Growing up in a communist household during the apartheid era, Michele Pickover developed a strong sense of outrage at injustice that stood her in good stead when she launched Animal Rights Africa (ARA) last month.
With the slogan ”One struggle — human freedom, animal rights, sustainable environments”, the ARA launch brought together an interesting assortment of left-wing and radical social movements. The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, for instance, is not the type of organisation you normally see at environmental gatherings.
Pickover’s father, Albert, was a member of the Communist Party of South Africa until it was disbanded in 1950; he instilled in her a contempt for apartheid and all that went with it.
”He taught me to have compassion for, and to identify with, oppressed beings. I developed a personal ethic built on an attitude of caring,” she says.
When she was 16 she stopped eating meat and became a vegan. While she was studying at Durban University in the 1980s, she was detained twice for her activities in anti-apartheid politics. In 1988 she joined South Africans for the Abolition of Vivisection and since 1990 she has played an increasingly important role in the animal rights movement.
During the apartheid years the struggle for human rights overwhelmed other liberation issues, she says.
”But in the post-TRC era of renewal and reconciliation South Africans’ experience of prejudice, discrimination and violence enables them to empathise with the suffering of other species.”
Pickover says the time is ripe for a broad-based liberation front. ”There are many crucial freedoms and liberation struggles that still need to be fought for and won — total liberation being one. These are also global struggles and people around the world are making the connections.”
Fiery struggle jargon echoed around the Wits Origins Centre, where activist groups such as People Opposing Women Abuse, the Anti-Privatisation Forum, Ceasefire and the Free Burma Campaign participated in the launch.
Jonathan Payn, a founding member of Zabalaza, explained its struggle is for ”an egalitarian society free from all forms of oppression, including but not limited to those based on gender, race, disability, age and the exploitation of the natural environment”.
ARA is perfectly positioned among these ”progressive groups”, Pickover says. ”The venue was overflowing, which showed there is great support for an initiative that links the common causes of oppression. Human, animal and environmental exploitation are tightly interconnected — no one form of exploitation can be abolished without ending the others.”
Pickover’s day job is head of the historical papers archives unit in the William Cullen Library at Wits. In 2005 she published a pioneering book, Animal Rights in South Africa, which was nominated for the Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction.