The moral compass that may yet redeem us

Dear

Oreaders,

n Tuesday, we had a holiday to commemorate Human Rights Day and the day in Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 when the South African Police opened fire, killing 69 people and injuring 180. They had come out to protest against the pass laws.

That awful day happened before I was born, but I grew up in the dying decades of apartheid when more than 500 people were killed during and after protests against Bantu education in Soweto in 1976.

Anyone who lived under the jackboot of apartheid will know why our Constitution’s Bill of Rights is such a precious lodestar.

We breathed fear, but fought for our human rights regardless. Activists arrested at every turn, pass laws limiting movement of black people, families torn apart by the “pencil test”, the savage tool of the Immorality Act.

Bannings, beatings, detentions, censorship, Bantu education, Bantustans, separate amenities: the whole absurd, brutal nightmare conjured up by the Afrikaner Nationalists who were elected time after time from 1948 to 1989 by most white South Africans.

Today we have another party voted into power for more than two decades (by the majority of South Africans this time), which, despite being the architect of a Constitution based on human rights, is serving its elite insiders at the expense of most people.

Under this government, we witnessed the Marikana massacre, in which police killed 34 mineworkers and seriously injured 78. We have seen the callous deaths of 144 former Life Esidimeni patients.

Under this government, despite a promise to replace 3,000 pit toilets in schools, just this month a four-year-old girl’s body was found in one.

This is appalling, but let’s remember that our Bill of Rights distinguishes us from the brutal republic we were before 1994.

There are a few who yearn for the days when our country was run with an iron fist under racial laws, and the lights stayed on for white suburbs and business.

There are others who think that everything that went wrong over the past 30 years happened because Nelson Mandela bowed to pressure from the white men who were formerly in charge and pushed reconciliation above retribution and redistribution.

These are the extremes tearing at whatever thread of common good we have left in our social fabric. Our polarisation is not what the noble writers of our Bill of Rights imagined for our country. Is it not time to open our hearts and minds, so we can again dare to dream of a future that works for all?

Tell me about your views on this at heather@dailymaverick.co.za