Introduction

South Africa is no longer notoriously known for apartheid only. It is also now known for the courage, determination and resoluteness with which the oppressed of that country seek, cherish and fight for freedom. It is not only the fact that we have taken up arms and are ready to die and kill for freedom which has catapulted us onto the lap of the world. It is that, as we do so, as we seek to define freedom, we become part of humanity, because our history of struggle for freedom expresses the culture of normal human beings. The rigour of our life against the high stakes of apartheid, as we seek the right to self-determination, is a clarion call to humanity, a cultural process to engage it in and to remind it of its duty to pursue happiness which is a normal condition of life. That is what human beings seek from nature; their interaction with nature for the betterment of their lives is an act of history which is also their cultural expression. The abnormality of apartheid lies in its having imposed on us a condition which requires that as human beings we had to reject life so that we can accept life. We have not known how it is to live as human beings. Apartheid is a negation of life; it exists to ensure that life is lived in the darkness of dungeons and survives because that condition exists; and, as the world knows, apartheid has been around for a very long time, in the broad daylight for everyone to see. History tells us that apartheid not only exists within the civilized centres of the world, but that it is a condition of the majority of people in this world. For this reason the world will, at this moment in time, be forced to look at the turbulent history of the oppressed majority of our country, so that it can know, can understand the slogan which walks our streets with a proud gait because its carriers are fearless of what ordinary people fear; and it speaks eloquently even from the mouths of little boys and girls who have hardly had the time to learn how to wipe their eyes and wash their faces, for they know death to be treacherously articulate in its speech to those of their age who have dared to seek freedom.

This slogan affects how we look at each other and at other people; it is a slogan which affects the way we walk the one-time dangerous streets which conspired with apartheid and their darkness as we lost life in them, where the rage of our existence instead of our living was expressed with amazing cruelty and fury.

Many of us have died senseless deaths in these streets which we made fearfully violent. The slogan has changed all this; it has changed our smile, laughter and gesture as we anticipate how the future will meet our aspirations. The slogan is ‘Freedom or Death’.

It is a slogan which, like the sharpest blade, has cut with extreme precision and the ruthlessness, between the old and the young, women and men, black and white, leaving everything very bloody! It is our history which has put this blade into our collective hand as a people; this slogan is lived and died every minute of our life as we think and search for what it means to be free and therefore, it is our contribution to the world to redefine the meaning of freedom. It is our will to be free, to become part and parcel of the world which wields this blade; we are creating new relationships among ourselves and between the world and us. The choice in words reads simple, but in deed it is profound.

It is as the South African Police and the South African Defence Force that the vigilantes and squads enter the townships and villages on a daily basis in the present time, to carry out their work in these dark dwelling places. We, the inhabitants: the children, mothers, fathers, the youth, after the glass has wailed, and wailed, after the fire has raged and raged, consuming bricks, fences and people, leaving behind a strange silence and the smell of gunsmoke, teargas, blood and shriveled human flesh once more, we ask as we become aware of those that no longer with us as we knew them — the maimed, the mad and the raving angry-does the world know that we want to be a free people? This question must be asked of the world, for indeed, the world has claimed civilization and this world understands to mean that human beings have achieved the highest knowledge and ideals of life.

Included among the civilized is the white South African population which, after dark or in the early hours of the morning, is joined by those who, after their work in the dark dwellings, change their uniforms to become fathers, lovers, brothers and husbands. This is not a description of innocence at all; and that is why in the townships and villages, their ilk, who are black, were consumed by fire and we were shocked to hear the parlance of racists that this is 'black-on-black violence'. This is indictment of the white master race. It is the definition of the collective responsibility of the white master race of the world; it must also be the process by which human beings rediscover conscience, which is colour-blind, which is capable of breaking conspiracy — for hope is unfriendly to fools — it is a process which also clings to life, or can, as the saying goes, render the subjects of God to madness in preparation for destruction.

It is our duty, as the oppressed, and as the subject of death for freedom, to remind our fellow human beings that love, compassion and knowledge, give us all a collective responsibility. And that therefore, as the strong men of the security forces of white domination go back to peaceful dwellings, their knowledge of what they saw, heard, and touched in the townships and villages, some of which will be indelible on their minds and unforgettable in their lives, becomes a collective knowledge of the suburbs. It is in the name of this civilian population that the order was given and that black children and women and men, who can never be civilians because they are black and are supposed to have no army, are left with a silence which no one dare listen to. If this silence is replaced with the question of why the people's army, Umkhonto We Sizwe, kills white civilians or blacks whose corpses only become human at the raging fire of this army, we can only hope that in the same breath the question will be asked as to why the white army kills black civilians. Then, our wish to be free puts the responsibility on us to give an answer to the question asked us. And the answer is that the ANC has never in its history considered civilian targets.

We may as well remind the world that the South African regime is illegitimate. That while we are not surprised that it maintains itself through terrorism, we are not expecting too much when we expect everyone to be outraged. In human terms, this illegitimacy of the white parliament made white South Africans emissaries for the dehumanization of Blacks. While on the one hand, this role of Whites had to be built on the destruction of the hopes, aspirations and normal life of Blacks, the hopes, aspirations and normal life of Whites could only be maintained if this state of Blacks was permanent. This could only be permanent if violence is permanent. That is to say, the only condition for Blacks to become human was if they could live the slogan: 'Freedom or Death! This is the condition which characterizes the lives of both black and white South Africans in the eighties. The oppressed majority can only enter into history through a blinding sound! We must agree that there is something uncivilized about this act, but that is only because, if free people are unable to accept that the freedom of others is theirs, and are prepared to obliterate this truth with fire, then in the first place, there is no such thing as civilization. We all live a culture of annihilation.

