EFF STATEMENT ON DAY OF RECONCILIATION

Thursday, 16 December 2021

The EFF observes the Day of Reconciliation as yet another reminder that there can be no true unity without justice and the return of the land to African people.

Reconciliation Day is one of many revisions of our collective history, which sought to erase the struggles of our forebears and their resistance to colonial conquest. In what was known as the Battle of Blood River, Dingaan and thousands of Zulu regiments were defeated by the Afrikaner Voortrekkers, in an act of vengeance for the murder of their colonial leader Piet Retief.

We are in essence coerced as a nation to honour a day upon which African people were murdered by colonial settlers, who had the audacity to stake claim to our land, under the guise of reconciliation.

This concession is symbolic of the continued cultural dominance of Afrikanerdom on the psyche of our society. It is ironic, because to this day there has been no reconciliation precisely because what led to the conflict at Blood River in 1838, remains a wound in our society today. This wound of land dispossession continues to characterise black life in South Africa.

The name of Retief is etched in public memory, with schools, streets and statues erected in his honour as a reminder of the conquest of Africans. We continue to glorify not only mass murderers, but days on which the landlessness of our people was orchestrated.

The EFF reiterates the call for land expropriation without compensation and for all sites that glorify colonial murderers to be removed. If we are to foster true reconciliation, it must be preceded by justice and true accounts of our history, not revisionism that insults the memory of those who stood against our conquest.

The day of Reconciliation will remain a mockery and failed attempt at social-cohesion, so long as the land remains in the hands of the benefactors of genocide, while black people live in absolute poverty.

Statement issued by the EFF, 16 December 2021