Institute for Justice and Reconciliation Memory Project in Memory and
Identity
11 August 2007
Thank you very much to Professor Charles Villa-Vicencio and Institute for
Justice and Reconciliation both for organising this day, bringing us together,
but also for the on going work. I want to thank you particularly for that
connection between two concepts that I think have become matters of debate in
the media over the last few weeks: The notions of Justice and
Reconciliation.
I think this institute in particular, has tried to keep this debate alive.
But I suspect that it took some real life examples to open it up in a way that
ordinary citizens, key decision makers of the past and key decision makers of
today can enter into some kind of debate about what is the balancing point
between Justice and the needs for Reconciliation.
We have said that, our vision for the Western Cape is that it becomes a Home
for All, n tuiste vir almal, ikhaya lethu sonke. When the President visited us
just under a month ago, for the Imbizo programme, he said "I was in the Western
Cape, but I have not really thought about the vision of a home for all. But
when I was sitting with the representatives of the 15 areas that have been
identified as the 15 areas with the greatest poverty, the greatest
unemployment, the greatest underdevelopment, the greatest problems in crime, in
drugs, in gangsterism and social dysfunctional, I began to see the importance
of idea of a home for all."
I went to a place like Lwandle and I listened to people speaking about the
needs, for houses, for water, for electricity, for jobs and other pressing
needs. I listened to leadership from the Western Cape, from all communities and
I heard how there were coloured leaders who believed that Africans were getting
everything and Africans who believed that the Western Cape is still a paradise
for coloureds.
So, how do we understand our movement towards a home for all when part of
our problem in the Western Cape is that we miss each other in that discussion
about unity we are not able to acknowledge each other in the debate. No one is
prepared to use the President's words to "put themselves in each other's
shoes." No one is prepared to stop a person from Mitchell's Plain who sees an
African from lost city and calls him a Kaffir. But we are not saying we should
tolerate that language, but if we were to put ourselves into that person's
shoes what would we experience? Why does that person think that Africans are
the threat to her as a coloured? Why does that person think that the Africans
take their jobs, their houses and all those kinds of things?
How do we deal with it in the same way when someone from Gugulethu believes
that coloureds are getting everything? How do we put ourselves into the shoes
of that person from Gugulethu in order to understand their experiences and how
they feel? How do we put ourselves into the shoes of white people who retire
behind big walls, have to install alarm systems in order to increase security
measures because they feel unsafe? How do we put ourselves in each other's
shoes?
I think that is probably one of the very important challenges in the Western
Cape, it is to put ourselves in each other's shoes, simply to try and
understand the view point of someone else because I think that is the starting
point towards beginning to make the Western Cape a home for all. Some people
seem to believe that the only problem with apartheid was that, it divided
people and it denied black people the vote. And now having constitutional
equality and the vote given to black people, that we essentially solved the
problem of apartheid.
There are those who go so far as to say that if you try and open up the past
and not to live with constitutional equality that we have now by opening old
wounds, that we are engaging in an unnecessary exercise. They are also saying
that this will recreate conditions for tension amongst different groups. That
perspective also moves very quickly to implying that that now that we have
constitutional equality, we can deny that fact that our people are still
divided, that we have thus far not been able to have this discussion in a way
that would bring us closer together. They also want to assume that we do not
need other measures to underpin that constitutional equality.
And so, to large extent, we have understood that not only must we create a
vision of home for all, we have to actively undermine the perspective which
says, that constitutional equality and the right to vote is enough. And that is
why we have underpinned the vision of a home for all with a Growth and
Development Strategy (GDS) that we call 'Ikapa elihlumayo,' the Cape that we
grow and the Cape that we share. Meaning, it is not enough to grow the Cape, we
have to share it as well. And that is where your role comes in.
That is where we begin to speak to each other through mechanisms for sharing
to overcome the past, through affirmative action which tries to rectify the
past, affirmative budgeting to try and give more money in some areas where
there have been depravation employment equity to get black people fast tracked
with regard to skills and jobs and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) to get
ownership and participation in the economy. These are mechanisms not only to
grow the Cape but also to share the Cape.
The truth of the matter is we are doing fairly well as a Western Cape
Government in terms of some of the material things that we are getting right.
This is a province where our people have access to water, to sanitation, to
electricity, to telephones and other services. From all the communities, rural
and urban, African, Coloured, Indian and White, we have an average of 96% of
our people having access to basic services. Meaning that only four percent of
our people in the Western Cape do not have access to those basics and services.
We have the highest matric pass rates although the quality of it in something
that we have to continue to interrogate. We've got the highest access, again to
Social Services, pensions, grants, healthcare etc.
We have the lowest unemployment, although the concentration of unemployment
is amongst the young black people, particularly Africans. We have a high
housing backlog and that is particularly because of the history of the Western
Cape. But the fact of the matter is that, on schooling, on healthcare, on
welfare, on basic services and even on access to work, the Western Cape does
fairly well, with exception for all its communities.
That begins to tell me that the restlessness that we feel, the suspicion of
other, the calling of names, the division amongst us, sometimes the racism
amongst us, the identity challenges that we all face, it begins to tell me that
this home for all, can not be based only on material well being. Meaning that,
while we have to get the material things, moving for our people and while we
have got to continue to grow and share the Cape materially, we must also find
ways in which to rid our people of the suspicion, the intolerance and of the
habit to reject.
