AROUND THE TIME THAT I WAS BEGINNING my initiation into civil society politics, my mother was slowly becoming dejected by the politics of the Congress Movement. We were no longer attending your meetings with the same frequency that we used to in the past. Once in a blue moon, we would go to Mapedi Hall in Meadowlands Zone 2 for a Youth League event. My mom had ceased to be active in the Youth League and was focusing her energies on the work that she was doing with SANGOCO and the other NGOs that she was working with as a volunteer.
I started to notice my mother’s unhappiness with you one afternoon just before campaigning for the 2004 general elections started. Usually excited about doing your campaigns, my mother was rather miserable at this period. She would just sit at home reading novels while her comrades were busy conducting door-to-door campaigns in and around the neighbourhood. When I asked her why she was no longer attending your events or helping her comrades to campaign and ensure an ANC victory, she responded that she was tired of you and felt that you were taking the poor for granted.
‘How so?’ I asked.
She replied that you were not prioritising critical questions that should have been made top priorities immediately after coming into power. These critical matters, she argued, were education and land. According to her, you were making grounds fertile for the creation of a welfare state by not making education your chief project. She was certain that within a decade the country would be plunged into a crisis of great proportions due to your blunders in the education system.
I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. As far as I could tell, there was no crisis in the education system save for the infrastructure contrast between township schools and former Model-C ones. I continued to hold the view that the difference was only in what they looked like and some activities they offered, and that the actual quality of education didn’t differ much. Tshimologo Junior Primary was just as good a school as Melpark Primary. Its teachers were just as passionate about teaching and the students were just as enthusiastic about learning. I presented this argument to her, telling her that the only crisis was that some schools had better facilities than others. My mother, in a very resigned voice, informed me that the contrast in facilities was not the biggest problem, though it was part of it because without proper facilities schools cannot function to the best of their potential. She argued that in township schools, students could barely use computers and so were destined to be incompetent in the workplace, where computers are a way of life. She argued that a lack of proper laboratories meant that students studying Biology and Physical Science in township schools wouldn’t understand some lab-dependent experiments and, as a result, their knowledge and understanding would be compromised. She argued many things about what a lack of proper infrastructure meant for township schools, which were dominated by black students. But this was not the heart of her view that our education was in a state of crisis. The crisis, she argued, arose from the curriculum itself. My mother felt that it was not producing critical thinkers or anything fundamentally different to what the previous system was producing: students who would graduate and serve the unequal system rather than change it.
She also argued that the land question was not being addressed with the enthusiasm that it was addressed during the days of the liberation struggle. With a haunted look, she said to me, ‘The ANC has forgotten about the land, Lesego, and yet that is primarily why we were in the struggle in the first place . . .’
She went on to argue that instead of returning land to the hands of the people you were instead more focused on building them Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) houses.
‘In the next 20 years, we are going to have more blacks in RDP houses and more whites on farms because of our focus on building more RDP houses and the lack of interest in reclaiming those stolen farms.’
My arguments with her on these topics went on for many months. Every day, my mother would return home from work and tell me stories of injustice happening in some part of the country. She would link these injustices to something that you had done or failed to do. It was a depressing period. I could barely understand half of what she was saying. I had grown up in a community that worshipped you. I was raised in a family of ANC activists and supporters and, suddenly, I was being told that the same ANC was at times the root of problems rather than the solution.
By the time I graduated from primary school in 2004, my mother was no longer a member of the ANC or any structure within the Mass Democratic Movement. She had decided not to renew her membership and was now a fulltime social justice activist working in SANGOCO and community-based organisations. She had lost faith in you. I always believed that she would return, so strong had her love for you been. But she never did. Not the next year or decade. My mother had parted ways with an organisation that she had once lived for.