In his book, Weep Not, Child revered Kenyan author, poet, essayist and professor of literature Ngugi wa Thiong’o opens with: “The world is just starting to get to know Africa.
“The last five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light, and now the time has come for Africans to tell their own stories.”
Has that time arrived? I ask.
US President Donald Trump inchoately continues to tell our African brothers and sisters in Africa, to be specific South Africa, “stories” without substantiating his facts.
Trump, not so long ago, pronounced that “there are some bad things happening in South Africa.”
Trump couldn’t present any credible evidence to substantiate his anti-South Africa
allegations.
What Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote decades ago when he said African authors must tell their own stories, especially about Africa – stories that will reverberate beyond the borders of our beautiful continent, Africa.
On August 9, 1956, thousands of brave women, the majority of whom were African alongside some progressive white women, marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria and protested about pass laws and apartheid in general.
The racial laws broke the Black families in that Black family units had to accept that, of necessity, husbands had to leave their rural abodes for cities such as Johannesburg to look for jobs to support their families back home.
Many got menial jobs such as “garden boys”, earning next to nothing and yet still managing to transmit a part of their wages to sustain their families back in their villages.
A consequence of the migrant labour system was that many a Black family got torn apart, with some men getting drowned in the comparatively good life in Johannesburg and never going back to the villages.
Black women had to toil to fend for their children through agrarian farming, which barely put enough food on the table.
As a result, many children in the rural villages back then couldn’t afford to finish their primary education because of the abject poverty.
In the cities, the men had to carry passes that showed that they were permitted to be there.
Emboldened to turn the apartheid screw even tighter, the apartheid government of JG Strijdom saw fit to extend the law to African women as well.
It was the trigger needed to mobilise thousands of women, exhausted of the heavy load of single-handedly raising children with virtually nothing material to do so, so that they decided to write their own story.
Women then could no longer stand the oppression and decided to do something about it.
So, the women of 1956 took Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s sage advice and authored their own story, showing that amid the repulsive apartheid repression, Africans had the wherewithal to build our continent, Africa, on all fronts.
That’s still the case today.
Trump chose to tell our story, taking the liberty to embellish it, telling the world and us that “very bad things are happening in South Africa”, perpetuating the false narrative of an imagined white genocide.
Trump chose to believe the story authored not by Africans about Africa, of the phantom genocide. It was, once again, a case of an African story told by others.
Despite a visit by a high-powered South African delegation to the White House led by President Cyril Ramaphosa to disprove the misinformation just a few months ago, Trump has decided to impose a 30% tariff hike on South Africa’s goods and services to US markets.
Trump chose to write this 30% tariff tax story based on lies. The 30% tariff hike will have a negative impact on South Africa’s socioeconomic wellbeing.
We will need alternative markets to cushion this blow. The new tariff regime came into effect this month.
Now, as alluded to previously in this article, this is a month of historical significance in the story of SA’s struggle for liberation, spearheaded then by women who marched on Strijdom.
Women, as the bedrock on which families are built, will carry the burden that the 30% tariff increase will put on South Africans, who will consequently lose jobs by their thousands because of Trump’s nonsensical tariff war.
The month of August has always been celebrated since those historic days nearly seven decades ago.
Speeches and symbolic marches are staged to remember that epic period.
While August 9 is a public holiday, the month is celebrated as Women’s Month.
Yet the import of the month is not documented sufficiently through writings, and in time the essence of what our grandmothers and mothers did on August 9, 1956, may end up forgotten.
We need, in particular but not necessarily imperatively, women to write their stories.
