1 March 2013
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Thandiswa Qubuda has Died

Dark clouds are not strangers in our patriarchal society. They are gaining momentum. On Thursday night, 28 February 2013, Thandiswa Qubuda passed from this world. She had spent six weeks in hospital, brain dead, after she was savagely raped and beaten.

We ask ourselves why her story, such a painful story, is not getting media coverage and creating an uproar. The lives of poor people count for nothing in this country. There is no democracy for us.

After Andries Tatane, Marikana and now Mido Macia the whole world knows that we are oppressed by a police force every bit as savage as the police force under apartheid. But the evil is not only in the state. It is amongst us too. This is the truth that we must face. Our struggle to build a society in which every person counts is with ourselves as well as with the state and the capitalists.

The Politic of Human Dignity

presented by Lindela Figlan at the Anarchist Bookfair, London, 24 October 2012

The meaning of dignity is often misunderstood. Many people only think of dignity in relation to the economic status of those who are better off. This is understood to mean that a person with no money is taken as a person whose life and voice does not count and is therefore a person with no dignity. It is also understood that a person with money does count and is therefore a person with dignity. But no amount of money can buy dignity.

Money can buy many things. With money you can live in a house that will not be demolished without warning, that does not leak in the rain, that has water, toilets and electricity. With money you can even give your children their own rooms. With money you can buy your children education and know that if they fall sick or meet with an accident they well be well looked after.