Kimberley Process / Suspend Zimbabwe / Diamond Monitoring Body Should Demand an End to Forced Labor, Smuggling, and Corruption
Kimberley Process / Suspend Zimbabwe / Diamond Monitoring Body Should Demand an End to Forced Labor, Smuggling, and Corruption
JOHANNESBURG, South-Africa, October 29, 2009/African Press Organization (APO)/ — The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, scheduled to meet in Swakopmund, Namibia, from November 2 to 5, 2009, should immediately suspend Zimbabwe for continuing human rights abuses and widespread smuggling in the Marange diamond fields, Human Rights Watch said today. The government of Zimbabwe has not complied with any of the recommendations put forward in July by a review mission of the group, an international body that governs the global diamond industry.
Human Rights Watch researchers carried out follow-up investigations from October 12 to 23, establishing that elements of the Zimbabwean Defence Forces have consolidated their presence in the diamond fields and that they are abusing members of the local community and engaging in widespread diamond smuggling. On June 26, Human Rights Watch published “Diamonds in the Rough,” a detailed report on human rights violations associated with illicit diamond mining at Marange.
“Zimbabwe has had more than enough time to put a halt to the human rights abuses and smuggling at Marange,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Instead, it has sent more troops to the area, apparently trying to put a halt to independent access and scrutiny.”
In their latest investigation in Zimbabwe, Human Rights Watch researchers were able to interview 23 people directly linked to the Marange diamond fields and to confirm the following abuses, which put Zimbabwe in violation of the minimum standards required for membership in the Kimberley Process:
The Zimbabwean army uses syndicates of local miners to extract diamonds, often using forced labor, including children.
On September 17, a soldier shot and killed a 19-year-old member of one syndicate. The soldier stated, in the presence of witnesses, that he had shot the man for hiding a raw diamond instead of handing it over to the soldier.
Local miners provided information that soldiers have begun to recruit people from outside Marange to join army-run diamond mining syndicates.
Smuggling of Marange diamonds has intensified. Scores of buyers and middlemen openly trade in Marange diamonds in the small Mozambique town of Vila de Manica, 20 miles from Mutare. The smugglers include people from Lebanon, Belgium, South Africa, and India, who circulate Marange’s diamonds onto the international market.
The ownership of the Marange diamond fields is in dispute. The mines minister, the police commissioner, and the government-owned company, Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC), have all failed to comply with a High Court order issued by Judge Charles Hungwe on September 28, to restore prospecting and diamond mining rights in the diamond fields to the previous owner, African Consolidated Resources (Private) Limited (ACR).
The judge also directed ZMDC to cease prospecting and diamond-mining activities in the area that the court says belongs to ACR, a private company. Although the High Court ordered the police to cease interfering with ACR’s prospecting and mining activities, both the police and the army continue to bar it from access to the diamond fields. Zimbabwe’s minister of mines has appealed the High Court Order, and ZMDC continues to carry out prospecting and mining operations at Marange.
On October 6, to comply with a demand by Kimberley Process members, President Robert Mugabe announced that the government had selected two new private-sector investors to take over mining in Marange. However, the process of selection has been shrouded in secrecy and the investors’ identities remain unknown. The Kimberley Process rules require participants to ensure that all diamond mines are licensed and that only licensed mines extract diamonds.
In its June 26 report, Human Rights Watch documented how Zimbabwe’s army, which remains under the control of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), the former ruling party, had committed horrific abuses against miners and local residents, including killings, beatings, and torture. The report also revealed the army’s policy of rotating military units into the diamond fields for roughly two-month periods. This policy was designed to maintain the loyalty of senior military and other officials to ZANU-PF by giving them illicit access to Zimbabwe’s mineral wealth at a time of national economic and political crisis. Human Rights Watch found new evidence of rotation of army units into Marange. At the beginning of October, the Harare-based special mechanized brigade was deployed, replacing the Kwekwe-based fifth brigade.
The Kimberley Process sent a review mission to Marange in late June to assess Zimbabwe’s compliance with the organization’s standards, which require diamonds to be lawfully mined, documented, and exported by participant countries. On July 4, local and international media reported that the review mission had found Zimbabwe to be in violation of these standards. The media reports said that the review mission urged the government to take corrective action by July 20 or face suspension.
The government of Zimbabwe has since ignored the apparent calls by the review mission to remove military units from Marange, end human rights violations and smuggling, and hold accountable those responsible for abuses.
