ZUKISWA WANNER

We are here because on 29 February, 2024 at 15h42 Central African Time, my co-recipients of the Goethe Medal, Bolivian visual artist Elvira Espejo Ayca and author Ian McEwan from the United Kingdom received an email from me on something I had been considering for a while.

After the niceties, the email came to the bones:

I am seriously considering making a public statement to surrender my Goethe Medal given the German government’s position on Palestine. I have been thinking about it for a while since Germany stated its position of supporting Israel after the ICJ provisional ruling but this feels a little more urgent now after Germany’s Cultural Minister claimed her applause at the Berlinale was for the Israeli filmmaker and not the Palestinian one (despite the two having worked together). In the last few months, I have seen so much assault on artists’ political position in Germany on this issue and I am unable to stay silent.

Within two hours, Ian had graciously responded with further niceties but also:

Germany has a historic investment of guilt in Israel, virtually written into the constitution. It is, or was, well-meaning, but it has caused all kinds of preposterous contortions, like the police arresting Israeli pro-Palestinian demonstrators and charging them with anti-semitism. But as with parallel contortions in the UK, this is a sideshow. It doesn’t change the slaughter (a fresh one today in north Gaza). What matters is what the US says or does in terms of military support. So if you have a US medal, that’s the one to return. The Goethe medal represents the best in Germany, so I think you should hang onto it.

I like and respect Ian but we know what I did in spite of his sage advice.

What did the Goethe Medal mean to me?

Although the medal itself does not come with an actual cash prize  and therefore I did not become some instant millionaire, surrendering it came with one thing that meant a lot to me. The prize came with access to funds for curating and being able to amplify the voices of writers and other artists that I felt were little seen but brilliant. Giving the prize up came with losing the access to funding that would often be given to me after writing a one pager concept note on an anthology I fantasised about publishing. Literature in particular, but art in general, are balms to my soul and something I celebrate and love so it felt like I was surrendering my tribe but it also did not feel like a sacrifice, despite not knowing how I was going to pay fees the next term, because I was doing this for a common humanity.

Reckless? Ill-thought?

Perhaps.

I like to think of it rather as a reset of the mind. If my son had had to leave his school, sit out the year and then write his A Levels at a later date, I am sure he would have been unhappy with me for the delay but he would still have breath in his body, a roof over his head, food in his stomach which, as we have noted since 2023, some of the bombs of the country that had given me a medal were preventing other people from getting or keeping.

There are those who will disagree, and that’s perhaps unfortunate but I think now as I did then that Israel was not a well-considered idea for humanity. Indeed I think the creation of Israel chose not to see the humanity of those indigenous people who lived there. A land promised to a people by a deity?

How did the Global North countries that claimed to be for democracy find themselves supporting a theocracy? Unless we really should call it what it truly is: colonising. As I said two weeks ago in Dakar, South Africa was never for the apartheid regime to partition and create Bantustans. Senegal was never for the French to give and certainly, Palestine was never for the British to give to Europeans in 1917 or after the Holocaust.

If anything, we should be asking why Palestinians have had to pay a price for Germany’s actions. Why Europe did not feel that a Bavaria would make for great reparations for Germany’s Holocaust atrocities to the Jews.

It is difficult, I think, to see someone as ‘other’ when you recognise your common humanity with them. Most of us love, we laugh, we hurt…we feel. To recognise that in others, not just those we know and love, but those who seem far away, is to nurture the humane in us. It’s to see—excuse me for sounding like a theocrat—the god in ourselves.

Towards the end of last year, I travelled this country by road for a project my friend and co-conspirator Parselelo Kantai and I call South Africa at 30 as we sought the answer to whether this was the South Africa people dreamt of in 1994. The journey got me into conversations with educators, healthcare workers, farmworkers and unemployed villagers. It got me into conversations with unionists and politicians. Those who were there at the formation of COSATU and even a man who was one of the first employees of our first democratic Parliament.

After the trip, I spent a good two weeks in bed depressed.

I spent most of last month in Brazil. Mostly in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It was my first time there. Yes, book things, but I also did interviews with activists, chatted with students and academics and drank cachaça and danced with locals.

If countries had mirror images, then Brazil is that to South Africa.

At least based on the two cities I spent the greater part of a month in. Unlike my trip around South Africa, I returned from that trip energised. Not because there were not a lot of depressing moments but because the trip illuminated just how much of a common humanity we have with the rest of the world. That, whatever I may have been nurtured to believe as a South African, we are not exceptional. Because Brazilians too, like us, believe in their Latin American exceptionalism just as we do in our African one.

Our countries are both nice to strangers – if we think they are going to leave.

In Brazil, xenophobia is geared towards Haitians and Venezuelans.

“They” are taking our jobs,  our women. They are draining our resources by using our hospitals and our schools.

The Haitians and Venezuelans are to Brazil what the Zimbabweans and the Mozambicans and Basotho are to South Africans. Both countries have a very high Gini co-efficient but the ‘middle-classes’ have been taught to be aspirational in spite of them being one pay cheque away from poverty. So they articulate what’s echoed and sometimes acted on by the working and unemployed – attack of the one who has been othered.

