told me, ‘my awareness over the problems that my country was facing, was growing. As young boys we worshipped Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. At the age of 10, I honestly believed that if we only had enough bazookas, we would liberate South Africa and thus bring our freedom about at once. After all, this was the way I had been indoctrinated at the time.’
During the 1976 Soweto student uprising, Jabulani Patose became entangled with underground resistance structures in his township. He had to tread carefully, because his father was the chief traffic inspector in the area. In 1977 he joined the Congress of South African Students, which was later banned by the government. In 1979 he found a job in heavy construction. Working there for four years, he learned what he terms the exploitation of the labourer. ‘We were not properly treated. We generated energy, but we did not share in the profits. We were merely used as tools. I hated being in an industrial job.’
Gently I tried to convey to him that 35 years of international reporting had taught me beyond a doubt that workers everywhere felt exploited, or reduced to mere robots, while not being properly compensated for their tireless efforts to contribute productively. I told him how I had watched workers in developing lands and former colonial dependencies continue to voice the same frustrations and dissatisfaction even after their countries had been liberated and were now being ruled, not by overlords from London, Paris or Amsterdam, but by their own compatriots. As examples, I cited two countries I had come to know well - India and Indonesia. Both had gained their independence half a century ago, but the fate of the masses in those countries once described by American futurologist Hermann Kahn as ‘the chronic poor’ had hardly improved, and in many instances had even steadily deteriorated. What I was trying to tell my young friend from Boipatong was, in fact, that he should realize that political liberation without realistic forethought seldom or never means that construction workers - or any other labourers, for that matter - will be offered a better deal from the day that liberation is proclaimed.
Revolutionaries the world over are too often deluded by a cherished aspiration that, once the hated overlords have been chased out, the goal of ‘one man, one vote’ and equal rights and opportunities will automatically arrive. This somewhat wild expectation is usually based on the erroneous belief that the minds of recently liberated people are disposed
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd