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Syndicate
John Pilger on South Africa: Honouring the 'unbreakable promise'
March 28, 2008 -- Fourteen years after South Africa's first democratic elections and the fall of racial apartheid, John Pilger describes, in an address at Rhodes University, the dream and reality of the new South Africa and the responsibility of its new elite. (See video clips of John Pilger's visit here.)
***
By John Pilger
On my wall in London is a photograph I have never grown tired of looking at. Indeed, I always find it thrilling to behold. You might even say it helps keep me going. It is a picture of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the notorious ‘hippos’, as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised. Her fists are clenched. Her thin body is both beckoning and defiant of the enemy. It was May Day 1985 and the uprising against apartheid had begun.
The fine chronicler of apartheid, Paul Weinberg, took that photograph. He described crouching in a ditch at the roadside as the hippos entered Soweto. People were being shot with rubber bullets and real bullets. “I looked around,” he said, “and there in the ditch next to me was this bird-like woman, who suddenly pulled out a bottle of gin, took a swig, then went over the top and marched straight into the moving line of vehicles. It was the one of the bravest things I’ve seen.”
Paul’s photograph brings to mind one of my favourite quotations. “The struggle of people against power,” wrote Milan Kundera, “ is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Moments such as that woman’s bravery ought to be unforgettable, for they symbolise all the great movements of resistance to oppression: in South Africa, the Freedom Charter, Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial, the heroism of Steve Biko, the women who somehow kept their children alive on freezing hillsides in places like Dimbaza where they had been removed and declared redundant, and beyond, the Jews who rose against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Palestinians who just the other day smashed down the walls of their prison in Gaza.
Unforgettable? For some, yes. But there are those who prefer we celebrate a system of organised forgetting: of unbridled freedom for the few and obedience for the many; of socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor. They prefer that the demonstrable power of ordinary people is committed to what George Orwell called the memory hole. You may ask how we can possibly forget when we live in an information age?
The answer to that is another question: Who are “we”? Unlike you and me, most human beings have never used a computer and never owned a telephone. And those of us who are technologically blessed often confuse information with media, and corporate training with knowledge. These are probably the most powerful illusions of our times. We even have a new vocabulary, in which noble concepts have been corporatised and given deceptive, perverse, even opposite meanings.
“Democracy” is now the free market – a concept itself berefet of freedom. “Reform” is now the denial of reform. “Economics” is the relegation of most human endeavour to material value, a bottom line. Alternative models that relate to the needs of the majority of humanity end up in the memory hole. And “governance” – so fashionable these days - means an economic system approved in Washington, Brussels and Davos. “Foreign policy” is service to the dominant power. Conquest is “humanitarian intervention”. Invasion is “nation-building”.
Every day, we breathe the hot air of these pseudo ideas with their pseudo truths and pseudo experts. They set the limits of public debate within the most advanced societies. They determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They manipulate our compassion and our anger and make many of us feel there is nothing we can do. Take the “war on terror”. This is an entirely bogus idea that actually means a war of terror. Its aim is to convince people in the rich world that we all must live in an enduring state of fear: that Muslim fanatics are threatening our civilisation.
In fact, the opposite is true. The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states. Ask the people of Iraq, who in five years ago have seen the physical and social destruction of their country. President Bush calls this “nation-building”. Ask the people of Afghanistan, who have been bombed back into the arms of the Taliban - this is known in the West as a “good war”. Or the people of Gaza, who are denied water, food, medicines and hope by the forces of so-called civilisation. The list is long and the arithmetic simple. The greatest number of victims of this war of terror are not Westerners, but Muslims: from Iraq to Palestine, to the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria and beyond.
We are constantly told that September 11th 2001 was a day that changed the world and - according to John McCain - justifies a 100-year war against America’s perceived enemies. And yet, while the world mourned the deaths of 3000 innocent Americans, the UN routinely reported that the mortality rate of children dead from the effects of extreme poverty had not changed. The figure for September 11th 2001 was more than 36,000 children. That is the figure every day. It has not changed. It is not news.
The difference between the two tragedies is that the people who died in the Twin Towers in New York were worthy victims, and the thousands of children who die every day are unworthy victims. That is how many of us are programmed to perceive the world. Or so the programmers hope. In the information age, these children are expendable. In South Africa, they are the children of the evicted and dispossessed, children carrying water home from a contaminated dam. They are not the children in the gated estates with names like Tuscany. They are not covered by the theories of GEAR or NEPAD or any of the other acronyms of power given respectability by journalism and scholarship.
It seems to me vital that young people today equip themselves with an understanding of how this often subliminal propaganda works in modern societies – liberal societies: societies with proud constitutions and freedom of speech, like South Africa. For it says that freedom from poverty - the essence of true democracy - is a freedom too far.
