BUFFEJAGSBAAI is a poor fishing village about 200km from Cape Town on the East Coast of South Africa. One travels through Hermanus, Gansbaai and Franskraal to reach this remove village of about 250 souls. The community depends entirely on fishing, including harvesting kelp [seaweed].
For the past 24 years the community has benefitted, through a community trust, from the income generated by various forms of fishing rights, with more than 80 permanent jobs created by the rights that the government of democratic South Africa had granted this community, made up entirely of previously disadvantaged South Africans.
NOW THE ENTIRE VILLAGE IS FACING DEVASTATION. The government has developed a small-scale fishing policy supposed to benefit those who were the victims of a whites-only apartheid system. Rather than continuing to ensure that the entire community of Buffeljagsbaai has access to these rights, it has taken the rights enjoyed by 80% of the community away and awarded it to a newly formed Co-operative of which only 20% are members.
It is a previous American First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt who said; “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.” This is exactly what this community is now trying to do, arguing in an Urgent Application in the High Court in Cape Town that the rights that they have enjoyed through their community trust was exactly what the constitutional values enshrined in the constitution envisaged – creating a more just and equal society, where each person has access to a certain personal dignity.
In addition to these constitutional values, there are also constitutional imperatives. These are the processes / framework / tools provided in the constitutional and legal framework of South Africa to instruct government, corporations, agencies and individuals to conform to behaviour that will advance the constitutional values that are so important in building the NEW SOUTH AFRICA that all its citizens have waited for over 300 years to have access to.
By stripping the majority of the Buffeljagsbaai community of access to income, it is condemning this remote and marginalised community to further deprivation, making education, housing and a decent existence much harder to achieve.
Lawyers representing the community are donating most of their time and expertise to force the government to face the irrationality of how it is implementing its small-scale fishing rights policy. Stripped from all legalities, The Question simply is; HOW CAN THE CONSTITUTION ALLOW THIS?
Demanding an answer is a difficult process where communication often has to come through the barrel of the law as a certain arrogance and incompetence in government are ignoring the constitutional imperatives, which in turn makes a mockery of the constitutional values for which Nelson Mandela and so many others fought for so long.
Maybe it will take a village – BUFFELJAGSBAAI – to again place human dignity, equality and access to citizens’ rights at the center of the national debate where it should be.
IT’S SIMPLE
“Human rights mean no one sleeps hungry.” - Hassan Abdille, a human rights activist from Kenya
In a little more than a month it will be 30 years since the adults in Buffeljagsbaai could vote for the first time in South Africa. Hopefully their journey will not be derailed by further denying them access to the fishing rights they have exercised for the past 24 years. The fight for their rights is part of the unfinished business of South Africa, so brilliantly articulated here:
“I think Nelson Mandela in particular taught us a great lesson when the constitution was signed on the tenth of December 1996. He explained that 94 years after an initial peace, after the Boer republics had waged war against the British, the so-called South African War, there was a peace treaty signed. But it was an unfinished peace, because in that peace treaty it was clearly stipulated that the political future of all South Africans, it would only be decided at a later stage. It took us 94 years to have that inclusive constitution that we were denied in 1902. I think that is the important lesson of history and of the individual that one should always be alive to, that you cannot conclude that you are done with the past because the past is very much with us, in the present, not only in South Africa, but everywhere.”– Leon Wessels, Director for Human Rights at the University of the Free State.