Cape Town - An honest and sombre conversation at where South Africa stands, 27 years after the dawn of democracy was held virtually.
Facilitated by Iziko Museums of South Africa (Iziko), the virtual public dialogue with Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and Nkosikhulule Xhawulengweni Nyembezi was held yesterday.
Iziko operates 11 national museums, the Planetarium and Digital Dome, the Social History Centre and three collection-specific libraries in Cape Town.
Participants provided a painstaking analysis on the meaning of Freedom Day in the time of Covid-19 and democratic South Africa.
Iziko Museums chief executive Rooksana Omar said, “We saw clearly that the existent inequalities in SA, were highlighted and heightened by Covid-19.
“Those living on the margins of society were pushed to the very brink. It is more relevant than ever that we look back to analyse how we exercised our freedom and how we navigated Covid-19– an unprecedented pandemic – as free South Africans. We know that the right to human dignity, the rights of association, are not accessible to everyone as they should be.”
Pheko said: “I find it very difficult to say Happy Freedom Day but I do think it's an important moment of national reflection and these are always sacred and important opportunities.
“Freedom is actually the power, the ability to shift and to reconfigure and to change and to transform and the ability to transgress and I see freedom as an ongoing state of transgression because freedom is what shifts us from the normative, to things that are considered to be radical.”
Mpofu-Walsh said if the apartheid regime was only thought of as something occurring in the past, we have failed to see how it has spilt over and contributed to the present.
“I think that these days of national celebration and national commemoration are beginning to ring increasingly hollow. We need to really start asking ourselves, to what extent these days of commemoration are having a counterproductive effect.”
Nyembezi gave a more positive outlook, pointing to South Africa’s steps in acquiring vaccines as well as regular five-yearly elections with even more optimism in that the voters’ profile is shifting to the younger generations.