The inability to see the common humanity means that in South Africa as in Brazil, as we cry about those who are taking our jobs, we are also not questioning who owns the companies that employ those who take our jobs. That, in fact, it is the plan of the company owner to keep us antagonistic towards the Zimbabwean, the Venezuelan, the Congolese so we do not see common cause. The Haitian and the Malawian will be told, ‘you are more hard-working than our native. You are more articulate, better…’

The Brazilian will be told, ‘look. The Chilean, the Venezuelan is taking your job.’ What the Brazilian and South African never ask is what the Venezuelan or the Zimbabwean is being paid. What the Malawian and Haitian, out of desperation, cannot highlight is how, in being employed at lower wages with no pension as per labour laws of the countries they are in, their employer is breaking the law and ensuring their peers remain unemployed.

In Eldorado Park, in the Cape Flats, in Morro da Babilonia, in Pavao-Pavaozinho, ten and 11 year olds handle guns as casually as middle class children their age handle the consoles of a Play Station. The middle classes have been taught to fear these areas. We tell our respected visitors, ‘don’t go to… it’s not safe.’

We don’t ask the difficult questions. How areas that do not make guns, have so many guns.

We do not ask how the Nigerian guy who has to stay in the shadows because he overstayed his visa managed to bring in 20 tons of drugs. We should but we do not. Because if we did, we would know that he is at the bottom of the drug-dealing pack. Instead of going to Sunnyside and yelling ‘abahambe’, we would go to Bedfordview, Bassonia, Clifton, Ipanema, Jardins because that’s where the people who have the resources to bring 100 tons of drugs into the country and bribe enough police actually stay.

Our failure to recognise our common humanity in those we think are lesser than us means that we shut our eyes or turn our heads when we have to confront uncomfortable realities.

Our failure to recognise our common humanity has led to us making excuses for the killings of miners in Marikana, to close our ears to the cries of death of artisanal miners in Stilfontein because ‘they are zama-zamas and illegal. If they didn’t choose to get out because they do not want to be arrested, they would not be dead.’ Little questioning who demands the gold that the zama-zamas supply and why we have not seen any of them in our courts.

Our failure to recognise our common humanity has led us to shrug our shoulders when Operation Dudula attacks a spaza shop that’s run by a Somali or a Pakistani or an Ethiopian. They are illegal, we say.

Because in our minds we have decided human beings can be illegal.

And our government says, ‘in addition to these illegals, we shall also arrest those who are renting their properties to them.’

Our government does not question why they are renting the properties and how, for an unemployed household of 10, five thousand rand rent a month for a spaza shop is the difference between eating and hunger. Little questioning why our government is not also threatening to arrest the management of Albany bread or Clover milk that deliver to these ‘illegal’ spaza shops daily.

Our failure to recognise our common humanity means we constantly are okay with criminalising those we think are less than us. Less moneyed. Less educated. And we elevate those we think are more than us. More moneyed. More educated. The latter perhaps why we have a proliferation of fake PhDs.

In South Africa and in Brazil, two countries that are perhaps a microcosm of the rest of the world, there are those who would say, we have poor people here. Then ask, why would you care about what’s happening in Sudan, in Haiti, in Congo, in Kashmir, to the Tamils, to Palestinians, to Kenyans? Why should I care?

Humanity demands that we have empathy and recognise the common humanity we share with everyone.

But if we decide we are essentially selfish and altruism is not our thing, even this should make us care. Haiti doesn’t make guns. Congo doesn’t make guns. There are no guns made in favela do Moinho or in Cantagalo or in Eldorado Park or the Cape Flats or Alex. There are weapons tested on  Palestinians and on Kashmiris and on Congolese and on Sudanese and on Haitians for effectiveness. Market research for the military industrial complex. And there are those who are profiting from all this.

Today is 659 days since 7 October, 2023.

The Lancet reports that 434 000 people, roughly 20.7% of Gaza have been killed through weapons or starvation since October 2023.

If we agree that South Africa’s population is 60 million, this is the equivalent of about 12 million 600 thousand people dead.

In Haiti, 10 thousand people have died since 2023.

Since 1996, over 6 million have been killed in the Congo.

And in Sudan since 2023, 15 000 people have been killed (the number is reported to be higher) and over 8 million displaced.

As I say these numbers, I am hoping that they do not desensitise you and appear to happen somewhere distant. Because I can tell you now that as I speak, a gun has gone off in the Cape Flats or in Eldorado Park.

I am hoping these words move something in each and every one of us because all that’s needed for evil to prosper is for good men and women to do and say nothing. And evil has been prospering.

The world, I believe, is due for a reset.

I can only hope that what we have been witnessing in the last few years pushes us to insist that the reset places us in a world where we are kinder, recognise the humanity in each other and push for a place where humanity and life matter over profits. Where mediocre people who cause harm do not get to have a say just because they have money. And where we protect the most vulnerable among us.

As I end this, more people have been killed across the world. Our humanity demands that when we reset, this should be the abnormal rather than the normal. Failure to do this means humanity is doomed.

We are here because over a year ago I gave back a medal to the German government for an award that honoured me from a country that to me, only honoured humanity selectively. And the South African Secularist Society, in a way, are giving me a better replacement with this award. But I hope we get to a time where being humane is not applauded but becomes the norm. I am not a praying woman but on this one, I may even say I pray for it.