“History influences our future”-YCLSA

Lebohang Pita
@LeboPita 

Buti Manamela

The Young Communists League of South Africa (YCLSA) hosted its ‘Bua Thursday’ educational programme at the Tshwane University of Technology’s Soshanguve south campus on Thursday 25 October 2012.

The YCLSA started the programme to open space for a discussion on the legacy of apartheid and its impact on the present-day South Africa.

YCL national secretary and Member of Parliament, Buti Manamela said it was important for South Africans to know their history because history formed people into the individuals they are today.

“It is what happened in the past which informs our current way of life,” said Manamela.

He said although the architects of apartheid and colonialism are dead, their legacy was still visible.

He said its visibility had manifested itself in political and educational institutions and these institutions were designed to favour certain class of people in society.

“The fact that a white child has a better chance to enrol at a university and ultimately get employment opportunities as compared to a black child is a reflection of what happened in the past and its impact today,” he said.

Manamela further said that historic class divisions were the root cause of the high unemployment rate amongst black people.

“There was reserved employment for white South Africans while black South Africans were forced into slave wage employment,” said Manamela

Manamela reiterated that the apartheid era designed so-called white universities in such a manner that they would still favour white students in a democratic South Africa.

Collins Chabane

He further said South Africans should stop pretending to be non-racial because access to basic services and employment was still defined racially and black people inherited poverty from the apartheid system.

“If we do not break the cycle of inequality, we would continue to live in a pretentious non-racial society where we just try to get along yet we are a society that is divided by poverty and unemployment,” he said.

Minister of Performance and Monitoring in the Presidency, Collins Chabane said South Africans adopted violent behaviour from the apartheid system.

He said the reason South Africans always resort to violence to raise their concerns was because of the violence they had to endure during the apartheid era.

He claimed that the reversal of apartheid was going to take a long time as long as there are socio-economic challenges in South Africa.

Chabane said it would be a crime against humanity if society was to forget the legacy of apartheid just because the country has celebrated 18 years of democracy.

“Anyone who does not know his or her history will not know where he or she is going. It is important for the nation to keep reminding ourselves that never in our history should we return to that programme (apartheid),” he said.

Responding to whether the renaming of street and town names was not an obliteration of history, Chabane said: “All these places had their names that were changed to celebrate the Boer’s triumph over the natives. Some of the changes in some places are the restoration of the original name.”