On April 27, every year since 1995, South Africa stops, and the
nation is supposedly celebrating its Freedom Day. The question that may not
have received attention is what South Africans celebrate beyond that April 27,
1994, extended the full franchise to non-whites as they were characterised at
some point. Nations have rituals that give society positive anchors with which
they can define their sovereign distinctiveness compared to others. The flag,
the national anthem, history, and other heritage symbols are tangibles Nations represent
their pride. A shared passion about a past, troubled or peaceful, often defines
the mood of being free, even celebrating a Freedom Day.
In
South Africa, this luxury of celebrating freedom day is a ritual that might be
more hollow than society would care to appreciate. When freedom is celebrated,
there should be a clear relationship between those celebrating and what exactly
they are celebrating to be free from. Apartheid and all discontent that goes with
the fact that it existed, otherwise also called its legacy, has for the bulk of
South Africa's history is the system South Africa, arguably, is celebrating to
be free from. Those that perpetrated apartheid are celebrating freedom from
being part of the oppressing class and thus working on the conscience of
defining their success which they know is inextricably linked to the dispossession
of the other for them to possess. Those on the receiving end are potentially
celebrating the ability to be democratic given by the franchise, which makes
the liberation or freedom promise a dream delivered but to be banked as a lived
experience for many.
The
dictionary defines freedom as "the power or right to act, speak, or think
as one wants". It also describes it as "the state of not being
imprisoned or enslaved". At one level, it deals with the firmament of
being free and what attributes that firmament should entail; on the other, it
deals with what you should tangibly experience to demonstrate that you are
indeed out of what had imprisoned or enslaved you. The extent to which what has
defined not being free and whatever templates that sustained that suffocation
of your freedom is systematically revealed and removed is a critical component
of the entirety of the freedom you might proudly celebrate.
Because
freedom, like oppression, in its political sense, is a human construct, it
cannot escape being about how the institutions charged with reconciling
competing interests in society are calibrated to do so in a context that
promotes both equity and equality. The long-term impact and apex danger of
oppression is the capability of those oppressed to understand their retribution
obligations for the freedom of those they had oppressed to become a livable experience.
Spoils of subjugation and oppression, when in the hands of beneficiaries, do
not often announce how they are ill-gotten save to show how great it is to have
them. Only in contexts where it is clear who won a war, and a treaty and not a settlement,
is signed do issues of retribution become part of the treaty.
In
South Africa, and because of the unique circumstances that defined its path to
the 1994 democratic breakthrough, and thus franchise rights to the black
majority, freedom can mean many things. The South African freedom and this
rendition argues, is an outcome of how its political order was calibrated to
guarantee the existence of attributes of what it means to be free and live the rollout
to be a continuously negotiated aspect of just being South African. Given that
a political order "starts as a set of ideas that might take decades to
enter the mainstream of political life" and is a construct of an
"inner circle often made up of economists, captains of industry,
politicians, and intellectuals", the idea of freedom will in South Africa
be about the order to be celebrated than freedom itself. Because a political
order "is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies and
constituencies that shape a society's politics in ways that endure beyond the
several election cycles", its true impact is directly related to how
political formations in a society adopt and embrace it.
Apartheid
and colonialism were a political order that served the purposes for which its
time required. Acutely, apartheid as a political order was an outcome of a
deliberate ideological exercise undergirded by an economic philosophy, an
entrepreneurial zeal that focused on exploiting the templated of economic
dominance opportunities presented by its ideology, an intellectual class that
theorised its correctness and legality without due regard to its long-term
legitimacy, and a set of institutions of leadership that structured society for
its endurance. As a political order, it set up scaffoldings with which its
undoing would require a similar or superior level of sophistication to manage.
It produced for its maintenance, and from within its victims, a cadre that
would defend its continuity by believing it is being destructed (subject for
another day).
For
a political order to endure and succeed, it must be chronicled as a legal
system legitimised by the political arrangements with which society agrees to
govern itself; and adjudicated independently by a cognitive legal elite that
carries society along through jurisprudence. Its success depends on its
proficiency in shaping what a broad majority of elected officials and voters on
both sides of the societal divide regard as politically possible and desirable.
The best way to focus society on a political order is to package it into a
Constitution, thereby establishing a constitutional democracy with checks and
balances. This is the freedom our freedom days might have thus far been about.
The boldness of the South African Constitution to deliver the liberation
promise to its citizens is the political masterstroke of the 20th Century,
second to the United Nations Charter of Human Rights adopted shortly after the
war. For all other South African Constitution chapters, the preamble and
chapters one to three define the liberation promise. Most monumental documents
of the liberation struggle find expression in these sections of the
Constitution, including how fears of those that benefited from the apartheid
and all its adjuncts.
Our
celebrated Freedom Day can, therefore, only mean that we are celebrating the
fact that
We,
the people of South Africa,
·
Recognise the injustices of our past;
·
Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land;
·
Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country;
and
·
Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live there, united in
our diversity.
We,
therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution
as the supreme law of the Republic to,
· Heal
the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values,
social justice and fundamental human rights;
· Lay
the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based
on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;
· Improve
the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
· Build
a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a
sovereign state in the family of nations.
Anything
beyond this is institutional. However, the brute truth is "every political
order contains within it tensions, contradictions and vulnerabilities that
at a certain point become too difficult to maintain". When maintaining
a political order is difficult, begins to age and fray, and crises emerge,
society must see that as room for the next ideology or political order to
gain ground.
Otherwise,
Happy Freedom Day, South Africa. From all of us at the Thinc and BPI
Foundations Complex.
info@justthinc.co.za
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