1. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: Today we are celebrating the life and times of Nelson Mandela and Albertina Sisulu, two stalwarts of the liberation struggle who were born 100 years ago. Both were products of social and historical contexts and conditions of their time.
2. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: And in celebrating their lives, all they struggled for, and all they achieved it is important to understand the world that moulded them.
3. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: In 1918 the year of their birth, it had been five years since the passing of the 1913 Natives Land Act. The 1913 Natives Land Act was the most significant piece of legislation in the dispossession of our land by the white minority.
4. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: It consolidated centuries of war and conquest, where European settlers had dispossessed our people of their land. With the last war of resistance having been fought in 1906 in the Bambatha rebellion.
5. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: The 1913 Natives Land Act confined black South Africans to only 7% of the country, while the white minority were allocated 93%.
6. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: The oppression, inequality, exploitation, poverty and unemployment that resulted from the dispossession of our land was the reality of the times that Nelson Mandela and Albertina Sisulu grew up in, and shaped their lives.
7. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: It’s what inspired their activism and involvement in the liberation of all South Africans from oppression and dispossession.
8. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: They both were prominent activists in the ANC Youth League and both were part of the first generation of Young Lions who made their elders uncomfortable and pushed for a new radical politics.
9. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: Albertina Sisulu was in fact the only female in attendance at the first conference of the ANC Youth Leage in 1944.
10. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: In 1948 the National Party came into power and further entrenched the dispossession of land, its unequal distribution and the exploitation of black South Africans by the white minority. With laws like the Group Areas Act.
11. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: This only led to an intensification of resistance against white minority rule, with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and many others including both of their partners the late Mama Winnie Mandela and Walter Sisulu leading this generation.
12. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: This decision to embark on armed struggle was informed by the continued dispossession and oppression of blacks as a collective, and the material conditions which they lived under.
13. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: Today while we are not embarking on an armed struggle, our generation like the generation of Nelson Mandela and Albertina Sisulu are ready to fulfil their generational mission.
14. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: Like the generation of Nelson Mandela and Albertina Sisulu we are shaped by the poverty, inequality, unemployment and landlessness of our people, as it informs our struggle, and the need to liberate the black child, particularly the girl child.
15. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: It is why we are demanding that Section 25 of the constitution be amended, and land be expropriated without compensation.
16. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: It is why are people must continue to occupy land. As the suffering of our people is directly linked to the dispossession of land, and the path to Economic Freedom in Our Lifetime is Land Expropriation Without Compensation.
17. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: 100 years ago the dispossession of the land of our people by the white minority shaped the lives and politics of Nelson Mandela and Albertina Sisulu, and inspired a generation of freedom fighters.
18. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: Today because of the failures of the ANC government, which has for the past 24 years failed to redistribute land, that very same dispossession and unequal distribution of land is the motive force for the EFF’s existence.
19. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: And whatever is said here by the ANC today is a hollow tribute, as they have abandoned the very struggle that motivated the activism of Nelson Mandela and Albertina Sisulu.
20. #Mandela100 #Sisulu100 Vawda: The only genuine tribute any of us here can make, is committing ourselves to the generational mission of Economic Freedom in Our Lifetime.