“Recommendations for Zimbabwe to withdraw from Kimberley voluntarily or for Kimberley to provide technical and other assistance without full suspension will not be effective.” Gagnon said. “Zimbabwe has already reneged on a commitment to withdraw the army from Marange. Clearly it will only be moved to make changes under the full force of suspension.”
Human Rights Watch urges the Kimberley member states at their plenary session in Swakopmund to suspend Zimbabwe immediately from exporting diamonds and from participation in the Kimberley Process until it fully complies with the following:
Immediately end all human rights abuses in the Marange diamond fields, including killings, beatings, forced labor, child labor, and torture.
Remove the army from Marange district, and demilitarize and depoliticize Zimbabwe’s diamond industry.
Restore security responsibilities in Marange to the police, but ensure that they abide by accepted international law enforcement standards and respect the rule of law.
Open an impartial and independent investigation into alleged human rights abuses linked to the illicit extraction of Marange diamonds, their smuggling, and the associated culture of official corruption.
Hold accountable all civilians, soldiers and police implicated in these abuses, irrespective of seniority.
Urgently resolve the outstanding legal questions of control and title to the Marange diamond fields in compliance with the relevant High Court Order. Lack of clarity around control and title has fostered an environment conducive to corruption and smuggling.
Ensure that, in the event that relocation of the community around the diamond fields is found to be necessary, the relocation fully complies with national and international human rights standards.
Human Rights Watch believes that the suspension of Zimbabwe and a ban on Marange diamonds are critical to the credibility of the Kimberley Process and the diamond industry. The Kimberly Process, established to end the trade of “conflict diamonds,” should fulfill its commitment to consumers that the stones they purchase have not been mined in situations of grave human rights abuse. In this context, Human Rights Watch again calls on the Kimberley Process to set up a local monitoring mechanism comprising independent local civil society organizations and Marange community leaders, who could freely monitor and verify the Zimbabwe government’s compliance with the Kimberley Process review mission’s recommendations.
Key Kimberley Process Members
The final decision on the suspension of Zimbabwe rests with Kimberley Process members, who work on the basis of consensus. When consensus is impossible to reach, the chair, Namibia, is mandated to carry out consultations. To reach consensus, it is essential for the following key countries to support fully the suspension of Zimbabwe:
Namibia: As current chair of the Kimberley Process, Namibia presides over all plenary proceedings and, in the event that consensus cannot be reached, is mandated to conduct consultations on the way forward. Namibia is also a major regional diamond producer, and its ruling party, SWAPO, has long had close links with Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF.
India: Some of the world’s largest rough diamond cutting and polishing centers are found in India. India chairs the Kimberley committee on participation, which is responsible for making recommendations regarding Zimbabwe’s future participation. Human Rights Watch investigations found that raw Marange diamonds are being channeled to India for polishing. This raises the risk that Marange diamonds could taint the reputation of India’s domestic industry if no action is taken.
South Africa: Human Rights Watch investigations found that South Africa is one of the main destinations of Marange diamonds, and that they are also smuggled there via Mozambique. Along with the region’s other main diamond producers, Botswana and Namibia, South Africa will find its market reputation undermined if it blocks Kimberley action on Zimbabwe and permits the continued entry of Marange diamonds.
Belgium: Home to a huge diamond sorting and polishing industry, Belgium is another notable destination for raw Marange diamonds. Belgium’s position within the organization is likely to have great influence on the rest of the European Union. Its reputation could suffer if it continues to handle tainted Zimbabwe stones.
Israel: As the next chair of the Kimberley Process, taking over from Namibia in November, Israel will face scrutiny for its position on Zimbabwe’s suspension at the November meeting.
To read the Human Rights Watch report, “Diamonds in the Rough: Human Rights Abuses in the Marange Diamond Fields of Zimbabwe,” please visit: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/06/26/diamonds-rough-0
For more Human Rights Watch reporting on Zimbabwe, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/en/africa/zimbabwe
For more information, please contact:
In Johannesburg, Tiseke Kasambala (English): +27-79-2205-254 (mobile)
In Johannesburg, Sipho Mthathi (English): +27-11-484-2640
In Washington, DC, Jon Elliott (English, French): +1-202-612-4348; or +1-917-379-0713 (mobile)
In New York, Georgette Gagnon (English): +1-212-216-1223; or +1-917-535-0375 (mobile)
In Mumbai, Meenakshi Ganguly (English): +91-98-200-36032
In Brussels, Reed Brody (English, French, Portugese, Spanish): +32-2-737-1489
SOURCE
Human Right Watch (HRW)
Nestlé gives AfriForum undertaking that it (Nestlé) will no longer buy milk from Mugabe
Nestlé gives AfriForum undertaking that it (Nestlé) will no longer buy milk from Mugabe
PRETORIA, South Africa, October 2, 2009/African Press Organization (APO)/ — AfriForum Media Statement
During a meeting in Randburg (South Africa) this evening, the Managing Director of Nestlé in Southern Africa, Sullivan O’Carrol, gave the South African civil rights initiative, AfriForum, its assurance that from 4 October 2009, Nestlé will no longer buy any milk from Grace Mugabe – wife of the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe.
