This piece is inspired by the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, which dawns the celebration of Human Rights day. Today, decades ago, 69 black people lost their lives in the violent spake of brutal police force undertaken by the Apartheid regime when launching mass action against the defamatory pass laws.
Given the recent commemoration of International Women’s day, it seems fitting to reconcile the proactive political role that South African women played on the 9th August 1956 in an organised staged protest to defianitely oppose the pass system. This had played an integral part not just in further entrenching subjugation by limited movement, but eroding the foundation of the home given the length of time men and women would stay apart.
In the new political dispensation, liberty is taking on several nuances.
The existential meaning of ‘blackness’ has little positive reinforcement, this vacuum largely due to having inherited a fragmented discourse that has distorted the lens through we which, we, as a people, see ourselves, and how that, in turn, affects the manner in which we occupy intellectual, economic, or physical space in the mainstream, continually assaulted by critical structures of education, media and cosmetics. The civil rights activists and philosophers of old have crowned us to remember the foundations of black consciousness, and the inherent value we have to share with the world, knowing ourselves to be unequivocally beautiful, and completely deserving, to walk tall throughout this exquisite country, unashamedly, in our divine unassailable right to em/body the fullness of freedom.