Loudmouth politicians out for short-term gain should look at the long road we’ve travelled
The idea of the new SA has always been to unite all the people of this country, to have them stride ahead with a common purpose while respecting each other’s differences. It is a project that’s largely been accomplished but, as in many other countries, it remains a work in progress.
The dream —and the costs involved — were summed up by Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia trial more than half a century ago: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Of course, there are those quick to pooh-pooh these sentiments even as they enjoy the fruits of what Mandela and his ilk gave so much for. They were brave words. Mandela and his comrades faced the real possibility of being sent to the gallows. Mercifully that didn’t happen, but instead they were sentenced to life on Robben Island.
Almost three decades later Mandela came out of prison to lay the foundation for the new society he told the judge about. The preamble of the constitution says in part, taken almost word for word from the Freedom Charter: “We, the people of South Africa … Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.” That’s the contract that binds us.
But apartheid had other ideas. The inflection point is actually not 1948, as is often believed, but the founding of the Union — in 1910. Determined to bring about peace between Boer and Brit, Britain, the colonial power, turned a deaf ear to black aspirations, and literally left blacks in the lurch, where they were to stay for almost another century. Instead the Union government enacted a piece of legislation which was to be the bedrock of apartheid, the infamous Natives Land Act of 1913, denying black people any land rights outside the so-called reserves.
The black elite responded by forming what became the African National Congress, whose mode of protest consisted of pleas, petitions and delegations to England to implore the British crown. The ANC was not averse to operating within government-created structures. Years later, during the turbulent 1980s, working within the system became akin to signing one’s own death warrant.
It was not until the formation of the ANC Youth League in 1944 and its adoption of the so-called Programme of Action five years later that a sense of anger and urgency was injected into the movement, primarily by the ascent to power of the unapologetically pro-apartheid National Party. The mood and the tenor of the struggle changed dramatically. The pace quickened. The 1950s was chock-a-block with events that had a major impact on the direction of the country — the Defiance Campaign in 1952; the adoption of the Freedom Charter in Kliptown in 1955; the treason trial involving the leadership of the Congress Alliance beginning in 1956; and, significantly, Robert Sobukwe leading the Africanists out of the ANC in 1958 to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania a year later.
Hardly a year after the formation of the PAC, Sobukwe led his party in a confrontation with the state against the pass laws. The Sharpeville massacre was the outcome, and the state responded by banning both the PAC and ANC. And SA was at war with itself.
The breakaway of the PAC from the ANC was the first major split of the forces fighting against apartheid. The bone of contention was the Freedom Charter, which the Africanists believed glossed over the land issue. As Sobukwe was to put it later: “… how could they try to avoid the issue of whose land has been taken by whom?”
The split meant that instead of two, the country now had three ideas vying for supremacy — the Nats’ divisive apartheid policies, the ANC’s policy of nonracialism and the PAC’s version of nonracialism, which put more emphasis on the land returning to African people.
The PAC’s members spent the time in exile fighting among themselves — and the organisation was a spent force by the time Codesa negotiations began. So it was essentially the visions of the Nats and the ANC that were contending for superiority, and the ANC, of course, triumphed.
The constitution that underpins our democracy largely bears its fingerprints. But we’ve all bought into it because its aims are noble. It seeks to unite all the country’s people under the same banner. It enjoins all of us, not least our public representatives, to work towards achieving its objectives. But listening to our politicians — this week’s parliamentary debate on the VBS looting was a case in point — it seems national unity is the furthest thing from their minds.
They sounded no different from mobs determined to destroy for short-term political gain.
Before opening their mouths, politicians would do better to ask themselves: is the aim to build on what has already been accomplished, or is it to destroy and burn everything with the hope of starting anew?
If unconvinced that words matter, they should cast an eye at what happened this week in the US, an old and more stable society than ours.
That should give them pause for thought.
SA is still a very fragile piece of handiwork which it has taken years of sacrifice to put together. It is not perfect yet but the contours of a brighter future are in place. It needs to be handled with care.