In the beginning, there was the word. And the word was caged, shackled by laws inked in the brittle bones of colonialism, bound in the thick ropes of apartheid and its bastard chommies; racism, sexism, xenophobia, classism, political oppression, capitalisms (in its exploitative forms) and various other injustices that continue to undermine our rights. But words, slippery as shadows, find ways to escape. Poetry, that restless fugitive, has long been the smuggler of human rights, the cipher through which pain and freedom whisper their clandestine messages. In South Africa, a country where the soil itself hums resistance, poetry is both the prophecy and the protest, the dirge and the dance.
Human rights in this land are neither the gift of benevolent GNU lawmakers nor the inevitability of democratic tides. They are the blood-won spoils of struggle, chiselled from the granite of oppression by tongues sharper than a tungsten needle. The poets knew this before the politicians ever did. Keorapetse Kgositsile’s words were guerrillas, ambushing the enemy in the dead of night. In the bleakest days, Dennis Brutus carved verses out of prison walls, each line a barbed wire fence electrified with longing and an urge to survive. South African poets Lindiwe Mabuza, Dianna Ferrus, Makhosazana Xaba and Antjie Krog sutured the wounded soul of a nation with stanzas dripping both rage and reconciliation. James Matthews said “julle kan almal gaan kak!”. Don Mattera sang a song for Palestine urged us to watch over the children of the world.
But human rights, though inscribed in constitutions, are fragile things. Like a poem unfinished, they remain subject to the violent whims of the editor’s pen. What is a right, if not an unwritten contract between power and the people, held together by the tenuous glue of collective agreement? To celebrate human rights in South Africa is to acknowledge the absurdity of their paradox: the promise of equality in a land still haunted by the ghosts of Sharpeville, Marikana, the horrors of Life Esidimeni, the unending water crisis in Hammanskraal and the everyday disappearances of the forgotten poor.
To preserve and protect human rights, we must listen, not only to the formal decrees of the courts but to the stories murmured in taxi ranks, on street corners, in overcrowded classrooms. It is in poetry that the contradictions of this democracy are most nakedly exposed. The Constitution declares, “We, the people,” yet a poet wails, “We, the hungry” (a nod to seasoned poet Kabelo Mofokeng). The law promises safety, yet a stanza scrawled in the margins of a township asks, “Where do the missing girls go?” The media proclaims justice, yet an unrecorded poem chants in the wind: “Where is the justice for the ones whose names and stories never make the news?”
If human rights are to be truly protected, then poetry must be weaponised. Not in the sense of violence, but as an insurgency of imagination, a refusal to accept the distortions of power. It must infiltrate the law books, the parliament chambers, the boardrooms where wealth conspires against dignity. A poem must be a courtroom where the landless cross-examine the landlords, where the evicted summon the absent deities of justice.
To celebrate human rights in South Africa is to sing in defiance of the silence imposed by power. It is to take a line from South African Poet Laureate Mongane Wally Serote and etch it on the walls of parliament: “For those who will come after me, I leave the future in your hands.” It is to turn every protest chant into an elegy for those who have fallen, and every elegy into a manifesto for those who will rise. It is to remember that poetry, in its most radical form, is not merely art, it is survival.
And so, on this shifting landscape of hope and despair, let the poets lead the way. Let them scribble freedom into existence, let them chant justice into being. For as long as there is breath to recite a verse, there is the possibility that human rights will not only be written but truly lived.
Quaz.