Often, on Human Rights Day, I publish a playlist of songs related to the fight for freedom, from here and elsewhere. I’m doing so again below. (One of them isn’t a song, but Jayne Cortez’s poem, Rape, says things that could never be prettied-up with music.)
What are you doing with the day? Chilling? Catching up on a Netflix series? Quaffing a few cold ones and charring bits of dead animal over hot coals?
Or maybe, if you’re in Joburg, heading up to Constitution Hill for their Human Rights Festival?
The Hill, of course, and the Concourt within it, are the jewels of our democracy: the places whose very existence embodies our commitment to the right to speak freely. We should not only celebrate the existence of these places, but use the space to live the freedoms won through struggle.
Except it’s not always as simple as that.
Since late last year, a group of elderly struggle veterans of the Khulumani Galela campaign have been staging a sleep-in protest on the Concourt steps.
Their strategic demand is for the re-examination of a TRC process that many saw and still see (https://humanities.uct.ac.za/apc/trc-and-codesa-failed-south-africa-its-time-we-reflected) as deeply flawed and incomplete, and for adequate reparations for those whose contribution has still not been acknowledged. (Remember, these are the parents and grandparents whose efforts and wounds won us the right to decide what we should do on March 21.)
Their immediate, short-term demand – the reason they are still on the Concourt steps after all these months – is much simpler: that the countless politicians and bureaucrats who have come to peer at their protests and mumble generalities, simply keep their promises.
“We’ll have a response for you in a few days”; “We’ll get the Minister (or somebody higher) to come and listen to you”; “On Tuesday, you’ll have an answer”. All these and more have been said. Over months. None of those promises has ever been kept.
Now, with high-profile events on the site, the presence of a group whose actions should be celebrated today as symbols of the human rights we have won, seems to have become an embarrassment.
They have been denied the use of toilets and washrooms on the site. Three weeks ago, police were called to move the protestors (mainly aged between 60-80) away, in the process injuring some between the heavy Concourt doors and manhandling and tearing the clothing of one who had suffered a seizure. No media noticed this outrage or the devastating irony of its location.
In a recent book, Solidarity, researchers Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt Hendrix track the damaging effects of the “professionalisation” of protest. Those with grievances are once more distanced from those who should hear them. Professional lobbyists stand in the middle. Protest is confined, individualised and tidied-up.
But what the Galela campaigners are doing on the steps of the Concourt is what exercising the right to protest really looks like. It isn’t neat or obedient to orders. It’s a collective effort, multivocal, genuinely democratic, and making do with what it has, on hard concrete steps, under plastic as shelter from the storms.
If you go to Con Hill today, take time to stop by the Galela protest. It’ll tell you more about what human rights ought to mean than many other things on display.
And now some music to back up that message.
sisgwenjazz 