Queer People Cannot Be Free Unless Education is Free #FeesMustFall

The Johannesburg People’s Pride Movement stands in solidarity with students across the nation demanding the transformation of universities and removing the principal barrier to accessing higher education: the exorbitant cost.

Thousands of young people across all of South Africa are being denied the right and opportunity to education in order to be able to have full citizenship in the global knowledge society. In the same ways that queer people are deliberately pushed to and kept in the margins, poor people (who are overwhelmingly mostly Black as a direct result of our colonial-apartheid past and present) are also being kept in the margins to maintain the pervasive structural and material inequalities that characterise our society today. 

We applaud the courage, discipline and singularity of purpose with which students have been engaged in our collective struggle for the fundamental transformation of our universities and society. Failed by the State and universities, students have shown great leadership in demonstrating that people’s power can effect the change we deserve to see in our society.

We condemn the contempt with which students making legitimate demands for long-overdue solutions are being treated by the State and universities alike. We condemn the use of State force and violence to prevent our right to assemble and protest and disrupt oppressive systems of power. So soon after the Marikana Massacre, and with the enduring memory of the Sharpeville Massacre, it was simply chilling to watch the South African Police Force shoot at students engaged in peaceful protest in Port Elizabeth. We, further, specifically condemn UCT’s fascist resort to interdicting students and staff from organising, assembling and protesting, and encourage all students to make a mockery of this outlandish and unconstitutional court order by continuing to organise peaceful protest actions under the #FeesMustFall banner.

They cannot detain all of us under this unjust and unconstitutional manipulation of the law.

We celebrate the citizen journalists everywhere, especially The Daily Vox, for providing nuanced and critical coverage of this momentous uprising for justice, filling the vacuum left by the mainstream media’s generally disdainful and ambivalent attitude towards this important struggle and the young people leading it.

We call on all our partners, supporters and all of us in the margins who have a stake in the transformation of our universities to show their support for our progressive student movements.

• We call on you to participate in student political actions happening near you, because their struggle is our struggle and our struggle is theirs.
• We call on you to send messages of solidarity and support.
• We call on you to provide support to the various student movements leading this necessary work, in money and in kind, to continue this revolution, for theirs is the long-overdue work of decolonisation in action.
• We call on you to provide financial support to The Daily Vox to enable its citizen journalists to continue their excellent coverage of this important work being driven by students.

Queer people cannot be free unless higher education is free for all who want it. None of us can be free, unless all of us are free.

Sithi phambili, ngabafundi, phambili!

Issued By:

Organising Committee: Johannesburg People’s Pride Movement

jhbpeoplespride@gmail.com

For further information, contact:

Kwezilomso Mbandazayo

Kwezi.mbandazayo@gmail.com

Sekoetlane Phamodi

mrphamodi@gmail.com

“Stabane,” “Kwerekwere” BUT STILL ENTITLED TO life, dignity & freedom from violence

The Johannesburg People’s Pride movement notes with concern the conspicuous wave of violence that has crashed over particularly poor and Black foreign nationals in South Africa, in recent weeks. As we rise together to condemn this egregious violence, and show solidarity with and support for our foreign-born guests, parents, lovers and friends, we would also put it on record that these acts of violence come as no surprise to us but, in fact, index a deeper and more systemic problem of structural, material, psychological and physical violence that we as South Africans have failed to face and address head-on over the last 21 years.

South Africa is routinely celebrated as the land of milk and honey where the rights of all within its artificial borders are protected and promoted. We, South Africans, routinely and arrogantly portray ourselves as exceptional to the continent because our democratic dispensation was not borne of any foundational violence. We reject these claims and characterisations for the brazen brand-building lies that they are. The only things that make South Africa exceptional are that:

1. the democratic society we seek to build is borne out of and shared by ongoing and unmitigated foundational violence against queers, against womyn, against foreign nationals, the poor and the landless;
2. the State machinery’s natural and routine response to civic unrest for its failure to bring us out of racial, economic, and political oppression is violence and murder instead of listening and delivering;
3. we are able to write world-class progressive Constitutions and laws, but fail to live them as a people.

