Our dream has been stolen
“AT THE Rendezvous of victory, there is a place for all of us” (late Steve Bantu Biko).
This was clearly an aspirational statement, not a statement of fact, otherwise we will say we were lied to.
A rendezvous is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “a prearranged or regular meeting place”.
Steve Biko and all the student leaders of our time, like Barney Pityana, Harry Nengwenkulu, Henry Isaacs, Onkgopotse Tiro, Thenjiwe Mtintso, Edna Van Harte, Saths Cooper, Thoko Mpumlwana, Mamphela Ramphele, Strini Moodley, Mapetla Mohapi, Bennie Khoapa and many other Black Consciousness leaders had this bright future in their minds, which made us, as their followers in the 1970s, when raising the clenched black fist in the air, believe freedom was imminent.
It would take another 20 years before we arrived at the rendezvous of victory in 1994.
When a dream turns into a nightmare, you end up waking, and are relieved that this is in a dream, not real life. But when it happens in real life, it is a completely different story. My wife and I fell in love at ages 17 and 18 respectively, when we met at Mnandi Beach in Cape Town, and were married seven years later. By mercy and grace, 48 years later we are still madly in love.
For entertainment in those days, we loved movies and either went to the Kismet Cinema in Athlone or the Luxurama in Wynberg. We once went to watch a movie, Neither the Sea nor the Sand, about exorcism, which we knew nothing about.
The advert showed a young couple, happy, in love, playing happily and romantically, as young people in love do, on a pristine beach, which resonated with us, as love birds too.
However, the movie turned into a nightmare, with a ghost wreaking havoc. My wife would put her head down, and ask me what was going on, and I too ended up looking away. Some coloured youngsters sitting behind us, nudged me saying in Afrikaans: “Nee broer, jy het mos betaal vir die ding, kyk, di’s jou geld …” I was not impressed. We had the option of walking out but endured the torment to the end, perhaps hoping it was going to change into something of the romance we came to see. It never did.
But what happens, when your rendezvous, in real life, like we are experiencing now in South Africa turns into a nightmare whose end is not in sight?
Even before the dawn of our democracy, it was easy to believe our leaders when they pointed us to a future state of affairs that was in contrast to what we were experiencing; it resonated with our aspirations but the reality was otherwise: oppression, racial discrimination, social degradation, humiliation and economic exploitation, segregated residential areas, trains, buses, beaches, shops, post offices, hotels – everything made you feel you were not human.
Come our freedom, our hopes were still high that our nightmare was going to end. Alas, the last 28 years have proven us wrong. We are in the belly of the beast.
We are perpetually caught up in the nightmare that will not go away, for the foreseeable future, whatever the utterances of those who are responsible for causing it in the first place.
Some were at the helm when it all unfolded, they aided and abetted it, and others watched it happen, when they could have stopped it in its tracks, they did not do anything, now here we sit, stranded, not knowing where help is going to come from.
What do we do when our rendezvous has turned into a nightmare? This is not imaginary, it is real. Everything is falling apart, our rail system has collapsed on our watch, our road infrastructure is in tatters, our aviation is no longer something we can be proud of; our cities, towns and hamlets are overflowing with people, where no infrastructure exists to support them.
Crime has ballooned and is out of control, corruption has pervaded every facet of society; security guards are no longer reliable, the police are accomplices and partners in the commission of crimes, fuelling it by supplying criminals with weapons to commit further crimes; levels of crime are unprecedented instilling a deep sense of insecurity in everybody.
Eskom and the blackouts have become the new normal, projected to be so into the foreseeable future.
Sewerage flows into the seas in Durban and Cape Town to such an extent that some beaches are closed because of high levels of contamination. In homes there is unprecedented levels of alcohol abuse, such that 9-year-olds are introduced to the use of alcohol by reckless parents and grandparents. Their future is compromised.
We have nowhere to turn, as the very people who betrayed our trust are doing everything possible to woo, especially the poor, whose votes they desperately need to continue in power.
Between now and election time, they will be criss-crossing the country, spending huge sums of money on food parcels for the poor to endear themselves for their votes, making promises they know they will not fulfil.
It would seem that we might not be able to extricate ourselves from the humongous quagmire we find ourselves in. We need the hand of Providence to get out of it.
On March 21, 1999, handing back land to the Khoi and the San and reflecting on the burden of restitution of their human dignity, then deputy president Thabo Mbeki said: “We shall mend the broken strings of the distant past so that our dreams can take root for the stories of the San and the Khoi have told us that this dream is too big for one person to hold. It must be dreamed collectively, by all the people.
“It is by acting together, by dreaming together – by mending the broken strings that tore us apart in the past – that we shall, all of us, produce a better life for you who have been the worst victims of oppression …”
If ever there was a time, when as a nation, we were called to act together, it is now, when all of us are subjected to indignities that know no colour, class, social standing and all the usual barriers that divide people.
The nightmare will only go away when we act and work together in earnest to rid ourselves of the corruption that has ravaged our lives. The hour is calling on us to come up with a new dispensation that will put the country on a new trajectory and never be captured again by any forces of darkness.
The task before us is to rebuild our society, rebuild our communities, our neighbourhoods and our families, ourselves as individuals with values that guide us from day-to-day.