In South Africa, new graduates have, it seems to me, both a special obligation and an advantage. The advantage they have is that the past is still vividly present. Only last month, the National Institute for Occupational Health revealed that in the last six years deadly silicosis had almost doubled among South Africa’s gold miners. There are huge profits in this industry. Many of the miners are abandoned and die in their 40s – their families too poor to afford a burial.
Why is there still no proper prevention and compensation? And although Desmond Tutu pleaded with them, not one company boss in any of the apartheid-propping industries ever sought an amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They were that confident that for things to change on the surface, things would remain the same.
For young graduates these days, there is a temptation to set themselves apart from the conditions I have described and from the world some have come from. As members of a new privileged elite, they have an obligation, I believe, to forge the vital link with the genius of everyday life and the resourcefulness and resilience of ordinary people. This will allow them, in whatever way you choose, to finish the job begun by Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko and the brave woman in the photograph. In a nutshell, it means standing by one's compatriots in order to bring true freedom to South Africa.
Those who led the struggle against racial apartheid often said no. They dissented. They caused trouble. They took risks. They put people first. And they were the best that people can be. Above all, they had a social and political imagination that unaccountable power always fears. And they had courage. It is this imagination and courage that opens up real debate with real information and allows ordinary people to reclaim their confidence to demand their human and democratic rights.
Oscar Wilde wrote: “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. I read the other day that the South African police calculated that the number of protests across the country had doubled in just two years to more than 10,000 every year. That may be the highest rate of dissent in the world. That's something to be proud of - just as the Freedom Charter remains something to be proud of. Let me remind you how it begins: “We, the people of South Africa, declare that our country belongs to everyone...”. And that, as Nelson Mandela once said, was the “unbreakable promise”. Isn't it time the promise was kept?
This is edited version of an address in March 2008
by John Pilger to graduating students at Rhodes University, which
awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature.
Click here to read the citation that accompanied the honorary doctorate. Visit http://www.johnpilger.com
Comments
South Africa: World Cup `our chance to make our voices heard'
Le Monde diplomatique, May 2008
'The world cup will be our chance to make our voices heard'
Whose South Africa?
South Africa will host the World Cup in 2010 so construction – and corruption – is booming. But almost none of the building or the money can be accessed by the poor who live in shantytowns without proper water, sanitation or electricity. These inequalities could be a major issue in the 2009 presidential election.
By Philippe Rivière
"All people shall have the right to live where they choose,
be decently housed, and to bring up their families
in comfort and security."
(Article 9 of the Freedom Charter adopted
by the Congress of the People at Kliptown
on 26 June 1955.)
There's a house for sale for $125 just two kilometres from the beach at False Bay, in Khayelitsha, a township east of Cape Town, between Table Mountain and the Cape of Good Hope. The downside is that it is in the QQ section, an informal settlement on marshy land beneath the high-tension cables of Eskom, South Africa's public electricity utility. Despite a ban, the area is covered with wooden shacks with corrugated iron roofs, the homes of hundreds of thousands of urban poor.
More than 20 years after QQ was squatted, its 600 families still have no sanitation and rely on eight taps for drinking water. An anarchic tangle of electricity cables, hidden beneath tarmac, connects the shantytown to metered supplies in the adjoining legal settlement. Fatal fires are frequent. Anything that can be let out is for hire, even a key to the latrines. Not far from Mzonke Poni's home, a branch from the main supply cable is concealed in a corner, behind a pile of boxes: he has lived in QQ with his mother for more than six years and hopes to avoid being cut off during the next police raid.
"We've got our own Waterfront," says Poni. QQ has appropriated the name of Cape Town's smart district because, for four months of the year, winter rains flood all the shacks on low ground. Some residents have raised the soil by a few centimetres to buy themselves enough time to move chairs, television and personal effects to the home of a neighbour or family member.
QQ is in Western Cape province, where half-a-million people are waiting for homes. Wave after wave of young workers flood into the shantytowns, most of them from the rural districts of Eastern Cape. To stay, they need the approval of the local residents'committee, which gives priority to couples with young children. Although, or maybe because, life is so precarious, there is a strong sense of community in these areas (1). So it came as a shock when the authorities decided to clear them out, district by district, without any preliminary consultation.
After a fire at Joe Slovo, another informal settlement beneath the flightpath of Cape Town airport, the victims were rehoused in new buildings further east, in the Delft area. But people who had not been affected by the fire began to be forcibly relocated. Mzwanele Zulu, a community leader, said: "We wrote to officials from the town council to the president's office, but nobody would give us any explanation. We refused to be moved by force, we're close to transport and work here." The inhabitants decided to block the nearby N2 highway. The reaction was immediate: "The police fired [rubber bullets], then arrested us for incitement to violence." The residents' groups went to court over the evictions from Joe Slovo (2), but it was too late to save the school they had set up in a shabby building.