Apartheid, in so far as it refers to racialism, has been the inculcation of fear to both Blacks and Whites about each other. The laws of apartheid were a 'conscious act' on the part of white regimes to ensure that Blacks are subordinate to Whites; white settlers through violence have achieved this through a systematic despoiling of everything human from the Blacks, and the legalizing of the ownership of the land and economic means. Hence, then, the collective responsibility of the oppressed majority in South Africa is to completely clean the streets and alleys of the townships; to absolutely clean the footpaths, fields and kraals of the villages; for it is in these streets and alleys, and in these footpaths and fields that we killed each other, raped each other, abandoned our children to a merciless future, as we acted out our worthlessness, and it seems, almost believed the meaning of why we deserved to be despised. We have been known as such and to be capable of this only. It is the very base of white power which taught us our responsibility. We saw the sweat of our brow water the roots of the tree of privilege of white people, from which their power bloomed. We transformed, almost with bare hands, rocks into holes, digging for gold and diamonds and coal; we built, we produced and as they become poorer. We had to ask, what is it that is so special about white people? It is incidental that there are white people and black people and this fact has been used to justify a crucial reality, that he who is superior owns power and rules those who are inferior; that is to say, the very fact of being White entitles a white baby to power and the very fact of being Black entitles a black baby to powerlessness. But then, politics is no power without an economic base This, then, is issue of the struggle for liberation in South Africa. White South African lived their lives in South Africa certain that they had the right to power; they used this to make certain that their black fellow country people lived their lives certain that it was their right to be powerless. Unnatural and abnormal as this is, it has been the basis for black and white relations, co-existing and as intimate to each other as a powerful hand is to the throat it is about to throttle.

Democracy demands that white South Africans obey the will of the majority — who are black; and democracy is a civilized criterion for life. Since white South African cherish civilization; and see themselves as part of and of it, their dilemma has been, how possible is it to give civilization to the uncivilized. The intimate relation between race superiority and economic power in South Africa and race inferiority and lack of power has bestowed upon the history of that responsibility to the world to answer the question: what is because there is no such thing as black history, history is human and history binds human beings together for life, for without it, there is no life. But that history has also asked of the oppressed whether they are part of civilization. When the world comes face to face with white South Africans, if that world is civilized, it must ask where are the black people of your country? But when black South Africans come face to face with the world, they ask: what is civilization, if to be part of it for us is to live 'Freedom or Death'? This has been the only condition - and the history of struggle in South Africa absolves me — for us as a people to re-enter life, to re-enter history and culture.

This re-entering of history through such grievous means, by a people relegated to the backyards of the world by law and privilege gained through conspiracy and blood-letting, has been and must be a subject and an issue of great concern for cultural expression in that country and in the world. It is only then civilization anywhere and everywhere can mean progress. That is, it is a moment in history when there should be no backyards in any country, for, indeed, when the oppressed in South Africa have, through their lives, forced on the agendas of the powerful round tables of the world an item on apartheid, it is a moment when once more, the issue of colonialism, whatever its form and shape, must be examined with the sole purpose of it being destroyed once and for all. That is the African struggle for national liberation in our time.

A people's history, and thus their cultural expression, binds them with humanity. That is so because history is of the people, irrespective of who they are and what colour they are, and culture is their expression of their acting out that history. In South Africa, this truth is lived as apartheid is dying. To hold on to life, apartheid has to be a master at making death, and the more it senses its end, the more it devises more effective ways of making death — hence the oppressed accepting death to gain freedom. The dying expressions on the face of apartheid have become an inspiration for the oppressed to seek more effective means of eventually dropping it dead, no matter what the cost may be; this history of life and death acted with such intense conviction, great demand on people, has become a finesse with which the oppressed in South Africa have hurled themselves out of the storerooms of history and culture, and have forged friendship and solidarity with the peoples of the world. After all, as every human being knows, we all live for happiness, and hope does define it. The songs, the poetry, the novels, the films, the plays which came out of South Africa lately, are located within and bound by the aspiration of the people of that country for freedom, which must mean that, as everyone seeks and pursues happiness and its meaning, in this period of humanity's history when life is under such great threat, our pursuit of freedom, no matter what cost, is a culture of hope creating space for happiness which must restore that peace which we all so cherish.

When Europe declared Amsterdam the capital of culture for 1987, and the CASA Foundation and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (Netherlands) organized a Festival and Conference of South African Culture called Culture in Another South Africa, though the world tended to be blind and deaf to this, it was a historic moment! About 300 cultural workers, both from South Africa and those living in exile, met, the objective being to answer the question: how does cultural work become part of and enhance the struggle? Several resolutions were passed, which located cultural work within the aspirations of the oppressed: 'Freedom or Death'. It was acknowledged at this conference that, as the masses have fought tooth and nail to organize themselves, so must the cultural workers. The organization of the masses, including those of white democrats, is a process of isolation of the apartheid regime and the objective of these organizations is to destroy apartheid and create a united, non-racial and democratic South Africa. The decision of the South African Cultural Workers in Amsterdam to organize themselves, to become part and parcel of the struggle for liberation, working hand-in-hand with the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement, was significant. Apartheid culture has been isolated in that country, where it had a free run not so long ago, and it was replaced with a life-and-death culture for democracy, coming from the backyards of South Africa into the international scene. There shall be more of these occasions; as the people have said through their historic document the Freedom Charter: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be opened!