07) "HOPE IN STRUGGLE" AT WORLD YOUTH FESTIVAL

A delegation of forty young workers and students from across Canada travelled to South Africa last December for the World Festival of Youth and Students - two weeks of conferences, sports, music, and politics under the slogan of "Let's defeat imperialism: for peace, solidarity and social transformation!" People's Voice coverage of the Festival continues with this report on the issues of social transformation and Africa.

By Johan Boyden

My partner and I are sitting in our living room, taken over by suitcases. Mixed between bags, hats, and clothes are posters, magazines, address cards, and stacks of papers and pamphlets in Arabic, French, Vietnamese, Spanish, and other languages. The mess of slogans and dirty socks spills over the floor. The gift of a carved wooden statue has broken open. A fine rain of tiny dead insects has fallen like dust in one corner.

     We are not just making a two‑week laundry pile. We are unpacking memories, making sense of two weeks spent in another continent, another pace of living, another setting of political discourse. We are not returning from a holiday, but from an intense and unique experience. Looking out our dark winter window there is a silent shine of snow and Christmas lights. Less than seventy‑two hours ago we were in Africa.

African dawn

     "I remember that morning, the last morning we were in Africa." I am having coffee with a member of the All‑Canada delegation, looking out onto ice and slush sprayed up by trucks on a busy Montreal street. "I must have fallen asleep at 4 am, kept awake by the sound of drums and chants and songs as the last parties continued into the night."

     We stayed in modern university dorms, a maze‑like complex of towers. Sometimes the music and partying seemed to reverberate through the brick buildings.

     "At 6:30 I was woken again by the bird noises, probably peacocks. It was already light outside. I stood at my window and I could see the full sweep of countryside."

     I also remember that landscape. From the small single‑story township buildings over on one hill, we could see four grey wide-mouthed smoke‑stack towers of a local factory. More and more buildings poked out of then green trees of the humid, subtropical climate, and then were swept away under a pinky‑blue hue of low cloud.

     Finally skyscrapers rose out of the cloud, catching the sun, marking the financial district of downtown Pretoria. Somewhere below us in that view were the Tshwane Fair Grounds, the large complex where the festival was held.

Contrasts and struggle

     The African continent is the birthplace of humanity. Using binoculars we might have seen the United Nations Heritage site, with some of the oldest hominid skeletons in the world. Millions of years have moved over these lands where the festival came together. The last few hundred have forged a new society, giving birth to a generation whose parents overcame one of the most brutal regimes in human history: apartheid.

     Look close at modern South Africa and you will see a new country, shaped and scarred by old contrasts and contradictions, social‑economic, racial and class divisions. Yet the young people we met were impatient for the future.

     "I was really taken by the spirit of the young people despite what they were facing, their sense of community and optimism," another delegate tells me over a bad cell‑line from Vancouver, "it was really strong."

     Each day in the streets between the conference halls a chorus of chanting voices could be heard. Bold and rich, they were the combined singing, clapping, crying and stomping of the militant harmonies of anti‑apartheid struggle songs.

Re‑naming, re‑claiming

     Except for the downtown, the Pretoria area is now known as Tshwane, after a local African language. Listening to the many voices around the festival, we realized the re‑naming is part of a political struggle over language. Many black South Africans are tri‑lingual, knowing English as well as two African languages.

     A struggle of re‑claiming is taking back a country where many signs and names are still in English or Afrikaans. Now there are over ten official languages in South Africa.

     "That means that if you are in a meeting or a conference or something, and you start speaking your language, nobody says `why is she doing that?'" explains Siphelele `Sphelly' Xulu, the residence advisor where we stayed. "When I came, the white and black girls didn't sleep in the same dorm rooms. We changed that."

     Our building was a women's student residence. The framed photos of sports teams in the halls illustrated Sphelly's story. The photos go back to about 1994, the year of the first elections with universal suffrage. In the first photos we see only white students smiling. Then black women appear, but stand separately. Recent photos show young women huddled together. Yet while today white people make up less than 20% of the population, they are still significantly over‑represented in post‑secondary education.

Free education

     "When Apartheid was defeated and the negotiations went on, the new constitution gave people the right to vote. We won many of the demands of the Freedom Charter but not the land, not the economy."

     The speaker is from the South African Student Congress. She is contextualizing the current struggle for free education during an inter‑exchange meeting of students.

     "Many lands were privatized," she explains. "Large territories held by the apartheid government were taken out of public ownership and given to private individuals. Even this Fair Grounds is no longer public. To hold this event, this festival, we must enrich a private individual."

