Screw the Politicians
Today is World AIDS Day. It is also ‘Save the Springbok’ Day, and we are in the middle of ’16 days of Activism against gender Violence’. That’s a truckload of causes to fight for in one day. AIDS in our country is such a big problem that one day of wearing a red ribbon just isn’t enough time to effect real awareness, and then change. We need one year, every year, until the pandemic is under control.
Neither is wearing your Springbok jersey going to make any real difference to the decision-making politicians who remain so jaded by apartheid that they think that changing Springboks to Proteas – not to mention street names and cities – is a way of combating racism. The truth is that the kids of the Rainbow Nation don’t see colour and race the way older generations do. They want to be a Springbok because they want to be a flank like Schalk or a wing like Habana, regardless of their skin colour.
14 years in to the New South Africa and I think it’s time to do away with the politicians’ meddling in sports quotas and street names. As the taxpayers who pay their salaries, it is time that we demand that they spend their time dealing with the far more urgent k@k that is wrong with our country. And if we do still need a Sports Indaba to discuss whether the Springbok should be bigger or smaller than the Protea on the Bok jersey, why don’t we send our kids along to decide for us? I’m with Whitney Houston on this one: “I believe the children are the future, teach them well and let them lead the way…” I guess none of us are sure though if Outcomes Based Education (OBE) is teaching our children all that well…
Then, my pluk with the ’16 days of Activism against Gender Violence’ is that it focuses attention on the victim of abuse, rather than the abuser. A society that seeks out and punishes its criminals rather than celebrating its victims with 16 days of awareness would be a far healthier one in my opinion. How about ‘Report Domestic Abuse’ December, marketed with the same vooma as Father Christmas gets?
AIDS, education, violence… there are so many damn problems in our country that we don’t need any more awareness of them. The people are suffering, ek sê. And none more so than my neighbours. I live across the road from Masiphumelele, ‘Site 5′ Township, which recently won the Reconciliation Award from the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation Commission for living in peace with foreigners. Sounds like a snaakse award to give a township, and it is. Why not give them something useful, like their own police station, rather than a community of over 30000 people having to rely on Ocean View?
Four years ago I picked up a guy from Site 5, Vuyisile (‘Mr V’), on Kommetjie Road. He was holding a sign that simply said “Need Job”. I needed help moving in to a farm small cottage and now, years later, Mr V and I are good friends. He sells my Laugh it Off T shirts at the Sunrise Circle market on a Sunday, he is learning to drive my car, and in years still to come I hope to make him my BEE partner. We help each other out and our relationship is a real, working one in this, the Real South Africa. So what is left of my column will be spent fighting for Mr V’s cause.
One of the wisest, funniest, things Archbishop Desmond Tutu has ever said was this: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
When the colonizing English whiteys gave South Africa back after World War II, the Afrikaans whitey government started forcibly removing settlements, usually in the middle of the night. Three quarters of the population were relocated to “homelands” which made up less than a quarter of the land. Puppet black rulers, given bucks and ammo by the apartheid swine, ruled over these populations which become poorer and poorer as the land deteriorated, while the men from these poor communities were spending their bucks drinking in the white-owned taverns after months living down a mineshaft.
Now, 14 years into the ‘New South Africa’ there’s a new ‘Whitey’ orchestrating the same forced removals, Housing MEC Whitey Jacobs. And the same resistance is happening in Site 5 township as it did back in the day in District Six, and Sophiatown, and all the other areas where ‘the people’, having built houses on vacant land, become a community, and that community rises up and resists.
The facts are that a low cost housing project called Amkhaya Ngoku is set to go ahead, and by the time you read this Mr V’s home in Site 5 may already be demolished. 150 families have been given until today to choose between paying R400/month rent for a new house, or moving to an area hardly big enough for 50 families, let alone 150, which is also right next to a wetland. The same ‘Reconciliation Award’ winning community are now being made out by the local media and local government as violent, uncooperative thugs.
Funded by overseas donors and the Department of Housing, someone is benefiting a great deal more than the affected community – enough to ensure that Mr V and his neighbours will have to move. And whether it is Whitey Jacobs himself, someone in government who willingly took the money from the overseas donors before getting the community to agree, or the builders who then got the contract, I smell a rat.
Land is one of the most sensitive, complicated, and important issues facing our country today. And one thing’s for sure, they aren’t making any more of the stuff. Madiba didn’t walk that dik long walk to freedom of his so that only the whiteys could have lekker houses. Owning land in this great country of ours should be a right for all South Africans. A right that we all can actually exercise, giving us all a sense of place and a feeling of belonging.