This undertaking follows after AfriForum had launched an international campaign called www.nestlebloodmilk.com yesterday, to encourage people to boycott all Nestlé products unless Nestlé were to decide before the 7th of October 2009 to stop buying milk from Mugabe. In the light of Nestlé’s undertaking, Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, undertook on behalf of AfriForum not to go ahead with the planned boycott.
Kriel welcomed Nestlé’s decision and described this turn of events as a victory for justice. According to Kriel, the victory has been made possible by the fact that thousands of people from all over the world have been prepared to send letters to Nestlé via the website www.nestlebloodmilk.com to express their dismay at Nestlé’s decision to buy milk from Mugabe. “This event proves that ordinary people can use their power as consumers to ensure that justice will prevail,” Kriel added. He expressed sincere gratitude towards all who supported the www.nestlebloodmilk.com campaign.
According to Kriel, AfriForum will continue with efforts to make certain that unceasing pressure is brought to bear on the Mugabe regime to ensure that human rights violations in Zimbabwe are brought to an end.
Kallie Kriel
CEO: AfriForum
+27 82 441 5073
kallie@afriforum.co.za
SOURCE
AfriForum
Southern Africa Weather on the 6th of October 2009
Human Trafficking Awareness Week
PRETORIA, South Africa, October 2, 2009/African Press Organization (APO)/ — IOM Press Briefing Notes
IOM is joining forces with the South African government, the International Labour Organization (ILO), national radio station Metro FM and the Kaiser Chiefs soccer team to raise awareness on the dangers and consequences of human trafficking in South Africa.
The 4th annual Human Trafficking Awareness Week, which will run from 4 to 10 October, will rally the support of non-governmental organizations and the private sector around this year’s theme: “Human Trafficking is real: Tsireledzani!”
The event is part of a European Commission funded national counter-trafficking programme which aims to reduce the vulnerability to trafficking, rescue victims and provide them with adequate protection, support and reintegration assistance. The programme also aims to track and disrupt trafficking networks and to convict those who organize and benefit from the trade.
Highlights of the week will include the airing of talk shows and Public Service Announcements on national television and radio networks, print and online media as well as the distribution of information materials in schools, shopping malls, and other high visibility areas.
Members of the Kaizer Chiefs soccer team will also address their supporters and wear t-shirts encouraging the public to report suspected cases or find out more information about human trafficking through IOM’s toll-free helpline number: 0800 555 999.
IOM will hold a national technical workshop on human trafficking and launch an educational animated web story for children.
The Human Trafficking Awareness Week is one of South Africa’s key interventions against human trafficking. It was initiated in 2006 by IOM’s Southern African Counter-Trafficking Assistance Programme (SACTAP) in partnership with South African marketing company Diasporafric and with the support of Metro FM, SABC and the Daily Sun Newspaper.
For more information, please contact Nde Ndifonka at IOM Pretoria, +27 12 342 2789, Email nndifonka@iom.int
SOURCE
International Office of Migration (IOM)
AfriForum
AfriForum launches international campaign against Nestlé re Mugabe’s ‘blood milk’
PRETORIA, South Africa, September 30, 2009/African Press Organization (APO)/ — The South African civil rights initiative, AfriForum, has launched an international campaign calling on people to boycott all Nestlé products, unless Nestlé decides by 7 October 2009 to stop buying milk from Grace Mugabe – wife of the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe.
AfriForum has already created a website, www.nestlebloodmilk.com, where the boycott action is announced. The site includes photographs, video-clips and facts about the brutality with which the Mugabe regime represses the people of Zimbabwe. A link is included by means of which people from all over the world can send messages of protest to the headquarters of Nestlé in Switzerland, as well as its offices in South Africa and Zimbabwe. AfriForum has already sent letters to these offices regarding the campaign.
As part of the campaign, AfriForum will asks other human rights organisations all over the world also to put pressure on Nestlé.
