Phoenix Settlement on Human Rights Day
21 March 2006
Thank you, Programme Director,
The Chairperson of the Phoenix Settlement Trust, Mr Mewa Ramgobin,
The Speaker of the National Assembly, Ms Baleka Mbete,
Your Excellency, The High Commissioner of India, Mr Pal,
Ms Ela Gandhi, the grand daughter of Mahatma Gandhi,
The President of the Sai Movement, Dr Reddy,
The Trustees of the Phoenix Settlement,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen
I feel greatly honoured by the invitation to address you today. Today marks
the launch of the year-long celebrations of Satyagraha. I must congratulate the
Phoenix Settlement Trust for having chosen today, South African Human Rights
Day, a day we have set aside in the calendar to mark an extremely tragic day in
the history of our country.
On this day 46 years ago sometime during the late morning, the apartheid
regimeâs police massacred 69 African demonstrators who had peacefully assembled
at the Sharpeville police station to protest the pass laws. Later that day at
around six in the evening, at Langa township in Cape Town, a further three
people were killed by police fire.
Till this day the apartheid regime, its apologists and its former supporters
can offer no explanation for these two shootings. At Sharpeville most of the
dead were shot in the back, indicating that they were very likely in flight,
away from the armed police. Similarly with the wounded at both Sharpeville and
Langa. The massacres that day shocked the world and sent shockwaves through the
country.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that 21 March 1960 was the crucial
watershed that separates the phase of non-violent struggle that we had waged
until then, from the phase that followed, which saw the founding of uMkhonto
weSizwe in 1961, the attempt to build a peopleâs army capable of waging an
armed struggle for the freedom of our people and our country. Sharpeville also
laid bare for the world to see the crass brutality of the apartheid regime; its
utter disregard for human life and its contempt for international opinion. In
every part of the world one travelled in one could always point to Sharpeville
as the justification for the decision to take up arms!
Yet, there was an important dimension of the events of that day we dare not
lose sight of. No one, least of all the demonstrators, nor even those
responsible for mobilizing those demonstrations, wanted to see bloodshed on
that fateful day. No! Quite the contrary! The Anti-Pass Campaign launched that
day was conceived, organised and executed as a peaceful, non-violent protest
against an unjust law. The only violence that occurred that day was at the
behest of the apartheid regime and its minions.
The methods of struggle employed by the oppressed people of South Africa not
a very interesting pedigree. What is more, it is important to underline that
these tactics were actually conceived and first tested on South African soil!
And, let us not forget â they were conceived and tested precisely to oppose and
to struggle against the Pass Laws not as applied to Africans, originally, but
as applied to South Africans of Indian descent! There is thus an amazingly long
umbilical cord that connects the centenary we are celebrating, the events of
March 21st 1960 and the memorialisation of the martyrs who fell that day and
Human Rights Day.
âSatyagrahaâ the quest for truth and right by bearing witness, was conceived
by the Mahatma when the authorities in the Transvaal colony as it was then
called imposed pass laws on the Indian people. That was 100 years ago. As one
has had occasion to mention, Satyagraha would have withered on the vine as a
concept and as a method of struggle had it not been for the response Gandhi
received from the Indian population of South Africa. Civil disobedience that is
deliberately breaking a law in order to make it unworkable and unenforceable
was first tested by the thousands who responded to Gandhiâs call.
The power of Satygraha lay in the willingness of the practitioner to endure
physical and emotional pain, even humiliation. It taught the practitioner how
to conquer fear and to transcend self pity. It is the expression of a certain
type of courage that does not require bravado, but rather a profound sense of
self-confidence not only in oneâs self but also in the justice of oneâs
cause!
Those first volunteers, whose numbers were swelled by others when they were
carted off to jail, had no way of knowing that they had set in train a movement
that was to sweep the world. From them sprang the millions who followed the
Mahatma when he returned to India; the millions who followed Martin Luther King
in the USA; the millions who year after year marched from Aldermaston to London
until the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was adopted; the thousands who clog the
streets in the present day during meetings of the G8 and the World Trade
Organisation to protest the inequitable terms of trade imposed on the
developing countries.
Civil disobedience is a proudly South African product and South Africa owes
to its citizens of Indian descent! As Gandhi explained; ââ¦.the doctrine came to
mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponentâ¦âAnd
it is important to underscore, that in virtually every struggle for freedom,
apart from the structural violence of oppression the main source of violence is
invariably the oppressor, and not the oppressed! Programme Director, in
preparation for the ANCâs national conference in 1997, I had occasion to pen
the following lines:
âThe attainment of Indian independence was of great political, social,
psychological and symbolic importance to all the peoples in the colonies. India
was the world's largest colony. It was probably the richest British colony -
fondly referred to as the "Jewel in the Crown" in the literature of imperial
nostalgia. The independence of India in 1947 was the first decisive triumph of
the liberation movements in the colonies and semi-colonies. Independent India
was also the very first country to place the issue of racial oppression in
South Africa on the agenda of the newly founded United Nations Organisation
(UNO). As such it had a very direct bearing on the struggle of our own people.
For the other colonies it represented the implicit guarantee of colonial
freedom. It gave a very positive impetus to the irresistible drive towards
colonial freedom that unfolded during the 1950s and 1960s.
