League, “the Prof” – a title he was bestowed beyond the confines of the University of the Witwatersrand where he worked – was elected the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) on 6th April 1959, countering the officially celebrated Founders Day marking Jan van Riebeeck’s landing in Table Bay.
The Prof led the March 21st 1960 campaign against the notorious pass laws, which declared the African majority as foreigners in the land of their birth.
He gave himself to arrest at the Orlando police station on that fateful day, which saw over 90 peaceful citizens killed and over 230 injured in the massacre at Sharpeville Police Station. Keeping to the principle of “No bail, no plea, no defence”, Sobukwe was sentenced to three years imprisonment in Pretoria for incitement and was confined to six years of unparalleled isolation on Robben Island from May 1963.
Then banned to Kimberley, he succumbed on the 27th of February 1978. Sobukwe held, correctly that “there is only one race to which we all belong, and that is the human race. In our vocabulary, therefore, the word ‘race’, as applied to man, has no plural form.”
The 18th of December marked Bantu Stephen Biko’s birth in 1946.
Biko, the founder of Black Consciousness (BC) in South Africa, was murdered in police custody on the 12th of September 1977.
On 19th October 1977 more than half of the organisations to be banned during apartheid dealt a body blow to BC, which emerged nine years after the ANC and PAC were banned in April 1960. For Biko, “Being black is not a matter of pigmentation – being black is a reflection of a mental attitude” and “whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.”
While it is significant that these three intellectual and leadership giants in our liberation (which has come terribly unstuck) were Eastern Cape activists in their early twenties, they refused to shy away from tackling head-on the thorny ongoing issues of racism, tribalism, inequality and the quest for true freedom in all its dimensions, which still seems to elude us today.
Notably in Brazil, the 20th of November has been recognised as a public Black Consciousness Day, to recall the African slave revolt against Portuguese colonisers which the famous resistance leader, Zumbi dos Palmares, spearheaded.
The Portuguese beheaded Zumbi on that day in 1695, marked in northeast Brazil where African Brazilians are prominent.
In Brazilian establishments today, one can also see signs prominently displayed stating that: to practise, indulge in or incite discrimination or prejudice of colour, race, ethnicity, religion, or place of birth, can result in a sentence of one to three years and a fine; abuse and violence against women is a crime; providing telephone numbers to report such crimes.
Our affirmation of those who gave their all for some of the freedoms we enjoy today should coalesce to a higher level, where we’re able to overcome our quickness to lament the overwhelming feeling of betrayal of our ideals, causing us to cling to and be imprisoned by the past.
This inability to find common cause – as fellow citizens and human beings – with those we disagree with, helps us forget how we got here, failing to give credit to where it is due. We often get so obsessed with our own needs, frustrations and anger, that we actively denude our own humanity.
There is that unique greeting of “Sawubona”, which has largely just been reduced to a knee-jerk platitude.
Many of us can’t seem to appreciate our own sense of self, so immersed are we in our negativity and inability to rise above those things that make us quickly lose hope, lose our ability to just be and share the joy of being alive at a critical time in our short history of democracy, when we confront our worst challenges as individuals, and in the groups that we are part of.
If we can’t appreciate our own worth and dignity, for whatever reason, we’re unable to grant that to others, especially those who are worse off than ourselves.
As we really cannot see worth in ourselves, we can’t see the other. I’ve never come across the most superior persons – from those who had power over and who tortured us then – who hid behind their fearful masks that revealed an insecure, inadequate, frightened tiny being, despite their size. Their greatest fear was “Will you not do to us what we’ve done to you?” We have not done to them what they did to us for so long!
The rise in narrow tribal, language, and other silos heightened during the hard lockdown periods of the Covid-19 pandemic, have now become fairly commonplace in most of our limited discourse.
In the strange time of that wildebeest GNU, which seems to grow new horns with each threat of fallout, the rest of us are left distracted to the point of not wanting to hear the inane spouting of certain leaders, who are so self-absorbed that they can’t understand the historic moment and new reality in the 31st year of our much-vaunted, but deeply troubled, democracy.
Elites cannot get over themselves, especially when they become the first and last items of the agenda they’ve created, which are costly for the rest of us.
At a time when the majority seeks inclusion, a minority seeks exclusion, taking us back to that watershed moment of June 16th 1976.
This minority ignores the harsh lessons of how we got here and even forgets the cataclysmic recent events of July 2021.
Threats and counter-threats on certain laws that are a progression of our liberal democracy, not an autocracy or rule by a few at the expense of the many. Their outdated screams of control over education boil down to either refusing to learn from our painful history or repeating it.
Nobody or group should hold our fragile country to ransom, issuing threats to the president, who forgot to sign the Bela Act into law when he should have, and who is not known for reacting to ultimatums.
These few scream arson, rape and bloody murder, ignoring our future – our children – who have been at great risk from a skewed education and healthcare system, the basis of any sustainable society.
It’s time that we, who have been on the receiving end for so long, tell this elite minority, who continue to benefit from a grossly unequal past, to get over themselves.
Remember, they used to tell us to get over apartheid? Beware what you ask for, which will open festering wounds, further alienate the majority, particularly our children, and infest our core that is barely surviving! Let’s work together to heal historic wounds, and forge a better future that heals, not divides.
**Prof. Saths Cooper is the President Pan-African Psychology Union PAPU, Chair of the Robben Island Museum and a Ex-Political Prisoner.
***The views here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL.
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