According to Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, the milk produced by the dairy farm of Grace Mugabe, is “blood milk”. Kriel emphasises that Mugabe and his inner circle have obtained their wealth by means of the violent repression of thousands of Zimbabweans.
“Nestlé’s purchase of approximately 1-million litres of milk per year from this farm, which had been “obtained” under questionable circumstances by Grace Mugabe, is a denial of the basic human rights of every Zimbabwean whose blood has been spilt, or is still being spilt at the hands of Mugabe’s brutal security forces and vigilante groups,” Kriel said.
In Kriel’s opinion, Nestlé owes the people of Zimbabwe an apology.
Kallie Kriel
CEO: AfriForum
+27 82 441 5073
kallie@afriforum.co.za
Hold the Prawns
Hold the Prawns
In the cities of the global South elites are often desperate to repress the reality of the shack settlement. Maps are printed in which shack settlements appear as blank spaces, laws are passed that assume that everyone can afford to live formally and, in the name of order and development, the poor are beaten out of the cities. The great elite fantasy is the creation of ‘world class cities’ – shiny, securitised nowherevilles in which the poor understand that their place is to live in some peripheral ghetto and only come into the city as menial workers. But from City of God to Slum Dog Millionaire and now District 9 cinema has put the shack settlement in the mall and at the heart of how Rio, Bombay and Johannesburg feature in the global imagination.
In District 9 the shacks in Jo’burg are inhabited by extraterrestrials which humans call prawns. Science fiction can, to borrow from the lexicon that the film’s hero Wickus van de (sic) Merwe has taken to the world, just be a load of kak. But, like all forms of fantasy, it can also be a dream of the present illuminating it with more power than the ordinary categories through which we see the world. When it can illuminate aspects of reality hidden by ordinary ways of seeing it can reveal those ways of seeing to be the real fantasy.
District 9 is set in something very near to contemporary South Africa – Mahendra Raghunath reads the television news, the red ants swarm through the shacks with their crowbars and the human rights activists demonstrating outside the shacks are vastly less effective than the xenophobic mobs. But the film also evokes the past. Apartheid is everywhere from the ubiquity of white and male power to the peculiar type of nerd that Wikus van de Merwe’s character parodies. District 9 also reaches into a vision of the future. Van de Merwe works for a multinational corporation rather than the state. Multinationals, like Group 4 Securicor, are already in the business of beating the poor into their place but they take instruction from the state. Here, in a staple of nightmare visions of the future, the state seems to be a junior partner to the multinational.
By weaving past, present and future into one cinematic vision District 9 steps out of the all too easy distinction between an absolute break between bad apartheid and good democracy to look at how some processes of exclusion endure or mutate as we move from one political system to another. Some reviewers, referring to their experience of apartheid evictions, have written about how the eviction scenes have a strangely hyper real feel despite the fact that the evicted are fantastical aliens. But these scenes are also a hyper real description of contemporary evictions. The bureaucrat who is ‘here to assist you’ by destroying your home, the clipboards, the helicopters, the red ants, the casual and contemptuous exercise of arbitrary violence, the assumption that the shack settlement is a zone outside of the ordinary rules of society and the relentless presumption of criminality are all very real aspects of our society right now.
Shacks in Johannesburg have always housed aliens. Apartheid turned most black South Africans into aliens in their own country. In democratic South Africa we turned Mozambicans and Zimbabweans into aliens. The obvious value of turning the shack dweller into a real alien is that the film can deal with the continuities in the processes by which we turn people into aliens, contain them, criminalise them, beat them and then evict them ‘for their own good’. District 9 confront these continuities head on and so although it is a fantasy it contains more reality than we’re likely to find in many of the spaces that produce, circulate and authorise the official consensus. It shows contemporary development-speak in which the only real issue is the ‘pace of delivery’ to be a fantasy as ridiculous as it is perverse.
After all, we tell ourselves that the new order has made a decisive break with the essential logic of apartheid as we are driving shack dwellers and street traders out of our cities at gun point. We tell ourselves that we have a new order founded on human rights and protected by the best constitution in the world as we exclude migrants and the poor from that order. We tell ourselves that building stadiums and ‘eradicating’ street traders and shack settlements will bring us into a new era of prosperity while we are actively and often violently make the poor poorer.
