South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. We all know this. The majority of South Africans live in extremely impoverished, drug-infested communities where teenage pregnancy; high school dropout rates; gender-based violence in the form of domestic violence, rape and sexual harassment; alcohol and substance abuse; unemployment and crime; racism and a high prevalence of HIV/Aids is the norm. Add to that corruption; nepotism within government structures; distrust of the police and trauma. It all looks hopeless.
According to the 2017 South African Reconciliation Barometer (SARB) survey conducted by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, only one in three (35.6%) South Africans have “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of confidence in the police. In other words, only about a third of South Africans. That the majority of South Africans don’t have confidence in the police is alarming. The ideal situation would be the majority have trust in the police or any government institution.
The inauguration of Cyril Ramaphosa as the new president brought hope to many of us.
His Thuma Mina slogan has inspired most (if not all) South Africans to believe, once again, in Mandela's Rainbow Nation.
To believe that South Africans will one day live in a country that is free of all these social ills; a country where each and every individual can be prosperous; not judged on the colour of their skin or gender; a country where it is safe for children to be children who can grow up to be anything that they want to be; a country full of possibilities.
For those of us who are passionate about community development, about social justice, it has brought a new challenge: how to make sure that in the communities where we work we don’t create "happily oppressed people".
That we don’t re-traumatise people, that we address the issues boldly and create spaces for everyone to share their story - listen to someone else’s story and learn from it, that we do justice to the practise of justice.
That it is not just another word thrown about carelessly, but one that has real meaning. This is a challenge that we face every day. Out in the field, talking with real people, it is not an abstract term, it is very real.
Working in communities such as Carolina in Mpumalanga; Vryburg in North West to name a few, conversations with the youth in these areas, their state of living, their everyday experience, become heated quickly.
The trauma that they experience in their communities has become normal to them and they are desensitised to it. Many feel that there is no agency and are unable to change the circumstances that they find themselves in.
They are hopeless and dismayed. They do acknowledge that they know or are cognisant of their human rights but are unable to exercise those rights. Conversations about consent and boundaries show that in these communities people feel that they have very little or no room to negotiate power within their relationships.
Men in these communities feel that they are entitled to a woman’s body and get angry if she feels differently. They claim that because they support them financially, they are entitled to their bodies. As a result of this, men are seldom held responsible for their actions nor do they willingly take responsibility for their choices.
The Sarb found that 43% of female respondents reported feeling unsafe in their own homes nationally. Many factors can play a role in making a person feel safe or unsafe in their homes - such as intimate gender violence. The Gauteng Gender-Based Violence Indicators Project tells us that 25.3% of women (in Gauteng) had an experience of rape by a “man, whether a husband or boyfriend, family member, stranger or acquaintance”.
Eighteen percent of women experienced “intimate partner rape on one or more occasions”. Against these statistics, 37.4% of men admitted to raping a woman, and 31% of men disclosed having raped a woman who was not a partner.
Racism is also prevalent in these communities where white people still perceive themselves as superior to black people. This is still a problem 24 years after the democracy came to the country. No one can escape. Even celebrities are sometimes victims of racism or as we saw recently in the case of Somizi Mhlongo (Somgaga) being referred to as a "homosexual kaferketjie" by Lia Meyer on Twitter. Twitter was bombarded with people hurling insults and some protecting her (Lia). It was later stated that her account was hacked.
What was reassuring was some of the comments were from white South Africans who distanced themselves from such statements, saying that it was people like this keeping the country back.
Is this the South Africa we envisioned in 1994? Surely we can do better. Surely we can do justice to all South Africans.
Surely if we all adopt the Thuma Mina slogan, we can create a better future for South Africa.
We must demand better out of each other as the people of this country and as persons to whom all of South Africa belongs, we must also demand humane and better leadership.
We must help those who work in this sphere by actively participating in dialogues, workshops, seminars, debates, etc, that talk about our country. Each and every South African has a responsibility to help rebuild this nation.
However, I direct my appeal especially to those who benefited and continue to benefit from the legacy of the past to come to conversations about dismantling oppression.
In our work this is one of the biggest barriers we face - not just making “happy oppressed people", but then having them talk among themselves.
The legacy of our past means that those of us who are relatively well off, as a group, are also white. And it means those of us who are well off and white have no urgent need compared to communities in deprivation to engage with the "community", not only to heal but to try to find resources or a means to address collective challenges. Because of this, we don’t transcend barriers, literal and figurative, that still define us in all the ways it divides our nation.
We must also encourage civil organisations to continue with their work as they did before 1994 (those that were involved in the liberation movement) to challenge government to deliver on their promises. Talking and listening to each other on a human level will help us to understand our fears about the "other". Our national broadcasting authority has to give the stories of ordinary South Africans airtime on SABC.
We are not free until all South Africans are free. Aluta Continua!
* Nosindiso Mtimkulu is a senior project leader for the sustained dialogues programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.