This inaugural lecture honours our insubordinate ancestors – the 20,000 women of 1956 who defied the patriarchal, capitalist, apartheid state. The pass laws entrenched colonial dispossession and criminalisation of millions of black South African people. Generations after that march Steve Biko united us across apartheid’s ghettos of “African”, “Indian”, “coloured”, ”non-white” as black people fighting apartheid brutality and its strategy of divide and rule.
Apartheid’s misogynistic police and army worked alongside the state’s institutionalised brutality including forced removals to apartheid’s equivalent of Nazi Germany’s ghettos – the Bantustans, townships and informal settlements – where millions died slow deaths linked to malnutrition, injuries from frequent mining accidents and preventable illness such as silicosis, TB and later HIV.
The apartheid budgets prioritised white power and privilege. The new economic policy of 1996 was drafted almost exclusively by white men, many of them consultants to the IMF and World Bank. The global trading system demands open markets for its hormone-injected meats and sources SA’s organic fruit and vegetables because their own courts have ruled against carcinogenic products, as cancers have increased across the world.
The cost of winning universal franchise continues to be paid to those who own the world. While poor people are branded as thieves of money, electricity, water and land, the statistics reveal that wealthy corporations steal billions. Their illicit financial flows, theft of land, water and electricity falls below the radar of our consciousness of what a thief looks like.
The pollution of the Earth’s water and air, her plants and animals seeps into our bodies, causing cancer and other illnesses that claim millions every day. Corporate self-interest dictates the priorities of our politics, economics, media, education and culture… our beliefs about who we are, how we should live and what we can be.
Love her