No thanks for the memories

Written by Tiisetso Makube

In one of the most eloquent newspaper cartoons of recent times, we were treated to a proud, post-1994 South African government boast that not only does it have the excellent capacity to deliver, it also does so with the necessary urgency.

The cartoon appeared shortly after the announcement of the successful construction of one of the stadiums ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup we will be hosting between June and July.

Such was its sheer ingenuity that no one but the most casual reader would have missed a telling detail: in the bottom corner was a representation of the wretched multitudes marvelling at this gigantic and imposing structure, while at the same time wondering when they, themselves, would experience this level of government efficiency.

Their concerns are unambiguous: will this "service delivery", the mantra of all political parties at election time, ever be anything more than that?

The people are very angry, and in their frustration and festering anger, they take to the streets the way South Africans have always done whenever they have felt grossly injured - just as they did on this day 50 years ago in what was to be known as Sharpeville day (Human Rights Day).

Sixty-nine people were killed and more than 100 others injured then, in what had been intended as a peaceful march in protest at the pass laws and other such demeaning legislation.

In his book published in 1960, Shooting at Sharpeville: The Agony of South Africa, the then Bishop of Johannesburg, Ambrose Reeves, asks why so much importance is attached to Sharpeville.

His answer is prescient: "Many people have forgotten what is the abiding tragedy, the loss to hundreds of children of parents and the hope of education and financial support for the future."

Now, how many of those who were mere children on that day, 50 years ago, were thus affected by that brutal massacre of their parents?

When residents of Sharpeville took to the streets in late February this year to protest against corruption and a lack of service delivery, how many of those would have been the children of the 69 killed and more than a hundred maimed?

"Many people will be inclined to dismiss the events at Sharpeville as just another incident in the growing series of disturbances," Reeves wrote 50 years ago.

"Their only desire will be to get back to normal as soon as possible. Superficially, this may easily be achieved; but underneath the external calm, dangerous fires will continue to smoulder."

Of course, this is not rocket science. Just logical reasoning. Yet for some unfathomable reason, those unto whom the power to govern has been entrusted seem to have an arrogantly contemptuous disregard for this simple logic - and Sharpeville, in this regard, seems particularly cursed.

Take, for instance, the 1984 case of the Sharpeville Six.

What happened in February this year in this accursed Vaal township when violent protest erupted, is almost a carbon copy of what happened in 1984.

Then, the residents were disgruntled that the deputy mayor of their town council, Kuzwayo Dlamini, was not attending to their service concerns sufficiently.

Worsening matters was the fact that Dlamini, who had been appointed by the apartheid government, was seen by the residents as being in office mainly to please his employers, who were the enemy, and also to eat, while his people starved, rather than to advance their cause. Does this not sound familiar?

As the writer Robyn Sassen puts it in her 2004 article "Just another day in Africa": "At 41, Dlamini had the material possessions about which most of his peers could only dream. He seemed to be straddling issues of home life and work adequately and in the process, had earned a reputation for not being completely sincere.

"On 1 September 1984, a 12.5% rent increase, payable to the government, was announced. Two days later, a mob planned to march to the governmental offices to object to the rent increase.

"En route, they passed Dlamini's home. One thing led to another and the mob stoned Dlamini, then burned him. His car was turned over and set alight, and his house and material possessions set afire."

It took the law two months to nab the "culprits". These were Reginald Sefatsa, Reid Mokoena, Moses Diniso, Theresa Ramashamole, Duma Khumalo and Francis Mokhesi, later to be known as the Sharpeville Six.

But the case against them was weak, the state evidence flimsy, and when they were eventually sentenced to death, Sharpeville, once again, became the focus of world attention.

Pressure was brought to bear on the apartheid government, which resulted in a stay of execution, numerous appeals and the eventual release of these five men and a woman in 1991.

To the extent that it has consistently managed to attract international attention, Sharpeville should easily be as famous as sprawling Soweto.

And so it had to be that when President Jacob Zuma was about to visit Buckingham Palace as the official guest of Queen Elizabeth a few weeks ago, world attention was again focused on Sharpeville as it burned - and burned in a manner that we thought belonged to a bygone era.

What is it about Sharpeville that, when it burns, the fire rages so furiously?

Could the answer, perhaps, lie in the fact that, as others accumulate wealth and indulge in conspicuous consumption, many others are in a perpetual struggle against forgetting?

The Nigerian writer Ben Okri once said that if the rich continued to ignore the poor, "violence will be the music to such deafness".

And we have begun to see that in South Africa - not just in Sharpeville, but in many townships across the land where the poor reside, hidden from sight, only to be remembered at election time.

But what is urgently significant about Sharpeville is - in what some may call a contradiction in terms - the tragic and precise insignificance that is rapidly being attached to the memory of this place.

In his essay, The "Black" Agenda and South Africa's Universities, writer and academic Njabulo Ndebele remembers a statement once made by Raoul Peck, the director of the acclaimed film, Lumumba.

Peck said that he belonged "to a reality that's shared by many Third-World nations: we are not in control of our collective memory".

Is it surprising, then, that the memory of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress who led the 1960 protest march, is slowly vanishing from our collective psyche?

And with that, the vanishing of the significance of Sharpeville?

Has not the time come that those in power stopped playing their narrow party-political games and started serving "the masses", and restoring their human dignity?

As Sobukwe once passionately appealed: "Remember Africa!" Africa and her people. Not just the amorphous masses.

*Makube is a Johannesburg-based writer and researcher

(This story was provided and used with permission by Timeslive.)