To me, activism is like growing a pearl. What may start as a tiny grain of sand or information will grow and develop into meaningful change in the coming years. My personal experience with activism began at a young age. I come from a household with two parents who were previously classified as “coloured” during the apartheid regime.
I grew up hearing stories from parents and grandparents about how they could only go to certain parks, certain beaches and get certain jobs. I recall my mother waxing wistfully about wanting to go to the Train Park in Claremont as a child but being unable to because of the colour of her skin. I remember my parents regaling me with tales of them escaping tear gas by the kindness of an aunty willing to open up her doors to them. I remember my grandparents whispering, “That’s the place,” when we would round the corner on our way to Cavendish, staring forlornly at the street where they had been forcibly removed from their home. In this way, the pearl of activism began to burgeon within me, the shells of my subconscious shaping it into a stronger sense of justice. Unsurprisingly, I believe that this is why I, and many other South Africans, tend to hold the Palestinian liberation movement close to heart. As someone who is made up of a web of complicated experiences of oppression and liberation, I feel it is my duty to recognise and speak out on injustice when I see it.
Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) took place at the University of Cape Town (UCT) between the 18th and 21st of March. According to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), IAW functions as a chance for people to raise awareness about the injustices experienced by Palestinians since 1948, create solidarity across nations and mobilise for ongoing boycott campaigns. For four days straight, passers-by would be confronted with green, red, black and white images of keffiyehs, poems from Gazan children, messages from martyrs and a blood-stained Israeli flag. Representatives from the UCT Palestine Solidarity Forum (PSF) and the UCT chapter of the Cape Youth Collective (CAYCO) set up “teach-in” sessions, in which booths offered information on the history of Palestine, pinkwashing, and how people could help.
What struck me the most was a large piece of fabric spread out across the plaza on the 18th. CAYCO had tasked volunteers with writing out the names of the martyrs in Palestine who had passed between 2023 and 2024 on the fabric, completely filling the sheet. The Gaza Health Ministry states that over 17,487 have died since 7 October 2023 in Gaza alone. The numbers continued to rise in 2024, with 29,000 being murdered before the end of February at the hands of Israeli occupation forces. Participating in the laborious task of writing out about 30 names each put the sheer weight of the offences into perspective for me. Each one of those 29,000 people was a human being with a life, goals, interests and loved ones. Each one snuffed out like a candle on a cold winter’s night.
On the 19th of March, hundreds of Palestine supporters gathered to express their disdain for UCT’s refusal to participate in a complete academic boycott of Israel. The size and demographic of the crowd were very telling – mostly people of colour, descendants of those who experienced apartheid, and their allies. As a child of people who lived through apartheid (and as someone still experiencing the legacy of it today), I found it heartening to see many, many people decked out in keffiyehs and unafraid to stand up for what is right. The deep, long-standing solidarity with Palestine that South Africa has built is one of the most beautiful things in the world to see. It was like viewing thousands of pearls in motion, all united in a common goal.
As the first democratic president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, once said, “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” May our freedom and the freedom of Palestine be granted soon.