The reality is that we have, at all levels of society, colluded to exclude some people from those who count as real citizens. This exclusion is often built into our speech. Some of us call others Makwerekwere. The state conflates ‘illegal immigrant’s with ‘criminals’. It conflates the theft of electricity cables to sell the copper with ‘illegal electricity connections.’ Exclusion is also being actively built into the structures of our cities. Shack dwellers are removed, often at gun point, to peripheral ghettoes. The reality is that some people and some spaces are treated as if they are outside of the law. The state, whether wielded by the DA or the ANC, engages in openly criminal behaviour towards the poor.
People who cannot afford to live their lives according to the rules of a society that assumes that everyone can be a consumer are usually understood in two ways by elites. They are either dangerous criminals who need to be repressed or childlike incompetents who need to be placed under some form of tutelage. District 9 makes a welcome break from this consensus, which is another elite fantasy, when it shows that the aliens have a weapon. In contemporary South Africa those weapons are the road blockade, the vote strike and the land occupation.
But just as our move from apartheid to post-apartheid changed who we turn into aliens but didn’t put aside the assumption that we should construct our society against the alien this film has its own aliens. In District 9 the Nigerians are, as in Jerusalema, another recent film about Jo’burg, presented through the basest racist stereotype. The depiction of the Nigerians is so extreme that many reviewers have concluded that it was intended to illustrate that as one alien is humanised another is created. But the film maker’ s comments don’t lend much weight to this interpretation. It seems that the film has inadvertently reproduced exactly what it set out to overcome. Perhaps this is its key lesson. As we humanise one alien we create another.
By Richard Pithouse. Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University.
Read more articles by Richard Pithouse.
From The South African Civil Society Information Service (www.sacsis.org.za)
Bigotry is More Than a Subculture in South Africa
Bigotry is More Than a Subculture in South Africa
An Austrian colleague of mine relays a dinner story. We are talking over lunch at a little side cafe in idyllic Stellenbosch.
There was a discussion about Obama and the historic moment for the United States when he took the presidential oath.
Obama holds great symbolic significance to all black and other non-white people of the world.
It is an important affirmation because he rose through the ranks on the basis of merit. But many whites also voted for him.
He is of course a highly intelligent leader, if not America’s greatest of presidential orators.
A certain woman, well travelled, a seemingly cosmopolitan lady, chirps in at the dinner table, to make what she thinks goes for intelligent commentary, she remarks: “But wait till he behaves like the rest of them.”
By the ‘rest’ she meant black people and one must assume by extension any other person of colour because Obama is actually half-black, half-white. He is also of mixed culture, not uniquely American.
In talking of the ‘rest’ of us, she failed to mention unintelligent Bush, the terror of Hitler, the skulduggery of Rhodes and the corruption prone megalomaniac Kruger, what about Vorster or the clumsy Terreblanche — the list goes on.
The ‘rest’ did not include them in her limited exposure or selective appraisal of white history. As always, it was black people who did not shine in history.
The rest of the audience, mostly European expatriates, sat in utter silence and disbelief at the shocking remark, their jaws dropping, their forks in hand; staid and momentarily immovable.
They say nothing. They change the topic. They don’t throw her out. They are far too polite towards her crass bigotry.
Their shock and silence comes from being confronted by the sheer audacity of the woman, who after fifteen years of democracy in South Africa, holds such strong, rabid and bigoted views about people she perhaps only sees and occasionally bumps into in the street, in malls or other places, but always at a distance and far removed.
It is not as if she was willing to confront her own stereotypes by gaining intimate knowledge of the ‘other’. But rather that she preferred to be uninformed and always guided by this lineage of three hundred years of racial stereotyping.
She was more confident in the truth of this than her plain lack of knowledge about others. Her false superiority appears to have predisposed her to see stereotypes as sure knowledge and not sheer ignorance.
She would not know either that by 2042, America will no longer be white. It will be non-white in almost every respect.
It is presumably the reason she can, with utter hubris, feel it her right to pass judgement on whether a person of colour is worthy of being human and possess intelligence.
In the meanwhile, here these expatriate Europeans were sitting, idealistic, thinking that things have changed in our country. So, too, have many of us who have come to accept the myth of the Rainbow Nation.
All of us thinking fancifully that bigots would have grown up or at least that their children would be more enlightened; that the umbilical cord that tied many whites to archaic stereotypes would have been broken.
We romantically also believed that in generations to come, the lineage of racial stereotyping will slowly be diluted, extruded, until it vanishes, forever, from their veins.
The answer to all of this is: No! And yes! They have and they haven’t. But crude thoughts continue to inhabit uneasy racist minds.
