Our dignity and history is not for sale

The SACP finds the latest manoeuvres to use our courts to try and rewrite our history extremely distasteful and seriously runs the risk of undermining our reconciliation process. It is also important that we also caution the courts themselves not to allow themselves to be used to try and wipe out the history of the heroic struggles of our people against the criminal apartheid regime. It certainly was not the intention of the authors of our constitution - a constitution written in blood and suffering of millions of South Africans - that an independent judiciary must mean that it should operate as if our country has no history. It is important that we remind ourselves of this as these attempts to use the courts to try to make us ‘forget' our history are actually a direct attack on the very process of reconciliation in our country. Our liberation songs are not only about our past but are also about who we are, our sacrifices, our dignity and our future.

We therefore fully support the intention of the ANC to appeal the absurd High Court judgement about one of the songs of our liberation struggle.

The SACP will strenuously oppose any attempt to re-write our history for the benefit of those who inflicted enormous damage on our people and our country. We shall not allow our institutions to be used to erase the collective memory of our nation, a past imposed on us by the capitalists and beneficiaries of the apartheid regime, who today try to opportunistically project themselves as latter day democrats. Where were the likes of Afri-Forum and their fellow travellers in the struggle against apartheid, and on whose side were they when our people were being thrown into jail, driven into exile, the underground, butchered by the apartheid police and military machine?

The overwhelming majority of our people have correctly taken a lead in the reconciliation process, but this should not be taken as a sign of weakness and that they will allow their history to be re-written. We owe it to future generations of South Africans to know about our past so that they too can have a future free of exploitation, racism and patriarchy.

Over the years, the ploy of the racist right wing apartheid regime was to position the liberation movement, its military wing and its alliance partners as nothing else but a group of terrorists as they where referred to at that point. To demonstrate its point and hide its heinous crimes committed against our people, the literature of the movement and its songs were used as examples of how the liberation movement was essentially a terrorist movement. Essentially today by these actions we are being told that we have intentions to murder!

Unfortunate parallels were being drawn about the alliance of the ANC and the South African Communist Party to further argue this point.

The issue of songs, language and mobilisation slogans to rally the people to heed a specific message has always been a contested matter in South Africa. At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the then Deputy President of the ANC, Cde Thabo Mbeki, led extensive evidence on this issue to clarify what songs and slogans meant for the liberation movement.

Organisations like Afri-Forum represents some of the worst hypocrites in our country, especially in their approach to these very fundamental matters of building a new South Africa. They have selectively focused on the murder of white farmers, but not once have they gone to court or any chapter 9 institution about murders of farm-workers by some white farmers and the slave-like conditions under which farmworkers and farmdwellers are treated by some racist white farmers. In fact Afri-Forum and its associated organisations are simply pursuing a racist and elitist class agenda to defend the narrow interests of their members, even at the risk of undermining our carefully constructed institutions of democracy.

Whilst every citizen has a right to approach the courts, but to reinvigorate what you lost at the TRC now through courts and complaints through our Chapter 9 institutions is opportunistic and an attack on our negotiated settlement by the propertied classes who at the same time oppose any constitutional amendment aimed at transforming the lives of millions of our people for the better, e.g. land reform and property relations.

The SACP abhors hate speech and respects the upholding of human rights values and principles. The key question is in whose class interest are some of these things being pursued? Why do you seek to maintain and protect the legacy of thousands of white South Africans who butchered our people, stole their land and renamed our cities in honour of these butchers and simultaneously attack the legacy of the liberation movement?

Statement issued by Malesela Maleka, SACP spokesperson, March 31 2010

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