Memoirs of a Born-Free by Malaika Wa Azania

Author:Malaika Wa Azania
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: apartheid autobiography, apartheid history, apartheid biography, memoir of apartheid, african apartheid, nelson mandela, south african apartheid, south africa, south african history, feminism, activism, social justice, immigration, sociology, biography, civil rights, autobiography, law, biographies, race relations, activist, police brutality, world history, biographies and memoirs, history books, memoirs, history, memoir, political books, politics, history of the world, autobiographies, africa, criminal justice
ISBN: 9781609806835
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-10-23T18:00:00+00:00

Parting ways with the Congress Movement

AROUND THE TIME THAT I WAS BEGINNING my initiation into civil society politics, my mother was slowly becoming dejected by the politics of the Congress Movement. We were no longer attending your meetings with the same frequency that we used to in the past. Once in a blue moon, we would go to Mapedi Hall in Meadowlands Zone 2 for a Youth League event. My mom had ceased to be active in the Youth League and was focusing her energies on the work that she was doing with SANGOCO and the other NGOs that she was working with as a volunteer.

I started to notice my mother’s unhappiness with you one afternoon just before campaigning for the 2004 general elections started. Usually excited about doing your campaigns, my mother was rather miserable at this period. She would just sit at home reading novels while her comrades were busy conducting door-to-door campaigns in and around the neighbourhood. When I asked her why she was no longer attending your events or helping her comrades to campaign and ensure an ANC victory, she responded that she was tired of you and felt that you were taking the poor for granted.

‘How so?’ I asked.

She replied that you were not prioritising critical questions that should have been made top priorities immediately after coming into power. These critical matters, she argued, were education and land. According to her, you were making grounds fertile for the creation of a welfare state by not making education your chief project. She was certain that within a decade the country would be plunged into a crisis of great proportions due to your blunders in the education system.

I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. As far as I could tell, there was no crisis in the education system save for the infrastructure contrast between township schools and former Model-C ones. I continued to hold the view that the difference was only in what they looked like and some activities they offered, and that the actual quality of education didn’t differ much. Tshimologo Junior Primary was just as good a school as Melpark Primary. Its teachers were just as passionate about teaching and the students were just as enthusiastic about learning. I presented this argument to her, telling her that the only crisis was that some schools had better facilities than others. My mother, in a very resigned voice, informed me that the contrast in facilities was not the biggest problem, though it was part of it because without proper facilities schools cannot function to the best of their potential. She argued that in township schools, students could barely use computers and so were destined to be incompetent in the workplace, where computers are a way of life. She argued that a lack of proper laboratories meant that students studying Biology and Physical Science in township schools wouldn’t understand some lab-dependent experiments and, as a result, their knowledge and understanding would be compromised. She argued many

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