What greater gift than the hate of Apartheid: Reflecting on the Cape Town Palestine Solidarity March

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other", writes Charles Dickens in his celebrated work, A Tale of Two Cities. In articulating disdain for apartheid, a crime against humanity, Capetonians were once again seen united in one of the biggest marches in recent history. The organisation prowess which went into the march had the common characteristics of the unity of South Africa's clergy represented by the erudite Rev Allan Boesak, invocation of the Mandela surname as a node to express the depth of injustice in Palestine represented by Mandla Mandela, and the resuscitation of the ANC-as-liberation movement represented by Fikile Mbalula. The message from the march was an unequivocal repudiation of the apartheid character of how the State of Israel and the global axes of non-white lives do not matter, headquartered in Washington, have been and still treat the people of Palestine.

In Dickens parlance, the march was to anyone who detests apartheid, wherever it manifests itself, and more acutely, the people of Gaza, a context of what greater gift than the love of the world's other structural victims of the templates that an apartheid system can bequeath to posterity. Whilst post-1994 South Africa has been the dream of the nation's soul, as the Siya Kolisi and boys have demonstrated, the Solidarity with Palestine march in Cape Town and the Web Ellis victory parade were a tale of two worlds in South Africa's legislative capital. It was the best of pro-Palestinian gatherings, and it might have been the worst of displays of unity in a city that still represents how not to be true South African. 

 

Concealed in the cosmopolitan character of the human solidarity movement to repudiate the US-endorsed unbridled and genocidal killing of Palestinians, euphemistically dubbed Hamas terrorists, is the disunity in agreeing what a true post-apartheid South Africa should look like. In the crowds were people who are living in communities where drug lords are the day-to-day dispensaries of terror and the criminal justice system is paralysed. The glare of inequality that will remain in the streets of Cape Town and surrounding towns, an abstraction of the general that the whole of the territory of South Africa is, should keep open the lips that profess support of Gaza also to say something about the subliminal other violence of the poverty-unemployment-inequality triad undermining our democratic order. 

 

As the rejection of Palestinian genocide and ethnic cleansing is the political sun that shines hot to energise global response and solidarity, our truth must be allowed to be the cold wind that accompanies the despair on the faces of most marchers. We must know that to the heart of Palestinians, this will remain the summer in the light for their cause in as much as it is a permanent winter in the shade of our South African equivalents. With the wrath that the templates of socio-economic dominance are keeping most South Africans bent and broken, we should hope that the wisdom of seeing it happening in others will be the teacher. Otherwise, it will be a day used on others and wasted on ourselves. 

 

A call to 'open our hearts and be the refuge' for the Palestinian cause was made by Dr Allan Boesak. With our accumulated prodigious strength in sorrow and despair and the growing experience by the majority of citizens to being refugees in our own political economy, opportunities, and real rights of property ownership, our capacity to become a refuge will remind us of the refuge we should seek in how we vote in 2024. In our little world of brittle freedom and fragile social justice, where the hopes of Palestinians are assumed to be in existence, there is more which is so finely felt as the injustice which makes us the first and loudest to pronounce Israel is what we know as an apartheid state. In our way, Capetonians told the wind and fire in Gaza to stop. We want more of what we theoretically have for anyone who feels the pinch of the apartheid shoes we once wore.

Our vote in 2024 is in many ways equal in significance to the stance taken in Cape Town for and on behalf of the people of Palestine. Again, in Dickensian parlance, for those we would give blood, we must remember there are those we share the same blood with. The multitudes we became in Cape Town must be calibrated to provide a historical bridge between our past selves as a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustices that the people of Gaza are going through and a future based on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. CUT!!!