Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga was awarded the Africa Freedom Prize at a ceremony at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg on 5 October 2023.
Often in our region and on our continent, we tend to think that civil liberties are under threat, and this threat comes from corrupt dictatorships. I take what I suggest is a more radical and hopeful view of the situation. I do not think that civil liberties are under threat. My proposition is that they are nascent, yet to be established.
The Africa Freedom Prize of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation is an award that recognises individuals who have freely and willingly taken on the task of undoing the violations of the past as they manifest in our present dispensations.
Job Sikhala represented the Ali family in the abduction case. Dissatisfied with the way the state handled the matter, Sikhala conducted investigations that led to the recovery of Ali’s dismembered remains in a well on a property belonging to the mother of one of the men Ali had last been seen with. Job was arrested at Ali’s funeral and imprisoned without bail.
What I have come to see is that my core is the business of increasing citizen agency. I conceive of agency as the decision process and capability to pursue individual or collective action. As a young woman who grew up disadvantaged by patriarchy, it was clear to me that women needed more agency.
Creative arts products that appeal to a person’s emotional and motivational systems, such as song, dance and stories that descend into propaganda, are routinely deployed by internal colonisers to keep their victim populations ignorant, mentally numb and subjugated. Those of us who work for the establishment of civil liberties, and for these liberties’ necessary precursor, that is, citizen agency, by and large neglect to use such compelling tools of formation effectively. NGO interventions too often take the form of didactic teachings aimed at a person’s intellectual, cognitive systems. However, human motivation is derived from human beings’ emotional, affective systems.