THE Convention on the Suppression of the Crime of Apartheid has its roots in the opposition of the United Nations to discriminatory racial policies of the South African government - known as apartheid - which lasted from 1948 to 1990, writes Dr Wallace Mgoqi.
If we consider how life was made difficult for black children from birth to old age through tight regulation, we can certainly state that all those born after 1948, like myself, in 1949, were born into a furnace of fire and sorrow.
The Nationalist Party immediately passed the Population Registration Act and the Group Zones Act to ensure that white, coloured, African, and Indian people lived in separate areas. Legislation was passed to forcibly remove any of the other three groups from white areas.
When we relocated from Goodwood to Nyanga for school, my family and millions of others suffered this. Where you live can improve or ruin your life.
The entire apartheid architecture was designed to create a furnace of fire and misery for darker-skinned people, based only on race.
My four cousins, Mzimasi, Ntombi, Ntemi, and Titi Mgoqi, were on a government truck carrying them and their mother to Dimbaza, near King William’s Town, in the Eastern Cape. After their father died, their mother could no longer keep the council house, according to council regulations at the time, thus all widows like her across the country were considered “surplus individuals” and had to be “dumped” in areas like Dimbaza, Ilinge, Sada, and others. The late Father Cosmas Desmond visited various “dumping grounds” around the country and wrote “The Discarded People”, which we should read since it’s still in print.
Other people, like the late Bishop David Russell, went on a daily diet like these folks and fasted on the cathedral steps in Cape Town to protest the government on behalf of these people.
We write about these things to keep them in the nation’s eye, so even the young know where we come from and so we don’t forget our past lest it repeats itself. Memory fights amnesia and past distortion! We’ll remember and never let it happen again. Like the holocaust, some deny that six million Jews died ever after 70 years.
Fort Hare University social work students visited Dimbaza and other regions. One time, we brought leftover loaves of sliced brown bread from the dining hall. When we got off the bus and gave the kids the bread, their eyes brightened up like they were getting a carrot cake, and it broke my heart. I became a social worker and a lawyer to oppose the system that dehumanised people.
I vowed to tackle all the obstacles that prevented people from achieving their God-given abilities, aspirations, and visions. My relatives’ lives were cut short after Dimbaza because they couldn't finish school, but I was able to go to university. Where they were forced to reside determined their fate.
After being forced out of Nyanga, Cape Town, their lives changed. After the new democracy, some returned but lived in abysmal poverty. Ntombi died recently. Apartheid was more than a crime against humanity — it was a fire that destroyed most people’s lives.
Our heritage?
Despite everything that has happened in the past 28 years, we have a good Constitution that enshrines our core ideals. It established the Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary as independent but interdependent branches of government.
We have good policies in most parts of life to lead our nation. Our society lacks an anchor to teach children from kindergarten through adulthood right from wrong. Because we chose to be secular, we tossed away items like the Bible, yet from the start of our battle, every political leader was affected by Christendom or another religion, and all of our forefathers drew on such morality. Our young parents, who do what they think is good, are lost without a moral compass; as a society, judging by the big scandals that have rocked us, state capture and pervasive corruption among government officials, mimicking what political leaders are doing, things that promote self-interest rather than effective governance and service delivery for the benefit of the population.
We’re wrong. We shall lose our heritage and be a bankrupt state with nothing to pass on to the next generation — what a tragedy!
Another area that threatens our heritage is the lack of good, well-trained leaders, who have been sidelined by the huge wheel of the “it’s our turn to eat” generation, who are only in positions of authority for personal aggrandisement, driven by crude materialism and exhibitionism, flaunting their ill-gotten wealth. We cannot pass this down.
We hoped to continue some of our struggles. We had thought these green sprouts would grow to their full potential, but alas. One was the dispute settlement project in the labour field, originally between employers and employees and then expanded to community problems as they grew throughout the transition period. The Independent Mediation Service of South Africa (IMSSA) was permitted to expire at a time when the country was entering a period of rising social unrest.
Street committees were another place where we had built local dispute resolution procedures and even pre-empted conflict. These community-based systems promoted strong local governance, but we let them atrophy and die out.
We abandoned ubuntu and interest-based dispute resolution methods like facilitation, conciliation, negotiation, and mediation in favour of rights-based methods like litigation in courts and arbitration in private forums, which is why we are such a litigious society and could have been anywhere in the West, not in Africa.
Small, scattered conflict resolution projects are not getting government assistance. Though small and underfunded, they do a great job.
In conclusion, if we are going to reclaim the ground we lost through carelessness over the years, we will have to go back to the drawing board, take all those things that worked in the past, but failed to carry over into our new democracy, drunk with the joy of our newly found freedom. Fire and suffering continue to affect us.
Dr Wallace Mgoqi is chairman of AYO Technology Solutions. He writes in his personal capacity. The views expressed here are his own.