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Many years ago in an interview, Pieter-Dirk Uys was asked by a foreign journalist about one of his plays that had been banned. He mentioned feeling a bit silly that it wasn’t because he had taken a major political stand against an oppressive regime, it was because the word ‘poep’ appeared in the script.
And that, in short, sums up the dilemma of many young political activists these days.
On paper, at least, we have a well-functioning democracy, freedom of movement and protection of human rights. (The Constitution also says people have right to housing, yet in 1 in 5 people in SA live in informal settlements, so clearly not all the battles have been won.)
All things many people gave their lives for in the dark days before 1994. The Struggle was noble and against an easily identified oppressive government that perpetrated a variety of both visible and invisible evils. It is now easily forgotten that many political activists of the seventies and eighties were tortured, killed and kept in solitary confinement. Many didn’t live to see the change of government in this country.
But on the ones who did, a certain nobility has been conferred. Mythical struggle heroes were either in exile or on Robben Island. They were steadfast, courageous, long-suffering, idealistic and principled in the face of overwhelming odds and physical deprivation. Little short of saints, in the eyes of many South Africans. Maybe they were – I know I would not have survived what many of them endured.
The true warriors of justice
But this reverence for the true warriors of justice has, as in many countries in the past, given birth to the phenomenon of Struggle Envy.
Each generation has its own struggles, admittedly, and ours will probably be about poverty, the environment, gender issues, education, food and water. But somehow these are worldwide issues, and just don’t have the romance and the immediacy and the danger associated with the struggle against Apartheid.
Being tortured by the security police in the 1980s gave you a political and social standing, which throwing poo at a statue in 2015 of someone who died 113 years ago just doesn’t confer right now. Occupying the air-conditioned Bremner Building just isn’t quite the same as taking part in the Woman’s March to Pretoria in 1956.
It’s a worldwide thing. Posters recruiting soldiers for the trenches in WW1 showed a little boy asking his father: “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” It shamed many into joining up. It was conveniently forgotten that millions of those who volunteered did not live to see their children grow up, or hear them asking uncomfortable questions.
By the same token, how could one ever hope to live up to a father who was a soldier during the D-Day Landings, who survived a Russian POW camp, or who fought at Stalingrad?
The struggle starts now
While I am not saying that all is right with the world and that there are no issues left fighting for, there is a bit of a feeling about this whole statue-issue that we are trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. History, and the generational damage it did to individuals, cannot be undone. Removing a statue is a symbolic thing. There’s not a statue on earth that is not found offensive by some individual, but while we can remove the statue to a storeroom, we cannot erase history and its effects so easily in that way.
Taking a statue down is not the end of that particular battle. It’s the start. I hope that the missionary zeal of all these young students will be translated into helping others to get to the privileged scenario they find themselves in. There’s a worthwhile and courageous struggle that needs to be fought on many social and economic fronts – and these jobs do not come with hero status, cushy salaries and company cars.
Take up the baton that has been passed to you from your parents and grandparents – your country needs you now.
