How do we break the cycle of black tax?
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Thinking about the upcoming public holiday, Human Rights Day, which falls on a Monday (yay) later this month (double yay), brought me to wondering how we each should celebrate the rights we have and the people who won them for us.
South African Human Rights Day is celebrated in memory of the events on 21 March 1960 at Sharpeville in southern Gauteng. On that awful day, apartheid police shot and killed 69 unarmed people and injured dozens more when they opened fire on a crowd protesting against the hated pass laws, which were designed to control the movement of non-white people.
There has been some disagreement over the years about whether this national holiday should be called Human Rights Day or if it should go by the name that many older people still call it, Sharpeville Day. Many people think the name Sharpeville Day recognises that it commemorates a day when individuals lost their lives fighting for the rights of the majority. I am not going to get into that today.
What I am interested in is the idea that while we didn’t have to win some of the rights we take for granted today (such as freedom of movement without carrying a pass), we should at least uphold and reinforce them
in honour of the generation who won them for us.
Some of that generation live among us still and, unfortunately, many of them suffer the indignity and deprivation of poverty, their lives and times not having been conducive to saving, investing and preparing financially for old age.
South African Human Rights Day is celebrated in memory of the events on 21 March 1960 at Sharpeville in southern Gauteng. On that awful day, apartheid police shot and killed 69 unarmed people and injured dozens more when they opened fire on a crowd protesting against the hated pass laws, which were designed to control the movement of non-white people.
There has been some disagreement over the years about whether this national holiday should be called Human Rights Day or if it should go by the name that many older people still call it, Sharpeville Day. Many people think the name Sharpeville Day recognises that it commemorates a day when individuals lost their lives fighting for the rights of the majority. I am not going to get into that today.
What I am interested in is the idea that while we didn’t have to win some of the rights we take for granted today (such as freedom of movement without carrying a pass), we should at least uphold and reinforce them
in honour of the generation who won them for us.
Some of that generation live among us still and, unfortunately, many of them suffer the indignity and deprivation of poverty, their lives and times not having been conducive to saving, investing and preparing financially for old age.