Being so readily available to violence as queer bodies in South Africa, we understand all too well how and why foreign nationals in our borders are victimised such as they are. In our broken heterosexist society, queer bodies are deemed unworthy of dignity, protection and life because of how they transgress sexist rules about how we must present ourselves and who we can fuck. Similarly, the bodies and livelihoods of foreign nationals are the ready targets of violent scapegoating by nationalists, cultural chauvinists and criminal opportunists who are made by an unequal and inequitable society that has its foundations in over three centuries of white supremacist and capitalist violence.

Last year, we marched to demand more than a paltry 16 days of activism against violence against womyn and children but a proactive and year-long systematic programme of action that addressed structural violence in our homes, our communities and the state institutions that we depend on. We did this with a firm understanding and a clarity of purpose that unless all bodies - queer, poor, landless, Black, disabled and foreign-born - are free from all violence, then none of us can ever claim to be free. In a broken society such as ours, we recognise that “stabane" and “kwerekwere” are but synonymous slurs used to establish and maintain the systems of violence and oppression used to sustain our common enemy which is white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.

Today, we repeat this message again when we say thina izitabane, we the disabled, thina omagosha, we the landless, thina abafazi, we Blacks, thina amakwerekwere are all deserving of life, of dignity, of land and of lives free from violence.

To those who have fallen, we say rest in power!

To those still standing, aluta continua for it is not yet Uhuru!

Johannesburg Peoples Pride March 2015 (video frame, katty vandenberghe)

Issued By:

Organising Committee: Johannesburg People’s Pride Movement

jhbpeoplespride@gmail.com

MEDIA DOWNLOAD (facebook postcards, placard, pamphlet)

Cape Town Must Give Pride Back to the People!

The Johannesburg People’s Pride Movement celebrates the emergent resistance against the exclusionary and elitist culture of Cape Town’s annual Pride celebration. From the moment of our inception, in 2013,  when we took on the project to boycott gay parades and reclaim Pride, we acknowledged that a Pride that unifies all LGBTIAQ people anywhere was and remains impossible if it does not reflect the diversity of the people of South Africa and actively campaign for the enjoyment of all freedoms for all people NOW!

It comes as no surprise to us that what sits at the heart of this challenge to the legitimacy of Cape Town Pride is its exclusion of the Black, the disabled, the landless and the poor. Indeed, what should be expected of a programme that situates itself in the affluent suburb of Green Point, where its activities must be paid for and its political agenda is centered around the freedoms we know can only be truly enjoyed by a few? What happened with Johannesburg Pride in 2012 and, now, with Cape Town Pride in 2015 only confirms that in the same way that there are two worlds in South Africa - one that affirms white, affluent, men above all else and another for the rejected and dejected rest - there are two worlds for LGBTIAQ people in Cape Town, Johannesburg and everywhere that queer bodies are to be found.

We remind all progressive LGBTIAQ people and allies that while the inequalities that characterise our society remain, there can be no freedom for queer people. Our vulnerability to violence as LGBTIAQ people does not emerge out of a vacuum, but is a direct consequence of our vulnerability to violence because we are women, because we are poor, because we are Black and because we are landless and discarded in the vast violent ghettoes that span from Orange Farm to Blikkiesdorp. In the same way that there was little to celebrate in the lush high-walled suburb of Rosbeank while violent evictions continue to happen in Hillbrow, there is little to celebrate in the non-poor only clubs of Green Point while the indignity of shitting in a glorified bucket toilet remains a reality for scores in Khayelitsha.

We say phambili to our comrades who will protest Cape Town Pride, demanding a broad-based community driven people’s movement! They will say you are mad Black queers not because you are out of touch with reality, but because they fear your capacity to imagine a reality in which we deliberately and decisively dismantle white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy - even in the queer spaces that claim to represent us.

Like our audacious, mad Black queer comrades in Cape Town, we are resolved that Pride is not an event, but a movement requiring collective efforts from individuals, organisations, communities, allies and families. We are unwavering that it cannot and must not be allowed to be owned by a privileged few.

