From Revolution to Rights in South Africa Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword & Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Zapiro cartoons
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Activist Mediations of ‘Rights’ & Indigeneous Identity
- 3 Citizens & ‘Bushmen’
- 4 ‘Civil Society’ & Popular Politics in the Postcolony
- 5 AIDS, Science & the Making of a Social Movement
- 6 Rights Passages from ‘Near Death’ to ‘New Life’
- 7 Sexual Rights & Sexual Cultures
- 8 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Activist Mediations of ‘Rights’ & Indigeneous Identity
Land Struggles, NGOs & Indigeneous Rights in Namaqualand
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword & Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Zapiro cartoons
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Activist Mediations of ‘Rights’ & Indigeneous Identity
- 3 Citizens & ‘Bushmen’
- 4 ‘Civil Society’ & Popular Politics in the Postcolony
- 5 AIDS, Science & the Making of a Social Movement
- 6 Rights Passages from ‘Near Death’ to ‘New Life’
- 7 Sexual Rights & Sexual Cultures
- 8 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I am an African.
I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape – they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
(Statement of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, on behalf of the African National Congress on the occasion of the adoption by the Constitutional Assembly of the Republic of South Africa Constitutional Bill 1996; Cape Town, 8 May 1996)
During the apartheid period, it was widely believed that indigenous Nama and San people had become ‘extinct’ or else assimilated into the ‘Coloured’ population. In fact, in 1996 Deputy President Mbeki made a similar claim about the Khoi and the San having perished in ‘the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Revolution to Rights in South AfricaSocial Movements, NGOs and Popular Politics After Apartheid, pp. 29 - 50Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008