Julian Kunnie
As June 16 unfolded here in the occupied Indigenous Indian lands of the western hemisphere, we honoured the children of Mother Africa and this Day of the African Child, the heroes and heroines and martyrs of the pan-African liberation and decolonisation struggle of Soweto from 1976.
This day was being celebrated as a pan-African event, with children from Haiti, Brazil, the Congo, Soweto, Washington DC and Atlanta engaged in storytelling and musical and dance performances in each place. It’s moving to see children and students in Haiti perform the play on Soweto uprisings, holding the body of Hector Pietersen, the first student killed in cold blood by apartheid police in June 1976.
For too long, we have all accepted and been conditioned by colonialism and capitalism where the vulnerable, particularly children and women, are rendered invisible in shaping the contours of society because they are generally considered dispensable, exploitable or irrelevant in terms of societal transformation and economic development. Politicians, economists, bureaucrats and professionals of every stripe; religious and social leaders; educators and the “leaders” of our societies are normatively male and adult. The reality is that children and women are the key movers of any radical transformation movement across the world.
In Azania/South Africa, one only needs to recall the resistance to passbooks called by the Pan Africanist Congress in 1960, the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the 1976 Soweto uprising, and the relentless protests and defiance of the townships of the Vaal triangle in the 1980s that made South Africa “ungovernable” by the apartheid colonial regime.
In occupied Palestine today, it’s the youth, young women and men who are arrested by the apartheid settler-colonial regime and shot virtually daily, like in Nablus. Youth in Kisangani, the Congo, in Mexico, the Philippines, India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Cuba and various parts of the world, all sacrificing for liberation and resistance to US imperialism and the tyrannical capitalist system.
As South Africa (and neighbouring Zimbabwe and other countries in Africa too) reels from continued electricity blackouts and water shortages generated by a criminal capitalist system under the auspices of the ANC regime that refuses to acknowledge that it is the source of the problem because it has valorised the accumulation of profit and sacralised money as the basis of life, in direct contradiction of traditional Indigenous African histories, cultures and societies that cherished life as sacred and priceless the principle of ubuntu. Ubuntu is used so cheaply and meaninglessly in South Africa’s money-obsessed society and socio-political circles, ensuring that it remains illusory and mythic so that its actualisation will never be realised.
Capitalism, as embraced by the ANC regime that claims it freed the country from apartheid oppression in 1990 and formally in 1994, is the dominant philosophy that has essentially destroyed the nation, while using “Africanity”.
While there are hundreds of millions of decent and honest people across the land in South Africa, Africa and the world, the rulers, bankers, corporations and other land and economic structural owners embody and propagate predatory exploitative and unjust practices and behaviour, so that such pathological behaviour becomes diffused and imitated by many of those in lower echelons of society. After all, if government officials and leaders persist in worshipping monetary and materialistic accumulation and are the dominant figures in the media and the news, including their criminal exploits, can one realistically expect the gullible, vulnerable and mostly unemployed younger generation to behave differently?
The fundamental difference between South Africa, a nation of about 65 million people where the majority are impoverished and deprived of basic and decent and fully-funded education, health care, housing, nutrition, electricity, and gainful and productive employment, and Vietnam, a nation of more than 100 million people and which had the lowest global rate of deaths from Covid-19 a few years ago, is that the government of the former is committed to generating and protecting the wealth of the few at the cost of the many, including its own members, whereas Vietnam is committed to ensuring that the people “come first” and education, health care, housing, agricultural production subsidies and support, infrastructural expansion for everyone are the priorities. Further, Vietnamese culturally reject individuals making money at the expense of the impoverishment of the majority and genuinely care for the well-being of others, as we learnt from living there.
All the academic reasons and excuses and Carte Blanche shows is that they describe the fine details of coal being stolen before reaching the country’s power generating stations and who’s benefiting makes no difference and will not usher any structural change. The ANC regime is not ashamed or embarrassed. Its response is: So what? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to stop our greed? The system is rooted in capitalist criminality and such theft is being accepted as “normal”. just as the exploitation of women and youth, and the constant sight of tens of thousands of ‘street children,” in eThekwini, Cape Town, Joburg, Kinshasa, Lagos and so on, now considered “routine”. People have generally developed thick skins of immunity to feeling impassionately for such pain and suffering. Ironically, African traditional Indigenous societies never had orphans and “abandoned” children; every child had a plethora of mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents and so on, all organically interwoven in the village circle of life.
Nobody was denigrated as “illegitimate” or “orphan” children. Shame on capitalism and neo-colonialism in our sacred Mother Africa, today, and those who protect and defend such exploitation, death, and destruction of the most beautiful of all – our burgeoning infants and growing children and youth.
Soweto taught us all to awaken from our apolitical and apathetic slumber, to smell the coffee! The Earth is our Mother, as is Africa, and the African child is most precious of all, the precious touchstone of life, not gold, oil, dollars, uranium, titanium, diamonds and the host of other “precious”minerals.
Let’s decolonise our minds, spirits, bodies, and beings in 2023, learning from our heroic and revolutionary children and youth of 1976! We must save the children so that they can save us and the next seven generations and beyond, our great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren!
Amandla ngawethu! Long Live Soweto 1976!
Kunnie is an activist Indigenous land rights and Earth Mother defender as well as unjustly incarcerated rights advocate. He is Pan-Africanist decolonisation educator who has been involved and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples struggling for recovery of stolen and dispossessed lands the world over. He is a professor and author.
Cape Times