“Free Pariah’s”

“Free Pariah’s” 

Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (9 October 1876 – 19 June 1932) was a South African intellectual, journalist, linguist, politician, translator and writer. Sol Plaatje was a significant writer. His political tract, Native Life in South Africa (2), was an angry denunciation of the 1913 Natives' Land Act. The first sentence is perhaps one of the hardest hitting political statements in South African history: "Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a Pariah in the land of his birth" (Document 52, p. 186). It’s this sentence that is giving me Sleepless nights the last few weeks. The First Secretary General of the ANC (SANNC) opens a can of worms equally today as we (SA) is entering again our proverbial “Crossing the Rubicon"?

I'm at pains to probe if we are "Outsiders at a Point of No Return?" What are we crossing and where are we cast out to? Are we to denounce like Plaatje, the current Refusal by government to heed the call of the majority in Gauteng to stop the E-tolls? What is our Recourse of a glorious movement who hold the most progressive policies anywhere in the world over? An Institution, yes, that’s what the ANC is, and slowly but surely loosing this impressive accolade? What is at the heart of the ANC refusing to admit that privatising the roads is not the way to go 20 years into our young democracy? Who is benefiting from this malevolent system?

Who are the middle class who is targeted by the government if not the preponderance Black and destitute? Why the onslaught against a class of the population that has no significant handle on the economy? How does the government hope to lift the masses out of dejected poverty if they continue to levy taxes against this much needed constellation that need to enter the higher echelons of the economy? The implementation of e-tolls as it has been argued will unshakably place additional burdens on the poor who will have to fit the increase on the food and petrol bill?

Awakening tomorrow morning on 3rd December 2013, exactly 100 years and six months, I (and Gauteng citizens) will wake up and experience a place where we are “Free Pariah’s” in the land of our birth.