Shutting Down the Rainbow Nation: #FeesMustFall

Welcome Remarks 'Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation'

Mwelele Cele

Book Launch: Welcome Remarks

Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

Good evening honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues … My name are Mwelela Cele, and I am the Librarian at the Steve Biko Centre Library and Archive. Our concern is with both the past and the future, honouring the legacy of Steve Biko and facilitating the application of his philosophy to help improve the prospects of our fellow South Africans, and the prospects of future generations.

It is indeed an honour to welcome you all this evening to the launch of a very significant new book: memoirs of a born free: reflections on the rainbow nation. Warmest greetings to the author Malaika Wa Azania, to Mama Biko, to representatives from government, friends of the author and friends of the Steve Biko Foundation and Centre. It is a particular pleasure to have with us our colleagues from heritage institutions in our region - librarians, archivists, curators, museum professionals. We appreciate the support of our friends and colleagues from Amathole museum here in King William’s Town eQonce. It is a pleasure to greet political and cultural activists, intellectuals and lovers of books and knowledge. I want to also welcome our partners in different projects, and welcome the neighbours of the Steve Biko Centre. I want to take this opportunity to thank Jacana Media, the publishers of memoirs of a born free: reflections on the rainbow nation, our partners in organising this event.

Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

Memoirs of a Born Free

Memoirs of a Born Free is a journey back through the life of Malaika Wa Azania as she recounts the experience of growing up through the end of apartheid and South Africa’s transition into a democratic nation. She was not born during the times of constitutionalised apartheid but is still a product of an epoch of systematic individualised apartheid. Her story is not a reflection of freedom; it is an epitome of the on-going struggle for liberation and emancipation from mental

slavery.

A revolution’s dreams betrayed

Protests are rooted in the frustration and despair of poverty and rage at an uncaring government, writes Malaika wa Azania. The Sunday Independent

 In his poignant masterpiece Harlem, renowned poet Langston Hughes reflects on the nervous conditions of African-Americans whose dream of emancipation from the draconian laws of racial segregation has been aborted in the inter-city ghettos that are concentration camps.

There, levels of poverty, destitution and unemployment are soaring and drugs and alcohol serve as escape routes from the unbearable heaviness of tortured existence.

Hughes asks:

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore – and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over – like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

Why Robert Sobukwe is not dead

Robert Sobumkwe

It is through the people taking part in service delivery protests, and those who refuse systematic dehumanisation that the founder of the PAC lives, writes Malaika Wa Azania. The Sunday Independent

Johannesburg - African intellectual revolutionary Thomas Sankara, the former president of Burkina Faso, once argued that while revolutionaries as individuals can be killed, you cannot kill an idea. Victor Hugo went further to argue that there is nothing in the world more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Black people are poor, not stupid

by Malaika wa Azania, Thought Leader,15 April 2013

I am terribly annoyed by academics and political analysts in this country. It has become a Herculean task for me to even read their works and research based on the conditions of black people, particularly in the townships and rural areas. Most of these academic papers and articles, whatever issue they deal with, however different the research methodology employed, seem to be arriving at the same conclusion about the consciousness of our people. The conclusion is that the toiling masses in townships and rural areas, the majority of them black, are ignorant or stupid.

The Real Threat to BC Today

by Malaika Mahlatsi, GroundUp

On a cold afternoon in July 2010, a group of us met in Newtown to distribute pamphlets around the Johannesburg CBD and hotspots of the 2008 "xenophobic" attacks, such as Diepsloot etc. We were only about twelve, so we had to break into groups of four.

Three people would distribute flyers and one person would engage people to explain the cause we were fighting. Our campaign was called "Singamakwerekwere sonke", meaning "We are all foreigners". Basically, we were protesting against the deporting and the violence against our Afrikan brothers and sisters, whom our system calls "foreigners" and our people call "amakwerekwere". Our group was called SNI. We were young people who wanted change and we wanted it NOW!