It is an honour to commemorate and remember the life and work of our dear brother and comrade, Achmat Dangor, with you today. We offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends, comrades and colleagues of Achmat Dangor. Today’s memorial and the moving tributes share the attributes of a role model whose lifelong dedication to the fight against oppression and injustice helped deliver freedom to our country.
Like many of his comrades and like all of us, Achmat Dangor is at once a product and creator of history. A child of his environment that shaped his impulses, responses and reactions. An environment of Spartan conditions under the repressive laws of the apartheid regime, a system of rule that was conceived and implemented by admirers of fascism in the form of Nazism. And, so as Hitler in Germany tried to destroy the intellectuals, his apartheid followers in South Africa copied this misology – a true aversion to enlightenment and hatred of reasoning.
They lived a lie that they were superior beings and therefore introduced laws such as the Group Areas Act, Bantu Education, Segregation in Sport, and all its attendant brutalities. They sought to define every facet of life on the basis of skin colour.
As Fidel Castro would describe how this notion:
“Made them to live in perpetual despair, perpetual anguish, perpetually lying and living in perpetual fear of the truth.”
Banned by the South African apartheid government in 1973, writer, political activist and leader, Achmat Dangor, faced political censorship when the oppressive regime attempted to conceal the blessed gift of his intellect and suppress his universal right to access the power and faculty of the mind.
Achmat Dangor developed into a formidable intellectual who never truckled to oppressors, but instead chose to resist the noxious ideas of white supremacy. White people presented themselves as the norm and the rest of us as sub-human and therefore the othered.
Inspired by the urgency to oppose the repressive apartheid regime, Achmat Dangor’s imagination was armed with a talent and skill for literature and he went on to become one of South Africa’s most prolific writers. He was amongst many writers, journalists, musicians and artists to be banned for no reason other than that they possessed brave and brilliant imaginations.
Censorship and opposition to books is nothing new. The banning and torching of books, for instance, has long been used to send retrogressive political messages, as the world saw in history with the bonfires of so called ‘anti-German’ literature during Hitler’s Nazi regime. These destructions of knowledge become seismic events that intend to leave a scar on the oppressed, strangle the mind, and wipe out memory. Often these ripple effects are still suffered many years later, as in the case of South Africa, where a lack of access to books and low literacy levels are still a bleeding wound.
Achmat Dangor together with 13 other banned writers, founded an erudite group called Black Thoughts. Its mission was to overcome Bantu Education, a system during apartheid that enforced racially-segregated educational facilities and an inferior education for blacks, imposing Afrikaans as a medium for instruction, and severely restricting access to literature. Black Thoughts offered readings in township schools and churches, and introduced students and the public to the work of important black consciousness writers, banned books and writings from authors in Africa and other developing countries.
Achmat Dangor was a humble person with infinite confidence and faith in the victory of the struggle for freedom. Servant leaders like Achmat Dangor do not struggle for honour or glory, or to occupy a hallowed place in history.
As we all know, individuals write their own history through their conscious actions and the choices they make in their daily existence.
Recognizing his own courage and commitment to literature, story-telling and free expression in the face of political persecution, Achmat Dangor’s books became a symbol of defiance for the oppressed.
As John Still would put it:
“The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.”
His early writings, including “Waiting for Leila” (1981) and the poems in “Bulldozer” (1983) and “Private Voices” (1992), focus on the effects of racial segregation and the forced demolitions of black neighbourhoods and townships. They gave a voice to the marginalized by offering a perspective of outsiders who were confined to the edges of society and prevented by racism to improve their condition.
He chose the pen and written word as his weapon. In his writings he always sought the conjunction between analysis and action. His writings have practical implications not only for the reader but for society at large.
He continued writing throughout his later years and devoted himself to his craft in his retirement. This devotion to the pen is a leading light to those whose imagination and command of language urges them to exercise their right to expression and intellectual freedom.
Opening the door to limitless possibilities by unlocking the potential of the mind, is a hard-won right in South Africa, in the name of intellectual freedom. The ideals of freedom of expression are intrinsically linked to human rights and an essential prerequisite to protect and promote democracy.
Intellectual freedom allows a society to become a market place of ideas where citizens reach their full potential as creative, critical thinkers and free beings. It is this understanding that reveals the power of books, literature, poetry, music and the arts.
Georges Politzer taught us that:
“Intellectual independence, the critical spirit, consists not in yielding before the onslaught of reaction, but, on contrary, in refusing to yield.”
The journey from an idea to a fully bound book begins with the writer, so it is our responsibility as society, as readers, as leaders, as defenders of the imagination, to light up the bulb of our youth and inspire the next generation of authors to explore, interrogate and express themselves beyond the limits of their material surroundings and lived experience.
The skill of Achmat Dangor to use the pen as a tool to contribute towards the direction of our democracy, together with his excellent management and people skills, placed him in a unique position to expand his human rights advocacy after the fall of apartheid.
Achmat Dangor was a gentle soul, a noble activist, and an exceptional writer whose work, steeped in history, offers an atmospheric presence that is perfect to motivate and encourage the nation to celebrate their hard-earned freedom to read, write and tell their tales.
Sir Leslie Stephen would have said the following of Achmat Dangor:
“Nothing could be told of his private life by those who have the fullest means of knowledge which would not confirm the highest estimate derivable from his writings of the tenderness of his heart and the moral worth of his nature.”
Once again condolences to the Dangor family, his comrades, friends and colleagues.
Hamba Kahle Comrade Achmat Dangor.
I thank you.
