Vote with your feet
ON November 10, 2016, there was no chance I’d be getting out of Manhattan and making my flight at JFK. The city was gridlocked. I was in New York on a Writer Residency that had lasted 10 weeks, housed with writers and journalists from 35 countries.
It had been a pressure pot of ideas and heated debates.
The latest polls had just come in and it was clear.
Donald Trump was winning the race for Presidency of the United States of America.
I stepped out of my hotel in Manhattan and braved a walk with some of my writer colleagues to Trump Tower.
The streets were thronging with people. They had come out in their masses, marching on Trump Tower. And that was just the start. New York had just been brought to an absolute standstill by the combined dissent of thousands of people – walking, marching, carrying placards.
And Trump had not even been officially inaugurated yet.
My colleague, a writer from Venezuela, reminded me of a moment when we both had watched in silence on television, on September 1, 2016, as the streets of Caracas had thronged with more than a million Venezuelans.
The people of Venezuela had come out en masse to demand a referendum to remove President Nicolas Maduro from his corrupt rule. Nothing happened. Maduro is still there wielding his fascism. But they came out and they marched.
Another vehement poet in our group, an activist for Kashmiri rights, reminded us that in India, people would take to the streets in their masses to protest against things as serious as the harassment and rape of a woman in Delhi to MS Dhoni’s royal duck at Lords.
It was then that an informal discussion by several writers from Latin America, Africa, India and Burma began on a bus that sat like a stationary frog for hours on 42nd Street and Broadway.
And like this bullfrog symphony, we all croaked in unison.
This turned into a political and an existential debate, much like the one I would imagine Chekov, the literary father of humanist fiction, would have in his own mind.
In all our accents, we wondered, “what on Earth was the point of marches anyway?”
I reminded my tempestuous colleagues of the words of Martin Luther King jr, in an essay he wrote on the Behaviourist and Psychological Role of Marches.
Us writers had been very fortunate to have attended a lecture given by an ex-Black Panther Activist in Chicago weeks before and his words rang true with those of Dr King, “The role of a civil march is to inject psychological and ideological changes within a group”. I couldn’t agree more. My Venezuelan friend disagreed, saying marches simply incited, with no real change resulting from all that shouting and exhaustion. I did not blame him. His country was in tatters, despite marches. “Marches are just diagnostic tools to gauge the numbers, so that the ruler being criticised can re-design his strategy,” he insisted.
Although I agreed with this, I thought there were more layers to it. I reminded him of our meeting with feminist writer Roxanne Gay in Iowa City, where she spoke about the Suffragette Movement in the early 1900s.
The Great Suffragette March of Women, demanding the right to vote, began in London, but extended to the US in a series of extensive Women’s Marches in Washington DC in 1913, and Roxanne Gay was clear enough to reiterate many times that it took seven long years of marches and protests before women’s right to the vote was secured.
I was then reminded of the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, who coined the term and later an entire research canon – The Collective Consciousness.
Here, he speaks of the gathering of a collective of like-minded individuals who are filled with vitriol, and that in any group, a herd, a tribe, people’s anger is tempered down into a collective sustained effort of positivity.
It is a side effect of togetherness.
And from the roots of positive togetherness there are many branches.
It is not just for the feel good factor of shouting out things that have been running around your own head, nor finally using your voice rather than your thumbs to spew out your anger. You no longer need to count characters on social media posts. And it is not only psychological catharsis that results from expressions of collective dissent.
If we are to keep our silence and not air our dirty laundry in the way of huge public marches and outcries, how then are we to be taken notice of as the people of this nation?
Was it not Martin Luther King jr who praised the massive turnout of people loudly expressing their dissent on the famous march on Washington on August 28, 1963, where his words “I have a dream” are immortalised in stone?
Obviously I made it out of Manhattan and landed smack into the many debacles of South African politics.
The latest one, perhaps the most significant one in post-apartheid South Africa, is the one we are all watching with baited breath now.
Initially a sceptic, I envisioned a sporadic sprinkling of events in Durban where very few people wore black, conscious of the humidity first and the humanity later, whispering: “March-no march, what march, when march… ”. But, I was wrong. Durban marched in unison with many cities and towns in South Africa on April 7.
My attempt in this essay has been two-fold.
One is to place the actions of South African citizen movements against political discontent in a global context where we as the people need to realise that marches as means of protest are not the sole vanguard of the current political rhetoric.
The second is to place an authenticity on marches in a historical context, so that the marches organised and implemented by various political parties and civil action groups in South Africa can be seen by the people as not useless endeavours, but tools.
The whispers have begun now, after the marching has been done and dusted.
Will the hundreds of thousands of South African citizens from all sectors of society, who came out en masse to march see the effects of their combined dissent?
Many political analysts feel that no effect will be seen, leading to a further demoralisation of the people.
People in South Africa are wondering if the marches were just means to gain political mileage by opposing parties.
In engaging this idiom I remind South Africans of the marches of the past.
The Women’s Anti-Pass March of 1956, the Gandhi-led March from Natal to Transvaal in 1913 and most recently The #FeesMustFall marches in 2016.
At the time, who knew if these efforts would bear fruit?
But, much like the marches that have graced the pages of history, worldwide, South Africa must now stand on the global stage and realise that it is very likely that, all that dissent may seem like they amounted to nothing. But judging from the past, in South Africa and worldwide, the combined efforts did have strong effects.
They afforded us South Africans the ability to exercise our basic human rights written in the Freedom Charter and our democratic right to express.
Remember the Durban Moment? That time in the 1970s when Durban was at the centre of purposeful anti-apartheid marches and speeches.
Well, I don’t remember it. I was not even born then. But, I had my Durban moment recently when I walked in unison with my fellow Durbanites on April 7. South Africa had a moment. And the sum total of this moment is exceedingly more than its separate parts.
We should be proud of this.
Zainab Priya Dala is a novelist and essayist and has been awarded the Honorary Fellowship in Writing at the University of Iowa. Her debut novel What About Meera was released in 2015 and her latest novel The Architecture of Loss is due for worldwide release on July 4. She writes in her personal capacity.