Grassroots activism: ordinary people making an extraordinary difference
Release Date: 23 March, 2005
By Kumi Naidoo, CIVICUS Secretary General
In 1960, March 21 was declared International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination by the General Assembly of the United Nations as a reaction to the killing of 70 peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville, South Africa. In post-apartheid South Africa, 21 March is observed as a public holiday: Human Rights Day, so this was a long weekend in South Africa and a weekend of reflection for many. I participated in various events which underscored for me the critical importance of grassroots activism as the most important engine of social change in our world today. I ask for your indulgence as I share my reflections from these activities below.
Monday, 21 March: I spent Human Rights Day supporting the efforts of family members to set up a HIV/AIDS support centre in the extremely poor Mnceba District, in the Ntabankulu Municipality in one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, the Eastern Cape.
The meeting with the community took place in the home of a relative who had recently passed away and who wanted the home and land to be donated as community facility and to focus on supporting community efforts, already underway, to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It was extremely inspiring to hear so many stories of courage, determination and commitment in the face of a pandemic that has, as community members put it, “our people are dying like flies”. We spoke to a young woman who has organised a support group in the area for young HIV positive people to support each other.
A nurse from the local clinic, a stones throw away from the proposed community centre, spoke of how the clinic was terribly understaffed, with four professionals seeing close to 2000 people per month. She said the sad reality is that they do not have space to counsel people who have been diagnosed as being HIV positive. She volunteered to work at the community centre during her lunch time and weekends to help with counseling young people in the community and agreed with twelve other community leaders to serve on a committee to oversee the community centre’s activities. I was accompanied by my CIVICUS colleague, John Treat, and we both were deeply moved by the spirit of sacrifice, volunteerism and hope shown by local people who were undertaking a range of activities without salaries, and with very little in-kind or cash resources. The leadership role of women in this rural community was also very evident.
Sunday, 20 March: The previous day, I had the opportunity to reunite with many grassroots activists from the community in which I grew up for the 25th anniversary of our anti-apartheid youth organisation, Helping Hands. The organisation has no website, has never employed staff and has never received external funding. Yet drawing on the skills of working class youth, their energy and their volunteerism, many activities were successfully undertaken. Helping Hands was primarily concerned with mobilising young people to play constructive roles in the township of Chatsworth but also to provide services to young people.
The leadership of the organisation throughout the last 25 years has always been an active supporter of the struggle for justice and democracy in South Africa. Organising young people in the context of apartheid was very difficult, as parents were very scared of detention without trial and other repressive instruments that were commonplace at that time. Helping Hands members were often arrested, followed by security police and were under state surveillance. However, moving young people who had limited understanding of what was happening politically, due to the propaganda machinery of the apartheid state, was difficult. So the activities in the main were "first level" activities such as organising sporting events, educational programmes, career guidance seminars, supporting charitable institutions and so on. Simply bringing young people together to share experiences and build relationships was hard enough.
Shifting them from safer activities to aligning with the liberation struggle took a lot of informal and painstaking work. As Helping Hands grew in confidence and strength, we began to host more explicitly political events such as commemorations of the Sharpeville and Soweto massacres. As resistance to apartheid intensified in the 1980s, several Helping Hands members joined the liberation organisations, including some who opted to join the armed struggle led by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC).
As organisers of the reunion put it: “Any community anywhere in the world that does not respect its history and does not seek to protect that knowledge loses its sense of identity and ultimately is culturally poorer as a result. In commemorating the history of resistance to injustice, promoting constructive ways in which young working class people can engage in society is a critical objective of Africa and the world as a whole. Our small movement, Helping Hands, must remember those that paid with their lives for their efforts in the struggle against injustice.”
Apart from the joy of seeing people I had not seen for several years, it was great to see that a new generation of leaders wanted to inaugurate a memorial trust to remember those that had fallen in struggle, and to continue the tradition of informed community service. As one of the organisers of the reunion put it, “This is an opportunity for memory, reflection and rededication to working to create a just world and society.
It is also an opportunity for Helping Hands members who came from working class backgrounds in the main, to recognise that it is not only those who have had the privilege of university education or those who pontificate from universities with very little grassroots experience to speak of, who have the right to have a voice in shaping the policy discussions of our time as well as the challenges of practically providing solidarity and support to those communities most in need. Serving those that are vulnerable and working for policy changes should not be seen as contradictory activities.This is a lesson that many of us draw from our Helping Hands experience; an experience that helped us maintain our humanity in a sea of injustice helped us to develop leadership skills and to form a family of friends that will be part of our lives till the end of our days on this planet”.
Saturday, March 19: The day before, we attended the 46664 HIV/AIDS event which sought to raise funds for the HIV/AIDS work of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. 46664 was Nelson Mandela’s prison number, which has become a powerful symbol in raising awareness about the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. Mandela spoke passionately of how the HIV/AIDS pandemic has a woman’s face stamped firmly on it and the concert focused on the specific impact HIV/AIDS has on women. I had the opportunity to thank Nelson Mandela for his support of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (www.whiteband.org) and to speak to Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).
Zackie, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year and who has inspired thousands of civil society activists and ordinary people in Africa and beyond, stressed that it is critically important that we ensure that grassroots activists around HIV/AIDS are given a voice and are part of any national effort. TAC places a huge emphasis on building capacity for this leadership role of grassroots activists in the national campaigns.
All of the “holiday” weekend activities were deeply inspiring and an important opportunity to reflect on the power of ordinary people to contribute to, and to lead, what are often extraordinary efforts to address injustice and deprivation at the local level where we all, ultimately, live.
Best wishes,
Kumi Naidoo
Please send your comments and suggestions to e-mail kumi@civicus.org.
