You need to know who Solomon Mahlangu was
THESE days we seem to know more about what US President Donald Trump is doing daily than we do about our own history.
If you ask many South Africans why two major roads in our country have been renamed after Solomon Mahlangu, you are met with a blank stare. But if you ask what happened in the White House this week, many would have an answer.
There may even be more people in Tanzania who know about Solomon Mahlangu than here. In 1977 the government of Tanzania donated an old sisal farm near Morogoro to the ANC, on which a school was built named the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College. Many Tanzanians became familiar with the name, and were keenly aware of the apartheid government’s hanging of the 21-year-old freedom fighter in 1979.
Today a major road in our nation’s capital has been renamed Solomon Mahlangu from the former name Hans Strijdom – the South African prime minister from 1954-1958.
I live just off Solomon Mahlangu drive in Tshwane, and have grown to realise that few people living in the vicinity have any idea who he was, or why he was honoured in such a way.
The common refrain among white South Africans is that the city is wasting taxpayer’s money changing street names. The same has been said in eThekwini, now that the major arterial road Edwin Swales VC Drive has also been named Solomon Mahlangu.
But who was Solomon Mahlangu and why does he matter? The answer can be found in the recently released movie Kalushi, which took a decade to make by a local movie producer. Watching the movie on Human Rights Day this week, it perhaps shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did that 95% of the audience were black South Africans, with few white residents caring to learn more about the relevance of this figure in our history.
But the tragic story of Solomon Mahlangu is key to understanding who we are and where we have come from. Mahlangu’s story helps us understand what motivated the ranks of the freedom fighters who gave up everything for the struggle for freedom and democracy.
What happened to Solomon as a young man, which compelled him to take the decision to join the armed resistance outside the country, happened to so many black South Africans under apartheid that it almost became the norm.
Brutality
Just as Gandhi had been thrown off a whites-only section of a train in 1893 in Pietermartizburg, so was Mahlangu thrown off a whites-only train near Mamelodi in 1976. But it was the brutality with which black South Africans were treated by white policeman that turned a normal high school pupil into a freedom fighter.
Mahlangu hadn’t belonged to the ANC, and only learnt about the struggle for freedom when out of the country in the ranks of the freedom fighters.
It was the sheer viciousness of the apartheid system at the time that had swelled the ranks of the armed resistance, with hundreds leaving the country after 1976.
But why Mahlangu’s story became so famous was that he was hanged by the apartheid regime in 1979 for a crime he never committed, shortly after reentering the country in 1977.
Three days before the first anniversary of the Soweto uprising, Mahlangu and two of his comrades were en route to Soweto to join the impending protests when they were stopped by a black policemen who demanded to see what they were carrying in their suitcases. Having been trained in sabotage, the group was carrying guns, grenades and pamphlets.
The three scattered with Mahlangu and Mondy Motloung running for cover in a John Orr’s warehouse. Desperately seeking Mahlangu, a panicked Motloung entered the warehouse firing shots, killing two employees.
When Motloung’s gun jammed he was beaten by onlookers and then the police. Both Motloung and Mahlangu were detained in John Vorster square and tortured, with Motloung so badly beaten that he had brain damage and was deemed unfit to stand trial.
Mahlangu was charged with sabotage and two counts of murder even though he hadn’t fired the shots.
The prosecution had argued under the law of common purpose that Mahlangu had shared intent with Motloung, making him guilty of murder. Mahlangu was sentenced to death, and ultimately hanged on April 6. At the time, various governments around the world and the UN had pleaded for his release.
Mahlangu’s famous statement before his death was: “My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight.” This became a rallying cry for the youth that proceeded to leave the country in droves to fight for freedom.
If we do not know and appreciate the story of Solomon Mahlangu, then we cannot understand our country. In honour of Human Rights week, we owe it to ourselves.
Ebrahim is the group foreign editor.
BEFORE the memory of our “day off ’” on Tuesday to celebrate Human Rights Day vanishes, I would like to reflect on the relationship between human rights and religion.
Though it has been a long and complex journey, we may have finally reached a juncture where each side is ready to learn from the other.
Historically, in South Africa some key religious leaders have been at the forefront of campaigning for human rights. The most famous names are widely celebrated, but each of us may also think of local figures in our own religious communities who fought and suffered in this cause.
