Reparations on agenda of apartheid victims
The voices of some 50 elderly protesters are heard echoing in song across the grounds of South Africa’s Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, the commercial heart of South Africa. They are demanding justice and reparations for abuses suffered under apartheid — 30 years after the country became a democracy. They are all members of the Khulumani Support Group and the Galela Campaign — two groups fighting for financial redress for the victims of white minority rule under apartheid. The protesters say that since they weren’t identified as victims of human rights abuses during apartheid by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu 28 years ago, they haven’t benefited from any reparations paid out by the government to date.
While the group have protested in front of the court intermittently for years, their permanent camp outside the Constitutional Court only started in November 2023. One of the protestors is Thabo Shabangu. He was shot in the back by police officers in 1990 during a demonstration against the oppression of the majority black population by the white regime — just as the country was warming up to the idea of equality and democracy.
The 61-year-old told DW that he has never received any compensation for his injuries. He feels abandoned, he says: “I am so very, very disappointed. We are the revolutionaries, we are the people that formed this democracy, we are the first democracy people. It is us that fought for the reparations that today we are not eating the fruit of.”
Shabangu wants reparations for the suffering he experienced during the struggle against apartheid, as well as greater medical and social support. Like around a third of all South Africans, he is unemployed, and money is scarce. “We thought the TRC would bring us justice,” he says about South Africa’s democracy project. Those protesting with him outside the Constitutional Court say despite their role in the fight for South Africa to become a democracy three decades ago, they won’t vote in South Africa’s upcoming 2024 elections in May if reparations aren’t paid: “No reparations — no vote,” says Shabangu.
Formal hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began in April 1996 and ended in October 1998, with then President Nelson Mandela personally appointing Tutu to chair the commission. Its aim was to promote reconciliation and forgiveness, rather than retribution, between perpetrators and victims of apartheid. During this period, the commission focused on evidence of killings, abductions and torture of people, as well as other human rights abuses. Victims and perpetrators often sat opposite each other in community halls and churches across the country.
Perpetrators who gave a full account of what had happened were granted amnesty — a painful compromise for many victims. But the promise of impunity brought to light the truth about the fate of many people who had disappeared without a trace, those who had been abducted, killed and buried somewhere.
Thus, just two years after the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in the first democratic elections in 1994, the atrocities of the past were in the public spotlight. To no one’s surprise, the vast majority of those who had suffered at the hands of the apartheid state were found to be black South Africans, although some cases also involved white victims as well as others.
This article was provided by Deutsche Welle