The Johannesburg People’s Pride Movement pledges its support to the building of a progressive queer alliance of people in Cape Town that will reclaim a Pride that is for the people. We urge all comrades and friends in Cape Town to visibly occupy and assert their presence in Green Point, Traffic Department Parking Lot, 10:30am, 28 February 2015.

We urge all progressive LGBTIAQ people and allies from Cape Town to Johannesburg and everywhere in-between and beyond to stand together in boycotting commercialised gay-parades that delegitimise our struggles and reclaim our Pride!

Issued by:

The Johannesburg People’s Pride Movement

Contact Persons:

Sekoetlane Phamodi

mrphamodi@gmail.com

076 084 8077

Reject 16 Days of Activism and Demand 365 Days of NO Violence against ALL bodies, NOW!

Call to Action

Johannesburg People's Pride March for 365 Days of No Violence Against All Bodies

29 November 2014, 10 AM

Constitution Hill

Last year, we, a radical feminist movement of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Intersex, Transgender, Asexual and Queer (LGBTIAQ) people, rejected the gay parade premised on capitalist single-issue politics. The gay parade celebrated the freedoms still only enjoyed largely by an elite minority of affluent, white gays that refused to recognise the structural and material oppressions still suffered by the majority of the LGBTIAQ public in South Africa.

In that landmark protest-celebration on 5 October 2013, over 4000 people standing under the banner of the Johannesburg People’s Pride Movement (JPP) gathered to reclaim and reassert a political Pride that celebrated the few freedoms we enjoy. We named the multiple ways in which our bodies continue to be violated and oppressed. We emphasised that unless all of our bodies are free - we women, we the disabled, we the poor and landless, we sex-workers, we Blacks, we undocumented immigrants, we queers - then none of us can be free.

Violence

We recognise that in spite of the constitutional freedoms we can only assert through expensive court actions, our lives are overly-determined by violence. Because we are women, our availability to assault and rape is drastically increased both in the workplace as well as at home. Because we are sex-workers, we are deemed unworthy of the State’s services and protection from violence because we are considered amoral criminals. Because we are disabled, we are invisibilised by an ableist society not interested in our justice. Because we are poor, we are denied a voice and a choice because these are only heard by those with access to the money and the land we were, and continue to be, dispossessed of.

This violence is rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy, and these violent oppressions are rooted in capitalism. While we continue to live in a capitalist state where an elite few own the means of production, we will continue to be divided by this insidious force which manifests itself in ableism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. If we are to break the shackles of our oppression, we need to rise up against these forces and collectively dismantle the stranglehold they have on our capacity to be free and live in the just society we deserve.

In the same way that we, the LGBTIAQ public of this city that was built on violence and oppression, boycotted the gay parade and reclaimed our Pride, we have decided to reclaim the 16 Days of Activism and expand it to sustained radical activism to eradicate violence against all of our bodies.

Reject Government’s 16 Days of Activism

When government launched the annual 16 Days of Activism campaign fifteen years ago, we celebrated that the crisis of violence plaguing this country and all its peoples would be addressed head-on with radical interventions. Fifteen years down the line, we not only saw more of the same violence, but a regression into ultra-conservativism from the Ministers right down to the State officials tasked with not only protecting us from violence, but preventing it.

Just last week we witnessed, with shock and amazement, the Minister of Women in the Presidency endorse the position that feminism should be rejected because it is un-African, and that women in South Africa - who bear the brunt of all violence - should subordinate themselves to benevolent patriarchs. We do not want men to protect us from violence, Minister. We want to be free from violence against these men who beat, rape and kill us in our homes.

In Women’s Month this year, we watched aghast when the Department of Arts and Culture, with the support of Cabinet and the Ministry of Women, launched the “Wear A Doek Friday” campaign to celebrate women. We know that in some instances the doek can be symbolic of oppression, but more importantly, telling us what to wear or not to wear in no way addresses the structural challenges women face.”

Routinely, we hear little from Cabinet about long-term and systemic solutions to the thousands of cases of beaten, assaulted, raped and murdered transgender people, women, lesbian women and sex-workers across the length and breadth of this country except when it is perpetrated by big and prominent men with deep and expansive pockets to pay for the wheels of justice to turn faster and in their favour.