Such heroes stand as a counter to a view, strongly-held among secularists, that human rights and religions are diametrically opposed. Some regard the worldwide recognition of human rights – as formalised in the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights – as the triumph of the Enlightenment and the end of religion’s domination of morality. One British book has the catchy title: Human Rights: Values for a Godless Age.
The argument goes that in the past we needed religions to impose systems of ethical values to keep communities on the right path – and threaten them with the wrath of God if they strayed. But now we no longer need religions because human rights are so self-evident to everyone that they can act as our guides. What is more, they cut across all cultures, beliefs and nations.
At first this seems very attractive. After all everyone can agree, can’t they, on the right to life, the right to free speech, the right to vote and so on. But once we dig deeper we discover that there are still issues that are not self-evident: When does the right to life begin and end? When can free speech be curtailed to keep the peace? Should prisoners lose the right to vote and if so, why?
Rights are not as clear-cut or uncontroversial as we initially believe. But, it is countered, that is true of all ethical systems; whereas at least human rights put everyone on an equal footing.
By contrast, many religions have reputations for creating hierarchies of human beings in which “all are equal but some are more equal than others”.
To begin with, some religions automatically have a higher regard for their own members. All within the fold might share equal rights, but those outside do not. After all, if those heathens/ pagans/ infidels are not wise enough to believe in the “correct” religion, surely they don’t deserve rights?
It was only 130 years ago that a pope, warning against excessive liberty, declared: “Error has no rights.”
Such an attitude has been used to justify ghettoisation, persecution, mass conversions, unrestrained violence and even genocide.
Infringements
In different times and places, members of all the main religions have been both victims and perpetrators of these human rights infringements.
The accusation goes further, that equal rights are not even accorded to all members within the same religious community. It was not that long ago that most religions treated people with disabilities as “children of a lesser God”.
The lower status that women hold in most religions is widespread and it is only in the last few decades that it has started to change; lower status for homosexuals remains broadly unchallenged in most religions; and lower status for people of different races is often present and sometimes formalised.
The Dutch Reformed and the American Baptist churches have tragic records of creating segregated communities; within Catholic history in India, the darkness of your skin determined whether you could be ordained as a priest.
So, far from promoting human rights, religions have much in their history which shows the opposite.
Even in recent years, as rightsbased legislation has been introduced in more and more countries, it is often religious groups that seek special exemptions. In some situations, they have been more fervent advocates: but it is noticeable how the right to freedom of religion tends to be much more avidly defended by a religion when it is in a minority, and that they are more mute on the subject when they are in the majority.
But I do not wish to caricature religions as the automatic opponents of equality. After all, the mistakes they have made have also been made by the founding fathers of human rights.
In America in 1776 they intoned: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
Yet it was almost 100 years after that before they ended slavery, 150 years before they extended the vote to women, and almost 200 years before black and white American citizens had equality before the law.
Most mainstream religions now mostly embrace human rights, realising that the values are shared ones. That is hardly surprising.
Almost every religion has an ethic built on what is called “the Golden Rule” – do to others as you would have them do to you. In other words, once you start recognising that every other person is a human being like yourself, you start treating them as you would expect them to treat you. I may not share the same gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, IQ, nationality, language, bank balance or shoe size as another human being, but I can still recognise that we are equal in dignity.
This is where I think religions have an important contribution to make. We can try to justify equal rights by saying we are all members of the same species but that is not very motivating. It is also tricky, as we increasingly discover that the biological differences between us and other species are often quite slight.
It is much more inspiring to say, as the American Declaration of Independence goes on to say, that “all are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”. For those who believe in God, human rights are a clear way of articulating the belief that we have shared “parenthood” in a common Creator.
Religions have a language and a poetry that can capture that awe-inspiring thought. From time to time, I will be tempted to put up my literal or metaphorical walls to block out people who live far away, or even round the corner. At that point, my religious tradition should remind me of the shared human journey.
We all begin in the same place and will end in the same place; and on the way we will travel much further if we travel together as equals.
This country’s history shows us what happens when blinkered political and religious leaders forgot that. But it also shows us what role good religious and political leaders can play in reminding us of that essential truth. They do so by their words.
But the heroes we commemorated this week remind us more importantly that it is actions that count in the struggle for human rights.
Perrier is the director of the Denis Hurley Centre