In his youth, Mpho Masemola fought for freedom. He was 20 years old when he was arrested, detained and tortured. When he was 25 when he was released from Robben Island.
A year later, he was shot at close range by a member of the police counter-insurgency unit at a march in Witbank.
In his youth, Mpho Masemola fought for freedom. He was 20 years old when he was arrested, detained and tortured. When he was 25 when he was released from Robben Island.
A year later, he was shot at close range by a member of the police counter-insurgency unit at a march in Witbank.
Today, Masemola is 44 years old, has one of those bullets still embedded in his skull and suffers from neurological problems, anxiety and hypertension. But he’s still fighting.
Masemola is a member of the Khulumani Support Group, an organisation of victims and survivors of apartheid atrocities.
He is also one of the plaintiffs in the South Africa apartheid reparations lawsuit which Khulumani filed in New York seven years ago.
The head of the support group, Grahamstown resident Dr Marjorie Jobson says: “The impression of victims’ movements [such as Khulumani]is that they tend to keep people trapped in this story of the past and that they’re only locked in that story until they receive compensation,” Jobson explains.
“What we’ve been doing is saying from the very beginning that we’ve got no guarantees of anything but as people who know the cost of being a human rights violations victim, we’re the people who should become the defenders of human rights in our communities.”
“Khulumani is the voice of the voiceless,” Masemola says, “the voice of victims of human rights violations.”
However the support group wants to do more than speak on behalf of the victims and survivors of apartheid.
It seeks to empower its 56 000 members by challenging them to re-evaluate how they see themselves and their role in society.
Although the lawsuit has lasted seven years and still isn’t over, it has been instrumental to this shift in attitude.
For Jobson the lawsuit is more than just a reparations case. She says while monetary compensation is important, it’s more important to rebuild people’s lives.
She says the South African government has crippled people by handing out the occasional benefit rather than equipping them with the means to empower themselves.
“While you can rebuild a house, people would prefer to be given the money so they can build their own house – they don’t actually want you to do it for them,” she says.
“People know what they need and they know what they want and they’re perfectly able to organise their lives to do that and [the government has]the duty to give them the means to do that.”
Having said this, Jobson believes people have begun to realise they need to do more than sit around waiting for a handout.
“No struggle is about waiting for anybody to give you anything,” she says. “It’s about taking control of your circumstances and understanding from your personal experiences that you actually have an enormous contribution to make.”
Jobson is optimistic that people’s attitudes and mindsets are changing and that victims are better able to understand the important role they play.
“This year [at the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture]these survivors of torture, who are members of Khulumani and who were giving their testimonies, got up and said: ‘We used to be victims and then we became survivors and now we are human rights activists.’
"I thought, if that’s what the struggle and these legal battles and everything is about, that people suddenly feel like we are human rights activists, I think that’s a very critical shift.”
“My message for those companies is this: stop supporting mercenaries and unlawful governments,” says Masemola. “If you don’t, you’ll face the wrath of the masses. It’s payback time.”