• We remember Nokuphila Kumalo, a sex-worker, whose name is known to us only because she was allegedly beaten to death by acclaimed artist Zwelethu Mthethwa.

• We remember Reeva Steenkamp whose story is known only because she was shot to death by her intimate partner and olympian, Oscar Pistorius, who claimed he feared the Black intruder behind that bathroom door.

• We remember Phumeza Modikane who was murdered and decapitated by her husband, the benevolent patriarch she was told to return and submit to.
• We remember the countless bodies, nameless, bodies that live through and die as a result of sustained violence and abuse that is repeatedly reported to and goes ignored by family members and police officers and prosecutors and magistrates. 

We are tired of waiting for an annual sixteen-day period, to hear the same platitudes in the grandest PR exercise our government undertakes every year. We say Minister Shabangu, take back your 16 Days because we don’t want it. We call on all progressives, civil society actors, social movements and trade unions to reclaim what is ours - 365 Days of NO Violence against All Bodies, NOW!

Our Demands

Our demands are simple and speak to the root of the crisis of violence in South Africa. 

We demand:


• Minister Shabangu’s immediate disavowal of the statements made in her name at the 16 days of activism roundtable that feminism is incompatible with African-ness. We call on her to explicitly state that what is incompatible with African-ness, is the requirement that women submit to men, and that her Ministry will do all in its power to fight and smash patriarchy in all its forms.

• The empowerment of the Commission on Gender Equality to shape and enforce policy that prevents violence against women and gender non-conforming people.

• The immediate decriminalisation of sex-work which will significantly lessen the vulnerability of sex-workers from violence and harm as well as ease their access to both healthcare services and recourse through the criminal justice system.

• The assertion of the dignity of women and girl-children through the provision of sanitaryware in all public institutions, and especially institutions of learning. We cannot continue to allow these people to suffer the indignity and health-risks associated with improvising with socks, bandages and toilet paper every month.

• The explicit recognition of gender non-conforming people in the national agenda and a serious detailing of what this means in practice.
• Sustained radical action to accompany the grand-statements made by government and State officials during the 16 Days of Activism period. We are tired of the repeated platitudes when the crisis of violence on our bodies deepens year-on-year.

• Safe spaces for women and gender non-conforming people at schools, institutions of further education and training and in our communities. We are tired of living in fear of violence from our teachers, our lecturers, our neighbours and our families.

• Sustained education on LGBTIAQ issues for State officials including healthcare workers, police officers and educators. We are tired of being victimised, ridiculed and barred access to basic services by the very people we rely on to heal, protect and educate us.

Statement Clarifying our Relationship with other Prides in Johannesburg and Beyond

Statement Clarifying our Relationship with other Prides in Johannesburg and Beyond

The Working Group of the Johannesburg Peoples Pride Movement (JHBPP), are doing the work of implementing the collective vision for a Johannesburg Peoples Pride, as articulated in the manifesto and mandated by a mass meeting of this movement. As a movement we are constantly aware that there are many areas for our collective growth and governance. We have been very attentive to how we work and have, with movement and ongoing engagement, acted to nourish the values and principles which underlie our politics and ethic. This is evidenced by the first mass meeting that produced our manifesto which is a living document, a commitment to change, the promise of transformation; to our organising committee meetings which are open to all and are spaces for discussion and implementation.

All decisions are made by full consensus, all ideas are debated and discussed with equal measure, all our short-falls are exposed, accounted for, and ways forward that are responsive to these are proposed and decided on by all of us who form the collective and who are committed to making the space work. In the last year we have struggled with capacity and have therefore fallen short as your committee to these ideals. We aspire to these and call on all comrades and friends to join the call in continuing to reclaim a PRIDE of POWER, of PERSISTANCE and of POLITICS.

Both prior to and after the first Johannesburg Peoples Pride March on 6 October 2013, a number of statements and questions have been raised on various online platforms, directed at the movement (through its Working Group).This document serves to outline a few responses and open up discussions on the various issues raised.

