How to remember Soweto

[struggle4progress]

The hunger for equality behind a schoolchildren's revolt in South Africa 30 years ago has not yet been satisfied, says David Johnson

Friday June 16, 2006

<snip> This was the first protest in South Africa of any significant scale since the Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s, led by national leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Oliver Thambo. The imprisonment of Mandela and other leaders and the banning of organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress in effect silenced mass opposition to the ever increasing inhumanity of the apartheid system. Now, here were school children in an African township, picking up the proud mantle of resistance and showing their collective anger at a brutally unequal system. <snip>

There were many things I did not know. Although I lived within a few miles of Soweto, I had never been there. I grew up in a mixed race community where, for the most part, young people like me tacitly accepted that communities lived apart, divided by law. I had never learned an African language and understood little of the oppressive legislation in force at the time that separated African families: men worked on the mines and lived in single-sex hostels, while many women were employed in the cities as domestics, there only by the grace of a pass book (a kind of passport that African people needed to move between rural settlements into the city centres). <snip>

I returned to South Africa three weeks later, the country still ablaze. I was determined to understand events such as those in Soweto. The following year, I became active in the rapidly growing student movement in the country. A few years later, while based at the University of the Witwatersrand, I was elected its president.

In 1980, I instigated what became a nation-wide boycott of schools. With others, I was arrested and charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act. A year later, I led student protests within higher education institutions, leading to various spells in prison and eventually to a five year banning order and house arrest. I was forced to leave South Africa after a warrant for my arrest was issued for furthering the aims of a banned organisation (the ANC). I lived and worked in Botswana but, constantly pursued by the South African security forces and having escaped several attempts on my life, left for Zimbabwe and later the UK. <snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/southafrica/story/0,,1799273,00.html

[Selatius]

1. The world needs more Nelson Mandelas and Desmond Tutus

I wish we had some good leaders like days gone past, but they are so hard to come by. Eventually, people will rise to fill the vacuum, I feel.

[struggle4progress]

2. The South African majority didn't win until grassroots activists ...

.. learned to organize without identifiable leaders. The apartheid state remainded in control for some decades by the standard tactic of neutralizing obvious leaders through assassination, banning, imprisonment, one-way exit permits &c&c

I have the greatest respect for Mandela and Tutu: Mandela ultimately became an excellent political analyst, and Tutu developed a voice with great moral clarity. Both were important but perhaps neither was decisive: conscious grassroots activism and direct action by a very large number of ordinary South Africans played a vital role.

[Selatius]

3. Again, there's that word "grassroots"

I am certain at this point this country won't be saved by Al Gores or even Martin Luther Kings or Bobby Kennedys. The power tyrants hold now is beyond the ability of these people alone. They are too easily assassinated. The only power that exists left in this land that could break tyranny is the power of the people.

The people hold the answer, but they do not see the answer. Collective action is the greatest power in all humanity. If people continue to simply sit and wait for a leader to lead them into the promised land, then another leader will simply lead them out of the promised land. The people can only be free if they realize the inherent power of collective action.

The problem is choice. If people choose to follow or choose to cower because it is the easiest route, then nobody could save these people. Not Gandhi. Not Martin Luther King. Not Nelson Mandela. No one. Only the people themselves could save themselves.

It is easy to assassinate one great leader. It is near impossible to assassinate an army of individual leaders walking hand-in-hand. It's the greatest power in all of humanity, and it can bring down even the most seemingly invincible tyrannies.