On April 27, South Africa celebrates Freedom Day. Ferial Haffajee asked veteran South Africans how life has changed since 1994
For lawyer and local legal legend George Bizos, freedom comes contained in a little beige book. His dog-eared copy of the Constitution is a well-thumbed and living document.
As the head of the constitutional unit at the Legal Resources Centre, it is Bizos’s daily work – and his passion – to enforce the rights contained in this Constitution. “When we talk about freedom,” says Bizos, “we must talk about rights.”
It is this Constitution that is held up by most thinkers as a potent symbol of freedom five years after April 27 1994 and after the first term in office of a legitimate authority.
The document has meaning only when there are structures to enforce rights. These include an effective criminal justice system, the media, institutions of state, like the Human Rights Commission, and of civil society, like the Legal Resources Centre.
A flurry of laws and judgments have brought the country in line with its Constitution: formal apartheid has been expunged, the death penalty outlawed, abortion legalised and the equal rights of women expounded on in several areas, to name but a few.
For Bizos, it is the “right to elect and be elected” that is primary. “Without that you’re a non-starter. Without it, you’re not a citizen in your own country.”
The shock troops of yesterday – people like Bizos, MPEllen Kuzwayo and writer Eskia Mphahlele – have a sense of freedom absent among segments of the young for whom history is not in such sharp focus.
Bizos remembers: “You really would have to have lived through the Fifties and Sixties to know the things you couldn’t do. You couldn’t live in Hillbrow, couldn’t love the person of your choice. You couldn’t change your job. You couldn’t phone the SABC and express your view.”
For Mphahlele, freedom is closely tied to dignity and the removal of the indignities of formal apartheid. “You don’t have that double queue [one for blacks and one for whites] any longer.”
Among the women of Orlando East where she lives, Kuzwayo discerns a different bearing post-April 1994. The 83-year- old woman mimics it by sticking out her chest to demonstrate a new confidence.
Women, she says, don’t walk with their heads down anymore. “People have a new outlook on life. They can make demands about the things they want.” Some have received houses, others sanitation, pavements are uniform and the streets somewhat cleaner. Development is slowly happening.
Yet the high degree of apathy ahead of what will only be the second election in which all South Africans can vote may be testimony to the failings of freedom, as are this week’s revelations about continued police brutality.
“I just don’t know how we are going to hand over freedom as something that needs to be valued, to be appreciated,” says Kuzwayo, who despairs at the young people who wander aimlessly along Tambo Street in Orlando East.
“Many people ask me, `Why do you let them sit under your tree? They’re just loafers.’ But are they loafers, or are they victims of circumstances?”
The link between joblessness and poverty on the one hand and crime on the other is a tenuous one, but all commentators equate contemporary freedom with tangible gain and opportunity in South Africa.
Government representative Joel Netshitenzhe says socio- economic rights – like the right to a job and a house – are “rights which are considered fundamental”.
Put another way, la Kuzwayo: “Freedom is seeing my children well fed in a home, to have the basic needs that will fulfil their lives. If I cannot fulfil some of the needs of my family, my freedom is limited.”
Many South Africans consider their freedoms limited by crime: the women dragged from taxi ranks and raped, the families holed up in walled communities, the township businesses under siege from young gangsters.
The clamour for the reinstatement of the death penalty is growing, as are calls for other constitutional amendments in an effort to get tough on crime.
For Bizos, the answer lies not in changing the Constitution, but in improving criminal justice. “Since time immemorial, democratic governments have abrogated the rule of law, withheld fundamental human rights because they are under stress either from enemies from without, or crooks and gangsters who want money and power. That is the real slippery slope.”