Letters and Statues
I wrote a letter last week. It was not a pen on paper or even a typewriter version but tapped out on my phone screen — all thumbs and fingers. My fingers and palms hurt afterward, but it was a satisfying pain. The letter was a relief to me; my co-creator sent no crazily misspelt words or text speak abbreviations, no gifs, no links sans the courtesy introduction. Just a week’s worth of updates and polite kindness, some raw honesty of a shared fragility, canine & feline news, a (not enough celebrated) sense of innate joyfulness, stoic acceptance, oceans and forests, mushrooms and a colleague testing positive for the Rona.
This is regular life in the holy land, circa winter 2020; from the freezing nights of the Highveld, lounging in the sun on the East Coast beaches, brisk walks staying out of the water on the West Coast and if you’re lucky to have your winter in Tshipise — enjoying the natural hot springs for the evening dip. There’s snow on the higher ranges in the Western Cape and neighbouring Lesotho. In the Free State, the browns and tans of the veldt against the mid-blue of the cloudless sky. On the lower ground, the gamut of green in a Durban garden, the occasional frangipani that keeps on blooming despite the genetic programming to hibernate for the season. And that’s but a fragment of this magnificent place, our holy land of South Africa. The site of colonisation of so many kinds for pretty much the last four hundred years.
Reading Sol Plaatje’s A Native Life in the midst of this season of global history, is arguably not the smartest move right now. Page after page of verbatim Parliamentary recordings from the politicians of the time infuses the present long moment of history, with a deeper resonance. Even with frustration, as the narrative that Plaatje weaves, remains essentially unchanged more than a hundred years on. Describing the irregular and rapid adoption and implementation of the Native’s Land Act of 1913; Plaatje is at a loss: “…God in the heavens alone knows what will become of the hapless, because voteless natives, who are without a president, ‘without a king’, and with a governor-general without constitutional functions, under task masters whose national traditions are to enslave the dark races”.
Toppling a statue of a slaver into a harbour or bringing down statues of the butcher of The Congo, are the zeitgeist of this long moment. We should however consider the long moment is stretched across time, from the distant past of modern day slavery, through the Apartheid policies implemented in the USA and North America, Australia, South America, the entire African continent, most parts of Southeast Asia and in the Pacific. In fact everywhere, European Imperialism, it’s military, religious and capital armies went in the world, over four hundred years. And with enough of that spirit carried over into modern day government to allow the statues of mass murders to remain standing in public places until #Rhodesmustfall got the present wave underway.
So, while some people talk about defacing public property and how nothing good came of tearing down things and other such quaint ideas; a brief look around June 2020 in any major city on the planet is an indictment on the state of the world and its peoples, nations and nationalities. This our best version of human civilization, human beings living their best life. A world floundering in the inequalities it has bred at every corner of its operations, a denuded natural environment and possibly a major financial market crash on the horizon. A world where police get more money than the healthcare or education system in the same town.
Moves to acknowledge the horrors of modern era, capitalist driven, military-based and government sanctioned slavery is being seen for what it is. An aberration of our collective humanity. And arguably, together with the COVID-19 inspired changes to life and lifestyle, one of the better opportunities we will have to recalibrate the civilisation we have inherited. Or is the idea that we might make some effort to reformulate our values and way of living just a flight of fancy?
If the scenes I’ve seen in the little I’ve been out in public, during what is still a national lockdown, is anything to go by — people seem to be going back to normal, quicker than anyone can say ‘the new normal is over’ — welcome to the old normal — with some minor changes — but essentially, it looks very much like business as usual. People getting on with the mundade and magnificent work of living every day — most trying to keep their heads down and focus on getting enough on the table for the month. Staying healthy, because illness means no pay. Staying away from police and other authorities because they remain illegally in the country. Small and large, but every concern and worry is a life threatening one.
The things that many of us take for granted; like eating a meal or three every day, staying warm and cosy in our homes through winter and being assured the children are safe and will not lose a school year are for millions of South Africans, very real daily worries. Going back to business as usual is not going to help us in the long run. If we do anything now, we should, as Nicole Fritz says, “allow for more careful appreciation of the importance of limiting the effects of arbitrariness and its resulting injustice in our country”.
The years of letter writing and petitions, marches, protests and sit-ins and hunger strikes and other actions by so many social justice activists over the years are being manifested by an organically driven global movement in 2020. If what we create from this moment can be organically formed and widely owned, then we have a chance of a difficult but wholly satisfying outcome, for all of us who inhabit this planet.
And that’s something worth writing an actual letter about.
