Appropriately, we celebrate Human Rights Day on the same day on which we commemorate the Sharpeville massacre. On that fateful day in 1960, the apartheid state unleashed its military might on unarmed protesters. By day’s end, 69 people had been shot dead, with more than 180 injured. The Sharpeville protest was part of the broader struggle against the denial of fundamental human rights. Influx control measures, such as the pass laws, restricted the movement of blacks, rendering them foreigners across vast swathes of the country of their birth.
What happened at Sharpeville was a turning point for South Africa. The regime showed its determination to brook no dissent; it would protect white privilege and the exploitation of black people by all means.
For some who had hitherto passively sympathised with, or supported, white minority domination under an illusion that there was something respectable about the apartheid experiment the state’s savagery was a rude awakening. The scale and viciousness of the response surprised even those who had sought to justify the apartheid experiment.
Abroad, the horrific images of blood and death precipitated international outrage that led, over time, to South Africa’s moral and, eventually, political and economic isolation.
In the liberation movement, the killing of unarmed civilians led to the conclusion that they could no longer eschew armed struggle. The time had come to stand and fight.
When the massacre was followed by concerted state suppression of any dissent, the country moved into a strange political paralysis. The state of emergency that was imposed, the bannings, house arrests, detentions without trial and political cases before the courts drove millions who hated apartheid into sullen silence and others into exile and some into collaboration with white minority domination. It would be 16 years before smouldering resistance would again flare up and confront the apartheid state this time in the shape of the youth of Soweto and other black townships.
In the memorable words of the now tragically discredited Allan Boesak, addressing the launch of the United Democratic Front in Cape Town in 1983, the students of Soweto and subsequent generations wanted all their rights, they wanted them here and they wanted them now.
So it is that, on Human Rights Day, we remember those who sacrificed their own lives, the lives of their loved ones and their youth so that we can now enjoy the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. We celebrate the triumph of the human spirit its ability to overcome suffering with humour, to mock tyrants, and to use cunning and innovation to defeat more powerful enemies.
The commemoration is a challenge to all of us. As whites we are challenged to accept the painful history that was inflicted on our black compatriots in our name. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed many of the atrocities that black people were subjected to, the method behind them and the systemic violation of gross human rights. But the commission’s approach tended to focus on appalling acts perpetrated by individuals and extreme bigots. It skirted the issue of whether whites must accept collective guilt or culpability for apartheid. Subsequent attempts such as that by the Home for All Campaign to argue for acceptance of collective guilt have been hotly challenged from within the white community. Whatever the rights and wrongs of an acknowledgement of guilt by whites, we believe that, until whites are able in some exemplary sense to acknowledge the pain their compatriots endured under apartheid, reconciliation and nation building are likely to remain elusive objectives.
Many of us who are black have been similarly evasive. Many of us have lost sight of the ideals that inspired the courage and sacrifice of those who took part in the struggle against apartheid. We disregard the concerns of minorities; we are often hostile to dissenting views; we turn a blind eye to corruption; we adopt hostile attitudes to refugees from precisely those countries who suffered most to help us in our liberation struggle; and we opportunistically exploit racial tension to achieve personal gain. Whereas apartheid sought to make blacks feel unwelcome in the land of the birth, we are in danger of making white South Africans feel unwelcome.
The greatest challenge for us as South Africans, however, remains extending human rights to all. We have, as a nation, self-consciously defined rights in a way that includes the material necessities of life. For us, rights cannot merely be a set of principles enunciated in law to which individuals or groups may appeal in the courts. It is, therefore, of grave concern to all of us or it should be that many millions of us live without supplies of clean water, without waterborne sewerage, without access to basic health care, without an education, without an ability to read a word or add a row of figures, and without the prospect of placing food in our bellies unless we rob or kill someone else.
It is the struggle to correct those inadequacies and to bring the material basis for dignity to all our people that must now move us. We will judge our current leaders by their ability to lead us towards those objectives by their ability to realise the highest ideals that drove the struggle against apartheid.