Rumours and dirty tricks
It is late morning in Delft and there is a palpable tension. A woman trying to get to the town hall climbs into our car and asks: "Do you think it's right, giving new houses to young people, when we've been on the waiting list for years?" From a Mercedes, touring streets of newly built houses, a megaphone tells residents to disobey the security guards who are watching the area and who have started an unauthorised census whose final purpose is unknown. The courts upheld the status quo in a dispute between the constructors, Thubelisa Homes, and the squatters who occupied the houses before they were even finished. The housing minister, Lindiwe Sisulu (3), had visited on 16 December 2007 and handed over the keys to families evicted from Joe Slovo, forgetting that a third of the dwellings had been promised to Delft residents.
At Delft town hall, two women claim the same house. "It happens increasingly frequently," explains Pam Bukes, secretary of the anti-eviction committee. "You can't blame her [one of the women] for trying it on, but I'm sure she isn't on any of our lists."Inter-community tensions are rife. Most of Delft's population is of mixed race (as defined under apartheid) and votes for the Democratic Alliance (DA). They suspect the African National Congress (ANC) of inciting young blacks from outside to try to force their way in. Martin Legassick, an historian and activist closely involved in the residents' committees, said: "The place is alive with rumours and dirty tricks, it's no wonder people are worked up. But bear in mind that the blacks were never able to register for the housing lists." When something is in short supply, legality goes out the window.
A man of 83 symbolises the seriousness of the problem. He pays out most of his pension to rent a shack in a backyard. As DA councillor Frank Martin, an adviser to Cape Town mayor Helen Zille, points out: "He's been on the waiting list for more than 20 years. People keep asking me about the risk of violence. The only way to calm things down is to apply the same rules to everybody. Sometimes it's difficult to deal with the authorities – on Christmas Eve they took advantage of the fact that we'd all gone to demonstrate at the courthouse and sent in the security forces to clear the houses. People want a roof, water, sanitation and local employment. The government is playing with fire by ignoring people's basic needs. It spends only 1.5% of the budget on housing, compared with 5% to 7% in similar countries."
Parallel economies
Since South Africa embraced neo-liberalism (open frontiers, economic liberalisation), the huge inequalities that already existed have increased. There are now two parallel economies that never touch; 60% of the population, mostly black and poorly educated, earn less than $450 a month; 2.2% make more than $3,500 a month and enjoy western lifestyles. Unequal land ownership, one of the legacies of apartheid – in 1994, 75% of the population lived on just 13% of the land – contributed to the rural exodus into the townships.
Half live in poverty. According to the United Nations, the current welfare system has only a limited effect on individual poverty and inequality (4). The majority are economically vulnerable and feel the full impact of rising housing costs. "South Africaexperienced a significant increase in housing prices from 2000 to 2004-05. It is estimated that house prices increased by 92% in contrast with an average increase of workers' income estimated at 8.3%."
The 2.7m homes built with the aid of government subsidies have not been enough to solve the crisis. Demand is rising by more than 200,000 units a year according to the housing ministry: on top of the rural exodus there is a sociological transformation related to political liberalisation, which is reducing the average size of households. There are now some 12.5m households in South Africa, 5m of them in urban areas. According to Legassick, 11% of households live in shacks and 12% in traditional huts; 56% depend entirely upon the government for their housing.
The poorest are being excluded from urban centres. Sometimes they are evicted by subterfuge, lured by the promise of a real house, sometimes under threat of violence. The UN's special rapporteur blamed the police and a private company, Wozani Security, known as the Red Ants because of their capacity to send 500 men, dressed in red, to empty a building of its inhabitants in a few hours (5).
Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of President Thabo Mbeki, is a specialist on the area, deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs and chairman of the South African subsidiary of the Dutch producer of TV reality shows, Endemol.
He said: "South Africa has much in common with post-colonial Algeria. Our economy depends upon mineral extraction. There was a wide sociological gap between grassroots activists and the leaders of the struggle [against apartheid]. The latter did very well out of it, because they took over the state. They and their children now make up the ranks of the emerging middle class. They were lucky enough to get an education; they [ought to have formed] the base of a dynamic private sector in a country where cheap education under apartheid created a huge human resources problem. [Instead] the government spawned an enormous bureaucracy which was spectacularly successful in feeding off these resources, without creating work for the wider population."
He recalled how in 1991 in Algeria the mismatch between the poverty of the population and the wealth of the privileged members of the political class encouraged the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front. The government's refusal to accept the result of the ballot plunged the country into civil war.
