Zuma’s plan for Robben Island is pregnant with ignorance
When former president Jacob Zuma proposes to exile pregnant girls to Robben Island, it tells us much about his primitive views on gender matters and human rights.
If it’s purely about the educational upliftment of young people, why is he silent about the males involved? Secondly, why should the island be the location for his proposed venture? More broadly, Zuma’s choice of Robben Island, which he’s called the “faraway place”, betrays amnesia about its historical significance, unbecoming of one who served time there. But these are not views expressed for the first time by the man bent on dragging his political career back from the dead.
While many know the island as a symbol of repression under apartheid and colonial rule, where liberation activists and leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and Makhanda were incarcerated, others have sought, with the connivance of the government, to turn it into more than just a tourist attraction, an exotic wedding attraction too.
Whether as a modern-day penal colony for teen mothers or a place to make merry for the newly married, the effect will be the same — to denude the island of its cultural and political significance. It will diminish and erase in the public mind, especially for future generations, Robben Island’s role in the centuries’ long struggle to free black people and create the new society we live in today.
But our treatment of Robben Island and its history is itself a reflection of our country’s indifference to its cultural heritage and history, in a world where debate is raging about the reclamation of cultural artefacts and historical symbols by the previously colonised. The call to return the booty of dispossession has been made from Egypt to Nigeria, through Ghana and Namibia. Even South Africa insisted on repossessing and burying the remains of Saartjie Baartman.
As an aside, South Africa should probably start the long overdue conversation with the king of England about the return of the Cullinan diamond, claimed to have been gifted to the British crown. All we know is that, as prisoners cannot negotiate freely with captors, the conquered do not willingly gift the conquerors.
It is telling that, in the global context, there should be
Our treatment of Robben Island and its history is itself a reflection of our country’s indifference to its cultural heritage and history
controversy in South Africa about the sale of artefacts that belonged to Mandela. The planned auction goes against the prevailing global sentiment to correct historical wrongs by returning historical and cultural objects to their legitimate owners. And so we may find ourselves, in a generation or so, having placed short-term financial gain above the preservation of our collective heritage, clamouring for the return of what we willingly sold to the highest bidder.
Meanwhile, in the former colonial capitals the debate about returning what was looted from the colonies, which intensified in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, is all but over, with few arguing against. Moves are afoot to return stolen treasures to countries where they rightfully belong, as well as human remains taken to Europe in pursuit of dubious scientific theories.
The returned, and yet to be returned, items are important because they form part of the history and culture of those from whom they were taken. Robben Island, in our case, is similarly intrinsic to our history. As is Senegal’s Gorée Island. Instead of neglecting it as an institution and allowing for a distortion of its history, we should ensure that Robben Island’s history is told accurately — if for no other reason than to avert a repeat of the violations of the past.
In two weeks’ time South Africa will be observing Human Rights Day in celebration of our constitutional dispensation, the antithesis of previous regimes under which Robben Island gained infamy. Not just another day of leisure and revelry, March 21 is the day on which a great outrage was perpetrated by the apartheid government — the killing in Sharpeville of 69 people while they were protesting against pass laws.
It is a day that woke the world to the horrors committed by the apartheid state against South Africa’s black majority, leading to apartheid being declared a crime against humanity and the global isolation of the country.
It is an event for which Sobukwe was jailed and held in solitary confinement. That, as well as the amendment to legislation to imprison him without trial, through the socalled Sobukwe Clause, was a supreme example of the violation of human rights under apartheid.
Regarding Zuma’s rather harebrained plan for the island, he is seizing on a genuine national crisis of teen pregnancy, which often derails girl children’s education, imperilling their life chances. But his purported solution, to “finish” teen pregnancies as he put it, would be a regression, a perpetuation of the violation of rights only countenanced under apartheid’s repressive dispensation.
A non-starter if ever there was one.