     In the South African context, what featured large in the Festival debates over social transformation was the question of free education. "Denial of education, ignorance, is a form of oppression," a leader of the African National Congress Youth League, Julius Malema, said in a speech to a mass arena.

     You could sense the South African youth listening closely to his words, catching his fiery rhetoric. They would discuss his ideas and personality later. Malema is not without controversy. The next speaker would be the Youth League president. Malema turned some heat on his leader, making a passing criticism of the ANC government's work in this area.

National Democratic Revolution

     Officially, the promise is to implement free education for first‑year university, and then the first degree in President Jacob Zuma's current term. Announcements have been made, but many speakers insist they are too far from the objective. Already the discussion about full emancipation is going further, to the question of ownership of the economy.

     Malema's call is to also nationalize the mines. Mining investments have driven South African capitalist development for decades. In the 1960s, South Africa had an economic growth rate and profitability second only to Japan. Apartheid was good for business. We learnt how black workers' wages were held down by a fascist police state with an arsenal of dogs, guns, tanks, bomber fighters, and nuclear weapons. Miners' wages saw little improvement for generations under apartheid, and there was no health and safety code for black workers. Now that is changing.

     What everyone was describing comes under a grand banner: the National Democratic Revolution. A brave, tortuous, difficult process of winning freedom for South Africa, not just democratic elections but economic democracy.

Bumps in the road

     In the context of the economic crisis, does nationalization mean enriching new black capitalists, some of whom have mistakenly purchased mines exhausted of minerals? Malema himself is a wealthy businessman, a striking contradiction that has drawn sharp criticism from the major labour union central, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Profiteering on the side from government contracts and corruption is an endemic problem inherited from apartheid.

     Even at the festival, poor distribution of food left many delegates hungry on some days. COSATU publicly called for an independent audit of the organizing committee's finances. In a small way we lived these contradictions, these bumps along the road. More serious were problems like sexual harassment and sexism in the festival, a topic for a subsequent article.

AFRICOM

     In a festival unique for its significant participation of African delegations ‑ over 300 youth came from countries like Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and large numbers from Libya, Zambia, Western Sahara, Swaziland, and Morocco ‑ the question of the next step after de‑colonization came forward in different ways.

     In the seminars, workshops and anti‑imperialist tribunal, there was a kind of consensus, an agreement woven around grievances against imperialism, the system that creates wars where rape is a weapon of mass horror, establishes a US military base system in Africa, and still makes off with the continent's resources and wealth on a vast scale.

     US military bases are a new danger to Africa, with the recent establishment of United States African Command, covering all of the continent except Egypt. Other than Ethiopia and Liberia, most African countries have refused to accept a US base on their soil. AFRICOM's headquarters remains in Germany.

Zimbabwe and Angola

     Zimbabwe literally marched into the festival, over 300 youth clad in green sports track suits and bright yellow hats, announcing they will never again be a colony, fists in the air.  Their country faces hard sanctions by Britain the US, and other countries, including Canada.

     The sanctions make it difficult for farmers to get basic tools like fertilizer. "We disagree over the approach to political dissent, such as of the labour movement," a representative from the Young Communist League of South Africa tells me, noting that right-wing opposition forces in Zimbabwe receive support from the United States. "But we agree on the necessity of the land reform and the need to end the sanctions."

     In bi‑lateral discussions, the Zimbabwe delegates explain some of the history of land theft during the century of colonization. "These stories are not told by your media," a young Zimbabwean woman says to me. Now they are looking also at expanding public ownership, into the highly profitable diamond mines.

     Likewise Angola on the Atlantic coast talked about control over their large oil industry. They are looking towards China and Venezuela in terms of investment and development models.

What next?

     Where is Africa fighting to go? One young woman delegate tells a session, "we are dealing with questions like HIV and AIDS, unemployment, so many issues... I am a health worker. A young man said to me, I do not get sex when I take a condom. It is unlucky! So these are the issues we are facing."

     And here was a lesson, perhaps something we could all relate to ‑ that even in moments that may seem bleak, there is hope in struggle.

     "We have had enough of this all, now we have to get rid of capitalism" another delegate tells me. "This is the policy of my union. We need socialism. We need control over our economy."

     Precise definitions, theories of different models of socialism, of tactics and strategy ‑ these questions were on the sidelines. The main concern of delegates was a break with imperialism. In this sense we discussed social transformation at the Festival, within, you might say, a broad sentiment against war and racism, and for our countries to seek out a new destiny, one of democracy, solidarity, sovereignty and peace.

(The above article is from the Feb. 1-14, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)