A living saint
Things aren't that bad in South Africa. But in a country where 4.2 million struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day, there is resentment of the new rich. The ANC's image in the shantytowns had been tarnished to the point where even Nelson Mandela is no longer immune from sarcasm: "He's a living saint... who has privatised water." The neo-liberal policies that he introduced and his successor Thabo Mbeki continued have not yielded the anticipated levels of foreign investment, but have caused social damage. The Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) programmes, supposed to open up economic opportunity (capital, participation in management) to blacks, have encouraged corruption rather than integrating the long-excluded mass of the population into the economic system.
As early as 2005 the ANC deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, stated: "It is the banks that have been the primary beneficiaries of this type of private-sector-led BEE... It should not be (and it is not) the objective of the democratic movement to support or advance such multiple, narrow-based empowerments... Genuine empowerment must focus on the black entrepreneurs who build viable and sustainable businesses [and] will be able to empower others in turn, and will be able to reap full advantage from the new vistas of opportunity that emerge as we integrate the second economy into the first" (6).
"Overall the BEE is crony capitalism," confirmed Moeletsi Mbeki. "Most of these so-called business leaders are agents of white capital, hand in glove with the state; they aren't entrepreneurs. Our country is undergoing very rapid de-industrialisation under the joint influence of its lack of entrepreneurial ability and Asian competition. Whole sectors are being undermined: 80% of the footwear bought in South Africa during the 1980s was home-produced. Now 80% is imported, mostly from China. Our mineral resources are enough to allow the government to maintain a welfare state, however limited; but they aren't enough to support economic development. There is a danger of catastrophe if world prices fall."
People may question ANC policies, but with 65% of the vote at every election it retains its hegemony. Real opposition to Thabo Mbeki has emerged inside the party, where a leftist coalition from the Communist Party and the Cosatu trade union federation secured the leadership for Jacob Zuma at the ANC national conference in Polokwane in December 2007. If he survives his forthcoming trial on corruption charges, Zuma should become South Africa's third president in 2009 (7).
But few observers expect a real change of policy. "The ANC has done nothing for us," an activist said. "Jacob Zuma's people have been part of the government for 13 years, so they won't change anything either." On the ground, on the margins of a system that has let them down, social movements of extraordinary vitality, such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum and Abahlali baseMjondolo (8), are beginning to cohere into national networks and are not afraid to speak out or take to the streets.
In November 2005 police opened fire on 2,000 residents from the Foreman Road settlement, marching on the town hall in Durban. Two demonstrators were wounded and 45 arrested. The same week, in Pretoria, 500 people sacked the home of a member of the municipal council. Confrontations have continued. According to official interior ministry figures, demonstrations about the provision of basic services have increased from an annual average of 6,000 in 2004-05, to around 10,000. In February 2008 police fired on a peaceful meeting in Delft. On 10 March 500 residents of Klaarwater, in Durban, set up barricades and called for the removal of an ANC councillor who had failed to keep his electoral promises over services.
Returning from a recent mission to South Africa, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Miloon Kothari, complained that "there appears to be insufficient meaningful consultation between all levels of government, civil society organisations and affected individuals and communities". More than $8bn has been budgeted for the building and upgrading of infrastructure for the football World Cup in 2010, including 10 stadiums and a high-speed train. Kothari warned: "Reconverting Johannesburg into a world-class city is already increasing housing prices and increased demand for construction materials has led to a foreseeable shortage of cement" (9). At his house in Orange Farm, a run-down district 40km south of Johannesburg, Richard "Bricks" Mokolo, a former footballer and a spokesman for the Anti-Privatisation Forum, predicted: "The World Cup will be our chance to make our voices heard."
Translated by Donald Hounam
(1) See Steven Otter, Khayelitsha, uMlungu in a township, Penguin Books SA, Johannesburg, October 2007. He describes the shantytown where he lived as the only white in a black neighbourhood while he studied journalism.
(2) On 10 March 2008 the Cape Town High Court ordered their removal to temporary accommodation in Delft.
(3) His office did not respond to our requests for an interview.
(4) South Africa Human Development Report, United Nations Development Programme, New York, 2003.
(5) See Jean-Christophe Servant, "Johannesburg, un urbanisme sous pression", video report for Géo.
(6) Kgalema Motlanthe, "Collective effort needed to achieve fundamental change", ANC Today, vol 5, n° 4, 4-10 March 2005.
(7) See Johann Rossouw, "This is break point for the ANC", and Aoife Kavanagh, "Jacob Zuma: president or prisoner?", Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 2008.
(8) See the video documentary Dear Mandela.
(9) "Mission to South Africa", UN Human Rights Council, A/HRC/7/16/Add3, New York, 29 February 2008.
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