Our Name

The formation of JHBPP is a direct result of the number of acts of resistance against an exclusionary LGBTI parade that has marked JHB for the last number of years. Peoples’ Pride represents a radical break from the commercialised, racist and classist JHB gay parade. Here, we raise the level of what we demand of each other within LGBTIAQ organising, what we demand of our communities and workplaces, and what we demand of the State.

We are on the margins of society, as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Intersexed Blacks, Women, Migrants, Workers, Disabled People and all those unlisted here, and yet suffer the burdens of not fitting into the “model person” “model family” or “model citizen”. Most of us spill into and out of these identities simultaneously and, for full freedom, require that all of these oppressions be addressed simultaneously. Most of us do not live, work and interact in Queer friendly spaces, and need those spaces to transform. We recognise that unless all of us are free, none of us will be free.

This Pride is an All Peoples Pride, as opposed to the some people (wealthy, white, privileged) pride. Our LGBTIAQ identities are front and centre within this movement, together with the other identities that we occupy. Not above, not below, but simultaneously. The choice to present as the people represents all of these complexities. This, by no means, makes our space less Queer for the benefit of heteronormative comfort, but expands our articulations for the benefit of freedom for all.

Which Pride should I attend? Why do we have so many Prides and why can we not all unite?

The JHBPP movement works hand in hand with all Prides which are politically orientated and have a progressive agenda. The organising committee has used as a guiding document our collectively-drafted manifesto. In addition to many civil society organisations, collectives and individuals; some of the founding members of JHBPP are Soweto Pride, Ekurhuleni Pride and Vaal Pride. There have been a number of other Pride protests/celebrations to emerge in Gauteng and other parts of the country which have taken to the politics of claiming the streets for all. We demand of ourselves  the existence of multiple sites of struggle, defiance and the claiming of space and therefore see the multiplicity of prides as something to be celebrated rather than to be seen as negative fragmentation. Unfortunately, there has also been an emergence of Prides that re-enforce the exclusionary politics that we struggle against and re-enforce difference and discrimination.

In our view, these are spaces that re-enforce single issue politics as going against the spirit of our movement. These spaces are hierarchical, oriented more toward opulence and expensive partying, hosted in inaccessible spaces for the majority of people, and require material wealth as entry.

We are reminded that spaces that endorse a capitalist agenda - such as those intimately tied with corporate wealth - are not for the people and instead serve the interests of profits over people.

We believe that through all of our bodies, the JHBPP should act as a radicalising force for change, asking the uncomfortable questions and seeking answers that advance radical transformation.

We continue to ask, if a pride expresses itself as non-political, if the space and entrance aren’t free, if profit-driven corporations are sponsors, if there are VIP areas: then who is this Pride for? We ask who pride is for if it does not articulate clear anti-wealth politics and does not recognise and work against the effects of race, class and gender as oppressive forces within all spaces including those of LGBTIAQ people.

Our movement believes that diversity of voice and contestation in terms of ideologies within the broader LGBTIAQ communities is necessary. We do not view ourselves in competition with other Prides, yet will continue, because of our politics, to be critical of all Prides, including ourselves.

JHBPP will be Marching on 29 November 201

10:00 AM

Constitution Hill

This date falls within the 16 days of Activism of No Violence Against Women and Children. We will again reclaim this moment as an activist moment and not a moment for the state and corporate entities to pay lip service, yet again, to our struggles against violence (while daily committing acts of violence against the majority of the population).

In conclusion, our struggle has suffered the restriction of being viewed as a struggle primarily for the right to be intimate with who we want, without the fear of harassment and violence, and the rights to be free from violence directed at us on the basis of our sexual orientation and gender identity. This movement is one that recognises these two issues as very important in the experiences of all LGBTIAQ bodies, but also acknowledges and demands the recognition that the oppressions we experience as LGBTIAQ people are accompanied and exacerbated by a host of other oppressive forces that restrict us and others from being alive.

We strive for the freedom to be, to desire, and to be free from harm.

Aluta Continua!

The JHB Peoples Pride Organising Committee