‘Most promises of liberation not fulfilled’
“I LIVED in a South Africa which was full of challenges and I am grateful today that I more or less rose to the challenges. The challenges were our opportunities and we either grabbed those and ran with them or we were apathetic, turned our backs on them and lost out on what had been given to us.”
Professor Fatima Meer was speaking on her 80th birthday in August 2008 at her home in Durban about her life and struggle against apartheid and white minority rule.
She was one of the most prominent anti-apartheid activists who made an indelible contribution to the struggle before 1994.
I had come to know Professor Meer closely since the early 1970s when I worked for the Daily News, which was then at 85 Field (Joe Slovo) Street in central Durban.
Professor Meer was attached to the then University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal) and was involved in a number of social and women’s organisations.
I would telephone Meer regularly about the work she was doing to promote, among other things, social interaction, the upliftment of education among the marginalised and poor and her total rejection of those who worked with the apartheid regime in institutions such as the South African Indian Council (Saic), the House of Delegates (HOD) and the homelands.
She had been involved in the struggle almost all her life despite being harassed by the former security police and suffering bannings, house arrest, detention, the denial of a passport to travel overseas and an assassination attempt on her life. She had also been restricted to her home in Durban.
Her social and political awareness became acute while she was growing up in a Durban home in which her father, Moosa Ismail Meer, a newspaper editor, constantly spoke to his large family of nine children about the racial inequalities that persisted.
Her active involvement in the anti-apartheid movement got well under way during her student days at the University of Natal and she became involved in the 1946 Passive Resistance campaigns. She initiated the Student Passive Resistance Committee.
With her husband, Ismail Meer, also a socialist and anti-apartheid activist, she worked closely with Nelson Mandela, Dr Albert Luthuli, Dr Yusuf Dadoo, Dr Monty Naicker, Ahmed Kathrada and Dr Kesavalu Goonum before the ANC was banned in 1960.
Thereafter, she worked with leaders such as Winnie Mandela and Steve Biko and other leaders of the Black Consciousness movement.
She was also among leaders who established the Federation of Black Women.
For most of the 1980s and 1990s, she concentrated her social and political work with the Institute of Black Research, which was based at the University of Natal.
Even after the ANC came to power in 1994 and the second democratic elections in 1999, Meer, with other community leaders, established the Committee of Concern to highlight the plight of the poor.
She went to Chatsworth to speak to community members about her concerns that people of Indian origin had voted for the DA, “our former oppressors”.
She then learnt that the community was experiencing hardship under the rule of what they called “our current oppressors, the ANC”.
She began to take up issues involving housing and water and electricity disconnections.
Meer had to dodge tear gas fired by the police while participating in protest marches with community members.
At the time of her 80th birthday, there was disquiet among former anti-apartheid activists about all the reports of fraud and corruption; the growing gap between the rich and poor and the infighting within the ANC.
It was against this background that I spoke to Meer about her battles and what she had hoped for the new non-racial, democratic South Africa.
She was concerned at that time, in August 2008, that the values and principles that she and tens of thousands of others had fought and died for had not been realised in the new South Africa.
“Although we applaud our constitution all the time and walk around thinking we have the best constitution in the world, the truth of the matter is that democracy has evaded the people,” she had said.
“Democracy has been captured and confined to the political parties and that is our problem.
“It is very sad that when you think of the ANC as a liberation organisation and what it has become in government.
“Most of the promises of liberation have not materialised. That is our greatest tragedy.”
She said: “In general, the governing body has not established equality. Poverty is rampant among our people, so we have to reform in the true sense of the word to re-establish, reform, renew and govern with the same values that we fought with.
“This corruption must end. The money must go back to the people. The land must be redistributed among the people and we must develop our agricultural resources.
“Prior to colonialism, we had a very strong and vibrant African peasantry. Colonisation destroyed that.
“It is our duty to resurrect that peasantry, so that it becomes one way of dealing with poverty.
“If our people can’t work the land and raise food from the land, there’s going to be movement from the rural to the urban areas.
“Crime has to come to an end. So there’s an enormous amount of work to be done. We can do it. India used to have its five-year plans under Jawaharlal Nehru and they worked.
“Today India is a great, booming economy and we could become like India.
“We have to have another government. Now I am quite convinced that the ANC will suffer an erosion in support in forthcoming elections.
“The electorate will be significantly weaker in numbers and that will reflect in the withdrawal of the support of the people.
“People know exactly what is wrong and they are going to put it right and that is my hope.”
She also spoke out against Julius Malema, who was leader of the ANC Youth League at that time.
Malema and his members shouted in demonstrations that they were prepared “to kill for Zuma” when marching against former president Thabo Mbeki.
Malema recently incurred the wrath of the community of Indian origin when he alleged at his EFF party’s fourth anniversary celebrations at Currie’s Fountain in Durban that Indians, among other things, exploited and were “ill-treating our people”.
She said of Malema in 2008: “These are the kind of people we can do without. They disgrace us and disillusion us. But we should not allow the Malemas to take us off our path, the great path to freedom carved out for us by Nelson Mandela. This cannot be abandoned, and no sunset can fall on that path because of a Malema.”