Upholding our hard-won human rights, unyielding in our defence
21 March 2024
On Wednesday, 21 March 2024, we celebrate the twenty-ninth anniversary of Human Rights Day, inaugurated on 21 March 1995. The human rights enshrined in our constitution were not handed to us on a silver platter; rather, they are the hard-won fruits of our revolutionary liberation struggle. We must defend these rights, including the fundamental right to national self-determination, and we must do everything possible to end racism.
The Human Rights Day is observed on the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, which occurred in 1960 under the apartheid regime. On 21 March 1960, peaceful protesters in Sharpeville were brutally gunned down by apartheid security forces. The Sharpeville massacre serves as a poignant reminder of our struggle against apartheid and underscores the imperative to defend our democracy and national self-determination against neocolonial and imperialist forces.
The apartheid security forces killed 69 people and wounded over 180 during the Sharpeville massacre. Among the victims were women and children, many of whom were shot in the back while attempting to flee. Estimates after the Sharpeville massacre revealed that the apartheid security forces fired at least 700 bullets from submachine guns. After the massacre, the apartheid regime declared a state of emergency. It detained over 11,000 people and outlawed the ANC and the PAC. The SACP was the first political organisation the apartheid regime outlawed, ten years before, in 1950, under the Suppression of Communism Act.
One year after the Sharpeville massacre, on 16 December 1961, the SACP and the ANC joined forces to establish uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the people’s liberation army, thereby integrating the armed struggle into the core pillars of our broader liberation struggle. This is one of the reasons we take serious exception to the misappropriation of the MK name and identity by Jacob Zuma through his new party, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
As detailed by President Nelson Mandela in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, the SACP had already developed its own armed units before our movement formed the MK. This pre-existing infrastructure simplified the establishment of the MK, as these units served as part of its foundation. When we adopted this direction, it was evident that the apartheid regime was unwilling to heed any language other than that of the armed struggle, over and above intensifying international isolation, underground organisation, and mass mobilisation to overthrow the regime.
The apartheid regime committed various massacres, killed many people and detained many others after the Sharpeville massacre. Records from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission highlight some of the apartheid atrocities. To this day, there are families who do not know where their loved ones ended – as a result of apartheid security forces and their networks the crime against humanity. Following up on all the cases to unearth everything and ensure accountability could help all the affected families to find closure.
Our struggle was long, lasted for centuries, considering the wars of resistance to colonisation before the formation of the ANC in 1912 and the SACP in 1921. Frederick Engels reviews one of these gallant wars in his book, the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, first published in 1884. A Lerumo (Michael Hammel) reviews a number of these wars of resistance to colonisation in his book Fifty Fighting Years: The South African Communist Party 1921–1971.
When we struggled to abolish racist oppression, the white minority supremacist racists presided over it. They had the support of the white community who benefitted from the racist oppression. With the white bourgeoisie playing a dominant role, together they vigorously defended the successive colonial and apartheid regimes that held sway over our nation.
Today, people who benefitted or continue to benefit from the inheritance handed down from one generation to another dating back to the era of racist oppression seek to lecture us on democracy. They also serve as local agents of contemporary forms of neocolonialism and imperialism by former colonial powers and imperialist regimes from Western Europe and the United States. This implies a persistent adherence to racism, which is not always overt but at times manifests in covert ways.
The DA, a political party of white leaders in an African country where the majority of the population is black, acts to subordinate our hard-won democracy and national sovereignty to the interests of former colonial powers and Western imperialist regimes. Evidence includes the recently leaked letter from the DA, soliciting these regimes to bolster their interference in our domestic affairs, particularly concerning the upcoming elections.
In defence of our hard-won democratic rights, the working class needs to unite to defeat the reactionary agenda of the DA and its handlers in the imperialist regimes of Western Europe and the United States. This should include defending our Independent Electoral Commission from the false information spread by the DA and its ilk. The IEC must take legal steps, to the extent spreading false information about other political parties, and the IEC itself, constitutes a violation of our electoral code of conduct. The SACP will engage with the ANC in the coming period to consider appropriate action against the DA and its ilk.
As we celebrate the twenty-ninth anniversary of our Human Rights Day, we need to identify and resolve unresolved national questions. The unresolved land question ranks high. We need to accelerate our efforts to resolve it as a matter of urgency, to ensure equitable access to land on a non-racial and non-sexist basis. This should be part of our wider efforts to dismantle the legacy of colonial and apartheid oppression, racism and patriarchy.
The racially skewed, capitalist, property relations that prevail in our country feed the root of racism and irreconcilable contradictions. It is unjust for massive tracks of our country’s land and the wealth of our society at large to remain in the hands of a minority, whilst the majority are landless and propertyless. The system of bourgeois ownership of land and socially produced wealth will not resolve the centuries-old historical injustice of colonial and apartheid land dispossession and racial wealth inheritance. It can only perpetuate the problem, as it has done over the past 30 years. We need to roll this back to complete building a non-racial and non-sexist democratic society characterised by shared prosperity social production.
We call on the working class to go out in their number on 29 May 2024 to vote for the ANC. Over and above that, SACP structures should strengthen working organisational, political and technical capacity, to ensure that the government implements programmes that will decisively roll back inequality.
We need a just social formation:
Socialism is the Future – Build it now!
Issued by Solly Mapaila, SACP General Secretary, 21 March 2024
