Human rights in the minds of Merebank

FORGIVE us. We're letting the cat out of the bag. Today's remembrance of Human Rights Day pushes learners at Merebank secondary schools into the spotlight. 

The Merebank Legacy Book Project essay competition will unveil the thinking of the young minds of the Durban South Basin that extends through Merebank, Wentworth, Umlazi, Isipingo, and the Bluff.

Collectively this is a community battered by the ravages of colonialism, indenture, forced migration, apartheid, environmental pollution, and the unchecked tentacles of capitalism. The pupils do not simply reflect on Human Rights Day as an annual exercise in remembrance; rather, they are engaged in a complex negotiation with history, interrogating the past to carve out the contours of a more just and humane future for the planet.

The Merebank project has evolved as an intellectual crucible, challenging pupils to wrestle with the meaning of justice, dignity, and historical agency. We often forget that the most beaten, battered, and bruised retain their agency - their ability to speak and defy their oppressors and to triumph over the violence of their circumstances. From our peek at the entries, this is no ordinary writing contest - rather, it is an exercise in historical reconstitution, an effort to reclaim silenced narratives and interrogate the knowledge that has framed their existence. 

The organisers, conscious of the need to foster both critical inquiry and historical empathy, have offered incentives that range from an educational pilgrimage to Robben Island, to cash prizes, and book awards. These, however, are merely conduits through which the deeper project of remembrance, critique, and restoration unfolds.

For these pupils, Sharpeville, the Trojan Horse of Athlone, the 1913 murders of indentured workers on the Hillhead and Blackburn estates, Marikana, and the torture and incarceration of freedom fighters among other atrocities are not a monolithic edifice to be studied from a distance but an active site of contestation. Their essays do not simply recall the brutality of displacement and economic marginalisation but challenge the ideological frameworks that sustain these structures. 

They ask: how does one move beyond the inherited traumas of systemic oppression? One young woman demands to know why her grandmother was denied an education simply because of her gender. Another poignantly imagines the cries of babies on the backs of their mothers as the police fire with live rounds in Sharpeville. What does justice mean in a world where freedom is increasingly boxed in by billionaire oligarchies stretching economic and social inequities?

Yet, these young people's engagement with history is not one of fatalism. If history has been written as a chronicle of suffering, these students are determined to rewrite it as a path of possibility. Their reflections extend beyond the lamentations of loss; they seek to reimagine the present and chart pathways toward a future where dignity is not merely a rhetorical flourish but a lived reality.

In this exercise of historical reflection, we see a generation that is not merely inheriting history but actively reconstructing it. Their work signals a break with traditional systems of knowledge, a moment where remembrance becomes a revolutionary act. As these young thinkers engage with Human Rights Day, they do so not in the spirit of passive commemoration but as agents of historical transformation, reconfiguring the past so that it might yield a markedly different future.

It will take a bit of courage for some of us who have been around the block to sit down and listen to this young generation speak. For more than half a century, Merebank marshalled its finest into the ranks of the liberation struggle and community service. Their current book project should spur communities around the country to document and publish their histories and hopes for the future. 

Kiru Naidoo and Selvan Naidoo are co-authors of The Indian Africans with Paul David and Ranjith Choonilall available at www.madeindurban.co.za  and bookshops around the country.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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