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Date : 21/03/2005
Source: Mpumalanga Provincial Government
Title: Ndebele: Human Rights Day celebrations


Address by the Honourable Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Sibusiso Ndebele, at the Human Rights Day rally, at Albert Park in Durban

The Mayor of the Ethekwini Municipality, Councillor Obed Mlaba
The Members of the Executive Council of the Provincial Government
Members of the Provincial Legislature
Councillors
Invited Dignitaries
Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen

We are gathered here today, the 21st of March, to celebrate our annual Human Rights Day. This day was born in struggles in which thousands of our people sacrificed their lives in order that we may never again be treated as second-class citizens in the country of our birth.

The 21st of March first shot to prominence in 1960 when jumpy Apartheid policemen fired at the crowd of African people that had converged on the Sharpeville police station to protest against the most hated pass laws. They shot and killed 69 children, women and men and wounded 180 others. Subsequent inquiry established that most victims were shot in the back as they were fleeing from police fire. A further 20 people were fatally wounded on the same day at Langa in Cape Town.

Again on 21 March 1985, the Apartheid soldiers opened fire on the crowd of the residents of Langa in Port Elizabeth who were marching from the township towards town to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre. 20 marchers were killed in this incident.

The pass or “dompas”, as the apartheid oppressors preferred to call it, imposed a life of subservience, intentional impoverishment and denial of human rights and human dignity to the vast majority of the people of our country. The race laws of the country meant that the only carriers of the passbook were African people who could not walk the streets in our cities and towns without constant harassment by the Apartheid policemen who stopped them and demanded that they produce a passbook or face a prison term, hefty fine or both.

The first democratically elected government in our country in 1994 deliberately chose the 21st of March as our Human Rights Day in order to honour and pay tribute to the men, women and children who perished during the Sharpeville and Langa massacres on 21 March 1960, as well as thousands upon thousands other cadres and compatriots who died in the course of our liberation in South Africa. As we are gathered here today we join millions of our people through the breadth and length of country and our province who are also honouring the martyrs of our struggle for liberation.

The victory of 1994 and our rise to power in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in April last year, created great opportunities for us to advance the course for which the martyrs of Sharpeville in particular and our liberation struggle in general fought and died. We are now in a position to take concrete steps towards the restoration of the dignity of all our people that is itself a fundamental human right.

Two weeks ago, in my address to the Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) conference in Durban, I committed my government to a concerted campaign to rid our province of illiteracy that is confronting more than 2,1 million of the 9,5 million residents of our province. As a provincial government, we are of an opinion that if our people are illiterate they are in danger of falling prey to criminals and may be denied basic services they are entitled to largely because they cannot read and understand the rights that they should enjoy under the Constitution of our country. It is therefore of utmost importance that we ensure that our people succeed in the struggle from ignorance that may have very devastating consequences if left unattended.

Prior to this I had outlined, in the State of the Province address, various programmes that my government will embark upon in the year ahead in order to ensure that the people of this province will succeed in the struggle for freedom from want, freedom from hunger, freedom from disease, freedom from fear and freedom from humiliation caused by poverty.

An academic once said that the role of the public service is to confer rights on individuals and the role of government is to confer these rights on the citizens of our country in general. For us human rights are not merely about reversing the ravages of the past, but are primarily about making tangible and qualitative differences in the lives of our people. We understand that as government our actions or non-actions that trample on human rights are illegal and should be punished since the Bill of Rights is part of our Constitution.

Allow me, master of ceremonies, to add that as we are assembled here today, our Deputy President, Jacob Zuma, and the Secretary-General of the African National Congress (ANC), Kgalema Montanthe, will speak at the launch of the book entitled The Legacy of Freedom: the ANC’s Human Rights Tradition. It was decided to launch this book on the Human Rights Day because of its historical significance in our Human Rights campaign.

The book is based on the document entitled the African Claims in South Africa, which the ANC adopted approximately 62 years ago, in 1943. The African Claims were drawn up by a 28-member committee of ANC leaders, five years before adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in response to the Atlantic Charter that promised the emergence of a new world order in the aftermath of the devastations, on an international scale, caused by the Hitler’s fascist madness that led to the Second World War.

The African Claims were well ahead of their time in that they insisted that in South Africa the envisaged new order had to be based on justice and self-determination for all the people irrespective of their race, colour or creed. It also asserted many rights that laid the foundation upon which our democratic Constitution and Bill of Rights were subsequently based. We all know that our Constitution and Bill of Rights are regarded as the most progressive in the world today.