The woman in Stellenbosch took liberty to speak freely her mind because, as she must have assumed, she was amongst her own – European folk, who share the same skin colour, western taste and other outer things that she identifies as being of her own. People and attributes that mark white civilization. Things and ways of life that settler communities who came from Europe wanted to model in the hope of refashioning African landscapes, culture and its people in the image of European civilization.
She was part of superiority and very happy to be in white skin, evidently.
Of course what she doesn’t realise is that this imagined Europe, as it squats in her mind, is very different from what the settler descendents truly know about Europe from which their forefathers had once come, about three hundred years ago. A lot has happened in three hundred years. To even think of themselves as European, as my friend reminded me, is a stretch.
In the end, the commonality of white skin does not imply commonality of culture. Europeans themselves are as different from each other as the French will tell you, how dissimilar they are to Germans, in many respects.
The whole episode requires a response. For one, it makes me very angry. I am almost confronted with it on a daily basis in a town like Stellenbosch. It happened even the day I spoke to my Austrian colleague. She is a woman and a certain white person in the restaurant kept gazing at us. It was an intrusive and penetrating gaze latching onto us without hesitation or doubt.
The second reason for my anger and more importantly, is that under the false illusion of the Rainbow Nation, things have long been swept under the carpet and we have not built the institutional mechanisms to deal with bigotry openly and critically. We have left things to be determined by fate and the courts.
The incident also made me wonder if her views were that of a minority, as often white folks like to argue. Tony Leon was famous for suggesting that race is a red herring in post-apartheid South Africa. Of course he was in denial just like we are still in denial about xenophobia.
Every time somebody says we don’t have a race problem, we then have a mad white farmer feeding his farm-worker to a lion after a dispute, or a young white boy goes shooting black people in Skierlek, or the Free State students humiliating black cleaning ladies in order to claim back their lost status as ‘baas’.
I have of recent come to think that this stereotype, as displayed by this woman, is typical and pervasive.
The inability of the woman in Stellenbosch to gaze beyond her own prejudice stems from a parochial view of our own history — this myth of tranquillity and civilization under colonial and settler rule.
We had three hundred years of bloody brutal internecine conflict. We had many wars and deaths as a result. Only in the last fifteen years, have we collectively created the conditions for trying to avoid those bloody conflicts of the past and live in peace amongst each other. These gains stand to be lost if bigotry continues abetted from one generation to another.
Little does she know either, nor possibly cares, that there were always morally conscious whites that fought against racial prejudice.
Not all whites think like her. Certainly not Obama’s mother and his maternal grandparents, who took care of him most of his life while his black father, lived in Kenya.
Consider the anti-slavery or abolitionist movement in Britain. It all started somewhere in 1760 when selfless individuals like Granville Sharp took on the cause of black slaves in London.
Then there was Thomas Clarkson who travelled 35 000 miles across Britain collecting petitions, giving out pamphlets and rallying fellow white citizens against the British Empire’s reliance on slavery to make profit and bolster the Empire’s economy. He was famously called the ‘Moral Steam Engine’.
Even the once slave-trader, John Newton, repented, became an evangelist priest and wrote the famous hymn ‘Amazing Grace’.
Slave ship-owners often stood at wilderment at how white people, in so many numbers, could be fighting in defence of black slaves.
Yet, it was a significant turning point in British history; if not the most significant movement in the world against the abolition of slavery, as Adam Hochschild narrates in his book Bury the Chains. Many, many people participated in the campaign against slavery.
From our own history there were many whites that fought for the rights of blacks and other races. South Africa gave birth to many white sons and daughters who fought against apartheid. They were, though, a minority.
This narration of a little bit of history of white actions against bigotry is to make us aware that the movement against anti-slavery and the human rights movement in general were movements driven by empathy by one set of humans from within the same system that brutalised others in their name.
It would be wrong to see them just as whites defending blacks, but rather morally inspired humans who laid the foundation for the human rights movement.
The reason we need to speak out against bigotry, all the time, is to remind ourselves how hurtful and harmful it is. It is also to protect the good work of the many ‘moral steam engines’ that fought on behalf of other humans all over the world.
They did it because an inner force of empathy tilted them towards what they knew is just. Often against great odds and danger to their own lives.
Our moral compass should be universal and not selective in favour of parochial privileges, nor should we be quiet against our own who think that bigotry is acceptable.
By Saliem Fakir, an independent writer based in Cape Town.
Read more articles by Saliem Fakir.
From The South African Civil Society Information Service (www.sacsis.org.za)