The point is we also have to look almost into the soul of our people, where
much of that restlessness that we feel sits. We need to look back as well, we
need to go into our memory and what I think we need to understand, is that it
is not only the continuities in our memory, the things that we remember, we
also need intensively to look at the discontinuities in our memories. The
things that we have forgotten, that we were made to forget, where memory has
been distorted, abused, suppressed and violated. Because maybe it is in both in
the continuity as well as the discontinuities of memory that we will find the
answers for healing and reconciliation.
I think that we have to look very clearly where these discontinuities come
from, in our memory? What are some of these discontinuities? I think just very
simply, given the fact that a key victim of colonialism and apartheid was also
religion. Islam was banned in the Western Cape and suppressed for 200 years.
Christianity was distorted in order to justify both colonialism and apartheid.
Although there have been enormous claim backs in that both Islam and
Christianity were used for liberation. But we are in fact more united than we
realise.
In the first Epistle of John, which starts, "who lives in love lives in God
and God in them" and then it ends up by saying, "this much you must know, I
have given you of my spirit." The Quran contains a similar scripture. While
there maybe a continuity in memory of our religion, we must examine where there
is a discontinuity in memory about spirituality and divinity, that is very
important because we do not seem to recognise the Devine in each other, we do
not seem to interact with each other, as if each one is carrying a part of the
spirit of God. And so I raise that, as the first illustration of both the
continuity as well as the discontinuity of memory, because I believe, it may be
part of our problem that it is difficult sometimes for Africans, Coloureds,
Whites and Indians to see each other as carriers of the spirit that each of us
have been given by Devine law.
The second area of discontinuity is the fact that a large part of Cape
history has been defined by slavery. Slavery by itself is the violence
dislocation of people not only from the countries, not only from geographical
spaces but also from their cultures, from the people, from the values, from
what they hold dear. So what was carried forward except the fragrance of memory
that these things happened and how have they impacted on society today?
Thirdly, the genocide of the Khoi and San. That is the killing of an entire
community. They exist only as exhibits in the museums, a valley of the past.
What discontinuity in memory comes in? What interruption in memory happens with
slavery and the genocide? Also, the killing of an entire language that was
spoken in the Western Cape, the language spoken by the Khoi and the San?
If the South African National Symbol did not rescue a part of it and give it
respect, we would even have thought that there was an entire language that has
been killed of and if language is the carrier of culture, is the carry of
tradition, is the carry of values, what is the impact of a discontinuity that
comes with the killing not only of a people, but also of a language? What is
the discontinuity that comes for Africans? Xhosa speaking people for example,
when an entire province is pro-claimed a coloured labour preference area, where
Africans are seen as intruders with a false notion that only those whose labour
are required, are allowed here, but families are left behind.
That is the particular history and even the 13 years into democracy, we do
not have the kind of budget to make up for the systematic denial of African's
right to come into Western Cape with for example, a housing budget or an
Education budget. What does that mean in terms of discontinuities of memory? So
what I thought, that I wanted to do hopefully, to stimulate on further thinking
for the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation is to programmatise this
notion of memory because the default position in memory is the continuity and
we often think that in the position you have to iron the few wrinkles of
disposition. And you've got to keep it alive, and you've got to memorialise
it.
I'm saying that, in our search of the Western Cape to become a home for all,
we may have to deal a lot more with the discontinuity of memory because in that
line some of the answers to the persistent problem today. When you go around to
places in the Western Cape and you speak about the origins of people and in
particular in Coloured community, we speak about our white father. Now it may
be amusing at one level, but the fact of the matter is what violence went into
that? The white father fathering a child, what violation of the mother took
place? What violence went into slavery to create that discontinuity?
Genocide and the killing of the language but itself is a violent act, the
denial of African's right, for African mothers and children to be with the
father in Cape Town resulting in the bulldozes, the shootings and so forth in
KTC and Cross Roads, Endabeni and to many other places. The removal of people
from where they lived. What violence went into it? And in trying to understand
our role in the Western Cape but particularly in the 15 areas that we are
speaking about that are the epidemic of drugs, of crime, of gangsters and other
kinds of social pathologist. How much of needs to be traced back to the
discontinuities in our memory to understand the origins of violence that
persists today?
The fact that we do not have a culture of problem solving except through
beating of our wives, that we do not have an inherited set of values that
informs right and wrong. And so, in a very real way, we've got to be able to
manage, not only the continuities in memory, and to memorialise but I think we
need a very intensive process to piece together the discontinuities because I
suspect that in the violence that created much of the discontinuities in our
memories, we may find the origins of much of pathologist that we try to deal
with in the Western Cape, whether they manifest themselves as violence against
women, intra community violence on the Friday night at the shebeen, the murder
statistics that we have in the Western Cape, the need for gangsters to be your
bonding mates, the need for drugs to deaden your soul and all of those kinds of
things. I suspect that we must also find ways in which to deal with not only
the continuities in of our memory, but particularly the discontinuities in our
memory.
Thank you.
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
11 August 2007