This year’s Human Rights celebrations also coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, a historical document that bears testimony to our deep commitment to the eradication of racism in all its forms and to our respect for human rights for all. In it our movement declares that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white; and that all national groups shall have equal rights; that all shall be equal before the law; and that all shall enjoy human rights.

I mention these things especially because there are still many ‘doubting Thomases’ in our midst who have unhesitatingly accused us of reverse racism when we seek to rename those buildings, roads and other public institutions that were named after figures that are associated with Apartheid and colonialism. We should like to assure them that we have never envisaged a situation where white domination would be replaced with black domination because our struggle was primarily about the eradication of racism in all its forms.

But we are, at the same time, mindful of the words of Amilcar Cabral during his Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture at Syracuse University in New York, in 1970, when he said about heritage and cultural domination:

“History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organised repression of the cultural life of the people concerned. Implantation of foreign domination can be assured definitively only by physical liquidation of a significant part of the dominated population”.

We know and understand that those who accuse us of reverse racism are bent on maintaining the status quo at the expense of the previously oppressed masses of our people whose heritage was suppressed and sometimes destroyed without any attempt to find out how they felt and what they wanted. We will not be distracted from our course which seeks to restore the dignity of people by honouring and recognising those who have made it possible for us to enjoy the freedoms and human rights that we are so proud of today.

Our liberation movement, the African National Congress, can proudly say that throughout its history it has remained the foremost defenders and upholders of a culture of human rights. At the core of our liberation struggle has always been the goal of creating a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic country based on the values of true freedom, social justice and respect for human rights for all. We have not deviated from these goals, and we will not do so at any time in future.

Indeed, our Provincial Government and the Ethekwini Municipality have chosen to celebrate this year’s Human Rights Day by honouring our heroes and fighters for human rights and by recognising champions of reconciliation and non-racialism. Among those we have chosen for our celebrations are Inkosi Albert Luthuli, Ms Florence Mkhize and King Dinuzulu.

Inkosi Albert Luthuli was one of the most outstanding president-generals of the ANC. Today he is widely accepted as an undisputed father of non-racialism, alliance politics and non-violent resistance in South Africa. He was the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in the whole of Africa. He was awarded the prize in 1960 and he travelled to Oslo to receive it in 1961. Also in recognition of his tremendous contribution to the struggle against Apartheid, the Organisation of Africa Unity, the predecessor of the African Union, bestowed a merit award on him posthumously in 1974. More recently, the University of KwaZulu-Natal has also awarded him a Doctor of Law Degree posthumously in recognition of his tremendous contribution to the struggle for democracy and justice for all in South Africa.

Under Luthuli’s leadership the ANC undertook campaigns that helped to transform it from politics of deputations and petitions to a mass-based movement. It also developed campaigns that were to define and shape its future programmes and policies. The most important amongst these are the Defiance Campaign and the Freedom Charter.

Luthuli will also be remembered in Durban for his daily public addresses at the Red Square in the 1950s before the Apartheid state served him with banning orders that prevented him from educating the masses about their rights as citizens of our country, province and city. By renaming the M4 Highway South after Inkosi Albert Luthuli we seek to reverse the injustices of the past and to extend to Luthuli the kind of freedoms that Durban denied to him during this lifetime.

Florence Mkhize was a tireless activist for the emancipation of the people of South Africa, particularly the restoration of dignity and respect for women. She was amongst the most outstanding women leaders in Durban from the 1950s onwards. She provided much leadership during the preparations for the historic women’s march to Pretoria on 9 August 1956. She worked tirelessly against the forced removals of our people from Cato Manor to KwaMashu in 1959 to 1960. She was also active in the 1959 potato boycott campaign. After the banning of the ANC and other organisations she became an underground operative.

It is worth mentioning that Florence Mkhize was charged and sentenced to a prison term for her role in organising the commemoration of the first anniversary of the death of Inkosi Luthuli in 1968. Florence Mkhize remained a loyal cadre of our movement until her death on 17 July 1999.

Comrades, friends and fellow citizens, allow me to set the scene for what I wish to say on the erection of the statue of King Dinuzulu by repeating what I said in the State of the Province Address in Pietermaritzburg late last month. I said:

“To face the future with confidence and hope requires that we carefully consider our past”.

I made the point that the unprovoked war of 1879 and the settlement imposed on the Zulu Kingdom in the same year had yielded a harvest of bloodshed and disorder on a grand scale. We owe it to our future that we remember this. We do so today, not in a spirit of bitterness and a desire to exact revenge, but with a commitment to build a future which will not allow such injustices to be perpetrated again. And we do so with the same generosity of spirit which is part of our proud heritage.

