We No Longer Live Under Overt Oppression Knowledge is the key to freedom that will bind our hearts and enable us to solve problems that face our people.
By Rahmat Luvuyo Nomvete On a fateful day in September, more than 35 years ago, Steve Biko died in police custody. Although he passed away at the age of 30, he helped to revolutionize South Africa. Biko’s work, in a word, centered on the notion of liberation. Freedom. “We want to attain the envisioned self, which is a free self,” he wrote. In South Africa today, we no longer live in a condition of overt oppression. Nonetheless, is it possible that pernicious, invisible forces of oppression act on our lives? What are they? When will we be free? These are some of the questions I posed to friends. Each person answered, “yes,” to the possibility of the existence of invisible oppression today. I expected this response. The oppression of poverty. Crime. Disease. Ignorance. Hatred. All of these are around us in abundance. Karabo from Mafikeng, a student at Wits University, said my question was “arbitrary.” “You can never be sure of the time of freedom — if it will ever happen — unless you are in everybody’s head,” he said. Karabo took a pen out of his cupboard and drew a rough map of South Africa. His drawing closely resembled a heart. “Anyhow, the underlying issue is: When will South Africa be united, be a country? Only then, I believe, can we be asked about the possibility of true freedom.” “When the people believe that God is one, mankind is one, and that the world is but one country, then we will be oppression free,” Sampson Agyemang, a Ghanian living in Port Elizabeth, told me. Jani, a drama student who lives in George, had similar thoughts. “It’s when we start respecting and loving each other, no matter the other person’s religion or race or social status!” she said. Shohreh, a Persian lady who works as a psychologist in Johannesburg, said freedom is, “When we can have access to any kind of knowledge we seek.” The cause of any oppression, she said, is ignorance. As long as people are left in ignorance, we never will be free and happy. For Shohreh, this is the significance of education. Biko had touched on something similar. “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” he wrote. Our freedom, therefore, seems to lie in efforts we make to sharpen our minds through education. True freedom, I believe, depends on inner qualities such as respect and love. It calls for abandonment of all forms of prejudice. Indeed, we have to be united as a nation in order to seek freedom. Freedom requires that we gain diverse types of knowledge. If ignorance is the greatest form of oppression, knowledge is the key to true freedom. It is this freedom that will bind our hearts and enable us to solve problems that face our people.
2013 Reflections on Freedom
27
