African Activist Archive

Letter to members of the Religious Action Network (RAN) from Aleah Bacquie upon her return from a three-week ecumenical solidarity trip to Southern Africa. She visited South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique with a group of pastors, activists and lay people, staying in families' homes. The group stayed for a week in a rural community of Mangata in the northeastern tip of South Africa, in what the South African government calls the Lebowa homeland. In Alexandra, the oldest Black township in South Africa, located just outside the white suburbs of Johannesburg, they saw the brutal reality of urban apartheid. Declared an "unrest area," the new term for the local states of emergency which give the government broad powers of detention without trial, charge, or benefit of attorney or doctors, an 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew was in effect. Thousands of shacks made of cardboard, plastic and, if they're "lucky," corrugated iron, stand crammed together with no running water, electricity, or toilets. Bacquie says that, in Mozambique, the long arm of apartheid was manifested in the terrorist contra group RENAMO, sponsored by the South African government to destabilize the independent government of Mozambique. In a refugee camp in northern South Africa called Hluphekani, or literally Place of Suffering, the group spoke to several people who were victims of RENAMO or who had fled Mozambique to avoid becoming its victims. Bacquie says aparthed still exists, not only legally, but especially in the daily lives of the people. Bacquie says the people of South Africa are not going to give up their struggle until their vision of a free South African society has been realized, despite President Bush's untimely lifting of sanctions. She asks people to urge their members of Congress to vote a condemnation of the lifting of sanctions and to make sure local sanctions remain in place.

African Activist Archive

[I just returned from an ecumenical solidarity trip to Southern Africa]

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