‘Country’s land is changing hands’
IN 1979, then aged 37, the Reverend Jesse Jackson came to Cape Town to rouse the black squatter community into a fervour of self-discovery.
“I may be poor but I am somebody,” the young firebrand chanted at the time.
When the crowds took up this refrain after him, it was like thunder from high above had descended on a people apartheid had long condemned to second-class citizen status.
He was in the country again this last week for the funeral of a long-time comrade in the Struggle, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who recently died at 81.
Jackson no longer speaks with a booming voice, the fire of oratory is gone. Of course it would have – the man is 77. He is now aware that he no longer needs to scream to be heard. The fact alone that he opens his mouth is enough to get any audience straining their collective ear to hear him.
He has been a friend of black South Africans for the better part of his life. He stood on the side of the marginalised in the fight against the evil system of apartheid.
He makes the distinction clear throughout his speech at the Sandton Sun on Tuesday and recalls that he was in South Africa in very cold weather on that 1979 trip.
But trade unionist Cedric Gina, who was in the audience, remembers another highly charged Jackson delivery in 1984, known as the “David and Goliath” speech.
“You were sweating on that occasion,” Gina reminded the US civil rights campaigner.
But with the passage of time, it is clear Jackson no longer delivers rowdy, goosebumps-inducing speeches.
He shares with his audience. “Interact” is the word.
Just a few years ago, the outspoken Jackson landed himself in a bit of a pickle when he inadvertently said into a microphone he didn’t know why it was that former US president Barack Obama “talks down at black folk”.
Jackson now talks with his audience, not at them.
In that 1979 speech – while distributing copies of The New York Times article of July 24 of that year – he had said: “If I ask you what’s happening in this country you’re probably going to say ‘nothing’, but you’re wrong. This land is changing hands.”
Fast-forward to today, and this land is indeed changing hands. The land question is no longer an abstract notion – Parliament has finally seen fit to legislate the need for expropriation without compensation.
We must focus on the land owned by black people, he says.
“That must be addressed in meaningful ways.”
He says we’re into the fourth stage of our Struggle; after slavery, political apartheid and the right to vote. We need to mobilise allies to help us win against economic apartheid, he says.
“Now we focus on economic apartheid. We now need economic allies,” Jackson says, and keeps repeating this so it sinks in.
“We need to globalise capital, globalise human rights, workers rights. A free South Africa is a growing South Africa.”
He speaks like a teacher now, one that wants to make sure the lesson filters through the class. No angst-filled, “freedom now” high rhetoric of the US civil rights movement of his time around Dr Martin Luther King jr.
He asks the audience to repeat certain messages after him, just to make sure he is clear. It worries him that, post1994, “blacks are freer, whites are richer”.
“Our engagement with banks, insurance, risk capital, marketing, media and other sectors must be based on how we can leverage our number. Blacks are the majority,” he says.
“In the US, for example we began to confront the banks about their investment portfolio. We went to Silicon Valley, to Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook.
“We challenged them to open up the boards. We bought shares when they did not open their books to give us information. If you’re on the board, you have the right to that information.”
Jackson is happy that Bill Gates’s successor at Microsoft is an African-American.
“We have to democratise the economy.” He says this a lot. But before approaching the companies, black people need to do research (on these companies).
He says the largest employer in Africa is CocaCola. “Engage with them.”
In this “new dimension of our Struggle, economic freedom”, Jackson is of the adamant view that it is no longer enough to just “complain about the politics”.
They are getting things right in America, it would appear.
One great example he makes is that “we teach young children, through churches, the benefits of financial literacy. Basic things, like “how to get a loan.”.
The investors who come in, Jackson says, should reverse the idea of “investing in Sandton, instead of Soweto”.
He saw almost no whites at Madikizela-Mandela’s funeral, he says, almost as if in a soliloquy.
“We’ve learnt to survive apartheid, we can learn to live together.”