Yet, the emancipation of India came in a form that was far less than the
movement for independence had fought for. The country was partitioned along
religious lines. The creation of Pakistan was a totally arbitrary act of
colonial despotism because there was no precedent of such an entity - a Muslim
state - in pre-colonial India. That act built into India's hard won
independence a virtually permanent source of tension.â I went on to conclude:
Virtually all the liberation movements that attained victory after 1947
including our own, have been forced to make compromises at the point of
victory. National liberation has rarely come in the form that the movement
sought. Consequently, the terrain on which the triumphant movement has to
manoeuvre after victory is not necessarily all of its own choosing or
making.
Anniversaries are important as marking a climax, the crucial nodal point in
time the people finally assuming power. But while we might focus on a single
day, a single event, or happenings revolutions are not a moment they are
processes. Processes in which there are nodal moments like 27 April 1994, but
they are a continuum. Our own national democratic revolution is no different.
On 27 April 1994 will remain a very significant day in South African history
but in reality it merely marks a high point in a continuing process. In that
ongoing process there will be moments of rapid advance but there will also be
the need sometimes to retreat. Retreating does not mean conceding defeat, it is
most often a tactical manoeuvre undertaken to put off till a more opportune
time action one would have preferred to take in the present.
What I am suggesting therefore is that national liberation movements have in
many cases been compelled to postpone aspects of their programme and policy in
the light of an intractable tactical conjuncture. The retreat in other words is
undertaken in order to prepare for a more coherent and better planned
advance.
It is important that we boldly acknowledge and accept that the movement has
had to seek compromises and make concessions to the old order so that we could
attain the important beach head of majority rule in 1994.â On this Human Rights
Day I want to return to the theme of an unfinished revolution as it affects us
here in South Africa. As a nation we are justly proud of the democratic
Constitution we have. It has won plaudits throughout the world as one of the
most far reaching and progressive. Yet casting our eyes around this country
indeed at our immediate surroundings, it is clear that the rights in our
Constitution are aspiration and not yet the reality for the overwhelming
majority of South Africans.
The challenge I want to pose on this Human Rights Day is: what do we have to
do to translate our Constitutional rights from aspiration to the lived reality
of our people. We have identified the scourge of poverty, which degrades,
humiliates and de-humanises far too many of our people as the principal enemy
of our people in the present. To confront and defeat this enemy will require
the same measure of self sacrifice, courage, endurance, determination and
confidence that we demonstrated in the struggle to defeat apartheid. The enemy
even under apartheid was not a group of people defined either by race or skin
colour. The enemy we always contended was a system, a system to be sure
operated and manned by people but a system rooted in dogmas of racial
superiority and buttressed by military and economic power.
That is why we as a movement at no time sought to avenge ourselves for the
wrongs and injustices inflicted upon us by either killing all the whites or
trying to drive them out of the country. Once the oppressive system was
dismantled we have sought to live at peace with each other and to build a new
non-racial, non-sexist South Africa in which we are all equal. Our commitment
to those objectives will not be shaken, no matter what hare-brained racist
notions may be flung about by others.
Tackling the scourge of poverty means hard nosed reasoning and actions
arrived at rationally through an appreciation of the immediate and
inter-mediate capacities we can marshal as a country. As someone has said;
âItâs the economy, stupid!â That is, it is only by growing the economy of our
country that we will create the resource base that will enable us to fight
poverty.
When he made his State of the Nation address this year, President Thabo
Mbeki unveiled the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa
(AsgiSA) whose aim is to stimulate the rapid growth of our economy through a
number of interventions by the state. But as government we recognise that the
state acting on its own, cannot hope to produce the required impact if it is
not met half way by the private sector.
The government is proceeding from the high level of macro-economic stability
we have attained over the past twelve years of democracy to implement a number
of micro-economic reforms. These in turn a premised on evolving a partnership
among government, business, labour and civil society. The stateâs principal
interventions will be in the realm of infra-structure its expansion,
refurbishment and reconstruction where necessary. The Expanded Public Works
Programme (EPWP) will also feature prominently among the governmentâs
contributions to this national effort. My own Department will be making massive
new investments in our creative industries, libraries and our heritage
institutions. The programme Investing in Culture, our flagship in the fight
against poverty, will see impressive new interventions utilising the seven
anniversaries we are marking this year as a platform. I want to use the
opportunity afforded by todayâs platform to call upon you all to find and
define a role for yourselves in this massive national thrust to eradicate
poverty.
Programme Director, as we celebrate Satyagraha we celebrate not only the
legacy bequeathed to us and the world by Mahatma Gandhi but also the struggle
for freedom and human dignity in whose crucible this method of struggle was
forged. Those who sacrificed in the struggle for freedom did so with no eye
towards material rewards. It is that same spirit that must today imbue us all
whether we have chosen to serve in government or outside government. The
greatest and must sustainable reward we can offer them all, the volunteers of
1906, those 1913 and those of 1946 at Umbilo Road, those who took part in the
Defiance Campaign, the martyrs slaughtered at Sharpeville and Langa, the young
people killed in the streets of Soweto and other parts of the country in 1976,
is the quality of the democracy we build.
Poverty, racism and sexism demean and degrade all of humankind. Fighting
this side by side, I have no doubt that we shall win!
Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
21 March 2006
Source: Department of Arts and Culture (http://www.dac.gov.za/)
