Recognition for rights, humanitarian stalwarts

POLITICS in South Africa is bedevilled by a lack of imagination and an absence of refined idealism, according to theologian and human rights activist Barney Pityana.

Delivering one of the Rhodes graduation addresses at the weekend, where he was also awarded an honorary doctorate, Pityana warned there could be no future if people were party only to sustaining privilege and belonging to an elite. He said imagination was essential. “In essence, it’s the exercise of the mind to transcend and transform and imagine beyond the present,” Pityana said.

“We must imagine a better world and recognise [the necessity] of human agency in constructing it.”

He said being a university student was a happy privilege denied to more than 80 000 people who qualified to enter such institutions every year.

“Universal free higher education is a manifesto of the privileged,” he said.

University orator Professor Paul Maylam described Pityana as having been a vital figure in the establishment of the black consciousness student movement in the 1960s.

“Rhodes is proud to honour this [multi-faceted] son of the Eastern Cape – ardent human rights activist, theologian, lawyer, accomplished scholar and an educationalist esteemed for his major contribution to open and distance learning,” he said.

Acclaimed Burundian humanitarian Marguerite Barankitse, who was also awarded an honorary doctorate at the weekend, called on the youth to make it their mission to break the borders that “are all around us”.

She said young people should always be taught with compassion and love, to pass on these ideals.

Maylam said Barankitse had, for 20 years, undertaken courageous humanitarian work caring for and nurturing thousands of children orphaned by ethnic bloodshed in Burundi.