CELEBRATING HUMAN RIGHTS CHAMPIONS

ON the day the 47th United States president was inaugurated, Americans were also celebrating Dr Martin Luther Jr, who was martyred in 1968. I would like to share an excerpt of his famous speech that continue to inspire generations globally.  It is recorded that on August 28, 1963, 100 years after President Lincon signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves, the young Dr Martin Luther King Climbed the marble steps of the Lincon Memorial in Washington, DC to describe the vision of America. On this day, more than 200 000 blacks and whites came to listen.  They were all in one accord, demanding equal rights for black people.  It is said that the dream they heard that day has become a dream of a generation. He said: “Five score years ago, a great American, whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the Momentous Decree came as a great beacon of hope to million slaves who had been seared in the flames of sweltering injustice.

Life

‘‘But, one hundred years later, the coloured man is not free.  One hundred yeas later, the life of a coloured American is still crippled by manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the coloured American lines on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of vast ocean of material prosperity”.  Then he shared his famous dream: “I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at a table of brotherhood.  
“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be not judged by the colour of their skin but by character.

Hope

“This is our hope; this is the faith that I will go back to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.  If America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from hilltop of Hampshire, let freedom ring from the Mountains of New York.  “When we let freedom ring, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands in the words of old spiritual song, Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” As the new American administration takes office with the new president’s quest for sweeping changes, it is my hope and prayer that Dr Martin Luther King’s dream may not be undermined. I am, however, encouraged by the National Action Network led by Rev Dr Al Sharpton, who has been part of Dr King’s Civil Rights Movement, that they will continue to shine the light through protest and speaking truth to power, because America should not go back.

If citizens are silent, democracy, freedoms and rights get undermined. The civil society movement in Eswatini and beyond our borders are also commemorating a human rights activist and Eswatini icon, Thulani Rudolf Maseko, who, while watching a soccer match, was gunned down in front of his wife and children. This hand of death robbed the country of a man of peace, a man who yearned for a great country where rights of citizens to associate, to protest freely, to access services, to access justice, to address the indignity of poverty, where gender-based violence will be forcefully addressed, to mention just a few. He understood the dangers of fighting for human rights and justice. He said in Oslo in 2016: ‘‘We shall not surrender, for we know there is a prize to pay for truth.’’

Silenced

He penned a letter in his cell to the then President of the United States, Barack Obama, where he said: ‘‘In Swaziland, dissenting and opposing views are silenced, harassed and thrown in jail.’’  He quoted Dr Martin Luther King Jr. when he said ‘we know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given; it must be demanded by the oppressed’. Maseko believed in human rights, which is the embodiment of human dignity.  He believed in peaceful resolution of conflicts, because like Dr Martin Luther King, he believed in peaceful resistance to foster change. As we celebrate the two eminent human right activists, let us be cognisant that the rights of emaSwati are enshrined in the Constitution and the government has signed a number of regional, continental and international human rights instruments. It is, however, regrettable, that rights of emaSwati are still violated with impunity!  


 

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