King Dinuzulu was convicted in a grossly unfair trial of treason for plotting an uprising against the British in 1906. He was imprisoned in Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg.

One of the first actions of the new Prime Minister of the Union government of Louis Botha was to order the release of King Dinuzulu from prison in 1910. This release of an important political prisoner was, in my judgment, an important act of reconciliation, which we should not forget. Botha was strongly encouraged by Harriett Colenso, the daughter of John William Colenso, the Anglican Bishop of Natal and who, like his daughter, was a tireless champion of the Zulu cause from 1879.

Botha had known Dinuzulu personally, since he had fought side-by-side with the King and the battle of Etshaneni against the Mandlakazi. But, because of pressure from the Natal officials, he did not release Dinuzulu into Zululand, but arranged for him to settle on a farm in Middleburg, together with his family and his Traditional Minister, Mankulumana. Unwittingly, Prime Minister Louis Botha restored a semblance of dignity to King Dinuzulu.

Very significantly, the farm Rietfontain on which the King was settled was known in Zulu as KwaThengisangaye, the meaning of which I am sure I do not have to explain to those able to speak Zulu. For non-Zulu speakers allow me to explain that the name means “the place where he was sold” aptly encapsulating the duplicity of those responsible for the King’s downfall.

Following the death of King Dinuzulu in 1913 the Botha government arranged for the welfare of the King’s family at Rietfontein. The King’s body was taken first by train to Vryheid and then by ox-wagon on a three-day journey to the eMakhosini, the ancestral heartland of the Zulu people and burial ground of kings for four centuries. The king himself had wished to be buried at Nobamba, a Royal homestead that preceded the reign of King Shaka by three generations and one of the most revered places in Zululand.

Large numbers of ordinary people and a host of Royal personages accompanied the King’s body on the trip to eMakhosini. On the wagon behind that bearing the King’s body was none other than Harriette Colenso, “Musihelo” the great friend and champion of the Zulu cause and confidante of King Dinuzulu and his father King Cetshwayo. Today is Human Rights Day and it is singularly important that we remember this important history in the life of our nation. We need to ensure that in the memory of the great champions of human rights, the Colenso family, are remembered and honoured.

Many members of the Zulu Royal family, including some of the King’s wives followed on foot. So too did his children who had been with him on the farm, including Prince Arthur Edward Mshiyeni, who was later to act as regent, and David Nyawana.

As the procession neared Nobamba it was met by one of the King’s other sons and heir, Soloman Nkayishana Maphumuzana. One of the chief mourners at the funeral was Pixley Seme, one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the African National Congress. Seme had arranged for a doctor to see King Dinuzulu during his final illness and had established a fund to send the King to Europe for treatment.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope this brief historic overview is sufficient to explain why I feel it is important that we honour King Dinuzulu on the site we have identified earlier today by erecting a statute to him.

Allow me now to briefly explain how I believe we should proceed from here. Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali, our heritage agency, resorts under my office and I have asked Amafa to co-ordinate this project, together with the Ethekwini municipality. It goes without saying that His Majesty the King, King Zwelithini Goodwill, will be consulted in detail at every stage of the process.

The sculptors will be chosen after a public process, details of which I will announce, together with Amafa in the next few weeks. I would like Amafa to ensure that the artists chosen to design and create this statue use natural rock from the sacred Nobamba ikhanda in the eMakhosini, as well as a rock from the battlefield of eTshaneni, in the construction of the plinth. This will not only, in my view, be richly symbolic, but it will create a tangible link between the site we have chosen and the historic places in Zululand that featured strongly in the life of King Dinuzulu.

Finally, I believe all our people would like to contribute to this project and thus not only feel part of it, but quite literally share in the historic significance of what we are doing.

Accordingly, I shall be asking Amafa to open a special bank account, the King Dinuzulu Fund, to enable members of the public, businesses, municipalities and other organisations to make contributions for this very special project.

I said in the Legislature that I would like this project to have been completed before the end of this year so that it can coincide with the beginning of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the 1906 Bambatha uprisings against colonial rule.

As a people of KwaZulu-Natal we have right to our heritage and self-determination. The area of heritage, history and culture is an area that is often neglected when we talk about human rights yet this area is at the core of who we are as a people. It reminds where we come from. To deny anyone this human right is to deny them their past. As the government of KwaZulu-Natal we will work actively to ensure that we safeguard and preserve this and other rights.

Failure to do this would render us criminals because it would go against the precepts of our Constitution.

Masisukume Sakhe KwaZulu-Natal!

Issued by: Office of the Premier, KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government
21 March 2005

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