Fred Hollows meets Steve Biko
Fred Hollows meets Steve Biko
As the Fred Hollows Foundation establishes its roots in this historic region of the Eastern Cape, it must adapt its motto, Our Vision is to Restore Your Vision, to address the broader developmental visions of the people of this province.
The word "restore" is especially apt in this case because this has always been a region of visions. It is here in this region that our people began to conceptualize and visualize freedom from colonial rule, for it is here that the first colonialism first anchored itself. The first settlers came here because upon landing in Cape Town they heard that the people in the interior of this province lived in abundant wealth in the form of cattle.
And so through a sojourn of a hundred years between the latter part of the seventeenth century and the mid eighteenth century they moved into the interior meeting resistance from the KhoiSan and San people they met on the way.
Thus the first martyr of the freedom struggle who was brutally killed by Harry Smith and George Southey Chief Hintsa once asked of his tormentors: "What have the cattle done that you should want them so much." The Xhosa chiefs fought nine valiant wars of resistance over a period of another hundred years from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. And the Xhosas would not know freedom for at least another hundred years under successive forms of white colonial and apartheid rule. During that period the people of this region produced great freedom fighters such as Chief Hintsa and Chief Maqoma, arguably the greatest military commander in the history of the Xhosa.
And so thus was set in motion a heritage of leadership that saw this region produce this country's most illustrious political leadership including the leadership of people such as Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko. One of the ironies of colonial rule is that it also sought to establish institutions that would convert the vanquished natives into properly Westernized subjects.
By the close of the century the Eastern Cape had produced towering intellectuals such as Tiyo Soga, John Tengo Jabavu, DDT Jabavu, SEK Mqhayi, AC Jordan, Walter Rubusana and B ka T Tyamzashe. Initially this was quite a conservative lot that together with their conservative counterparts in Natal such as John Dube and Pixley ka Iseme became the founders of a conservative elitist nationalism. It was only in the 1940's and 50's that we began to see a radical nationalism first with the ANC Youth League of people like Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe.
However, the most systematic critique of white power structure in its totality came from a man who lived a mere fifty kilometres from where we are. And that man was Steve Bantu Biko. Having been banished by the apartheid government to his home in Ginsberg, Biko turned that little community into the headquarters of the liberation movement. As the writer Noel Mostert puts it: "Biko, himself missionary educated, represented the last African generation to be the beneficiaries of that tradition.
He personified through his lack of anti-white sentiment, his gentleness and articulate rationality, so many of the characteristic attributes of the missionary educated African elite which had assumed African leadership after the last of the frontier wars exactly a century before; yet he embodied as well a rupture with that tradition."
Why is this historical preface relevant for a programme in blindness prevention, you might ask. This history is important because it carries within it antecedents and memories of not only political struggle but positive examples of self-help as an essential element of struggle.
Some of the earliest examples of public health in this country were started by Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele at the famous Zanempilo Health Clinic just outside of King William's Town. They also started community based projects such as Zimele (Stand on Your Feet) Trust Fund and small-scale home industries. Their motto, which had been coined by Barney Pityana, was "black man you are on your own." Steve himself defined freedom not so much in material as in psychological terms. He argued that " freedom is the ability to define one according to one's own possibilities held back not by law but by God and natural surroundings."
In the great tradition of classical definitions of early democrats such as Jean Jacques Rousseau he also came to the conclusion that freedom was first and foremost a matter of self-definition.
The Fred Hollows Foundation must build on this bank of historical memory if it is to capture the imagination of the people of this region. If people were challenged to take their health conditions into their hands under the most oppressive conditions, there is no reason why such a consciousness cannot be developed under much freer conditions today.
Yes people will be attracted to your programmes because they offer them the tangible possibility to have their sight restored. But