A South African activist representing more than 200,000 shack dwellers has praised New Zealanders for their international solidarity against settler colonialism and appealed for them to “emulate” their 1981 stand against apartheid over Palestine.

S’bu Zikode, co-founder and current leader of Abahlali baseMjondolo, recalled how it had been 15 years since he had been in New Zealand to mark the 20th anniversary of the “great protests against the Springbok rugby tour of 1981”.

Speaking at a public event in Auckland’s Ellen Melville Centre organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) last night, he said he wanted to remember that history and thank all those people of this country who “stood with us against apartheid”.

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“You refused to allow the apartheid state to present itself as a normal member of the international community,” he said.

“This was an outstanding example of international solidarity, and an example that we should seek to emulate in our solidarity with the people of Palestine.”

Zikode is in New Zealand for a week-long tour primarily to speak at a Federation of Socialist Societies event in Dunedin on November 13/14. He also addressed a Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland yesterday and will speak in Hamilton today.

He will visit Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch, Kerikeri and Whangarei.

“In our movement we speak of living solidarity. This means solidarity that exists in actions, not just in words,” he said at Ellen Melville, speaking on the theme “South Africa, Palestine and the urgency of solidarity”.

“It means solidarity between people who recognise one another as equals.”

Settler colonialism oppression
Zikode said South Africa and Palestine were both countries that had been oppressed by settler colonialism. This was part of the reason for the long solidarity with Palestine among South Africans.

His words came as global headlines exposed the cruelty of Israel’s breaches of the so-called Gaza genocide “ceasefire” with savage storms and flooding killing five Palestinians living in tents and during local body elections in South Africa where the progressive African National Congress (ANC) has suffered its worst electoral defeats.

Zikode said there were important differences between the two forms of settler colonialism.

“In South Africa, the colonial system was organised around dispossession of Africans from their land, the theft of their cattle and the exploitation of their labour.

“The economy depended on African workers in the mines, on the farms, in the factories and in the homes of white people. The settlers wanted the land , but they also wanted the labour of the people the dispossessed.

“Huge numbers of people were forced from their homes and land as African people were pushed into ‘reserves’, based on the system used to oppress Native Americans, and later into the ‘Bantustans’, the so-called ‘homelands’.

“The Bantustans were not just used to confine African people to tony areas of land. They were also central to the migrant labour system that ensured cheap labour for white capital and white families in their homes.”

Forced to leave families
African workers were forced by economic necessity to leave their families and communities to find work in the mines and cities. Many were compelled to live in single-sex hostels, separated from their families.

“When we look at Palestine today, we recognise many of these methods of oppression. We see a fundamentally racist settler colonial system in which there is ongoing dispossession of people from their land by the Israeli state and settlers,” Zikode said.

“We see homes being demolished. We see communities separated from one another by walls, checkpoints and military restrictions. We see people who stand up against oppression being called ‘terrorists’ and subject to mass imprisonment, torture and murder.

“The struggles against racism and for land are central to the struggle for freedom, both in South Africa and in Palestine. But there are also differences between apartheid in South Africa and oppression in Palestine.

“While Palestinians have been exploited as workers, the fundamental drive of settler colonialism in Israel is to remove or destroy the Palestinian people rather than to exploit them for their labour.”

The Nakba of 1948 had forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, Zikode said.

Many had become refugees in other countries while they and their descendants remained unable to return. The occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 had brought further dispossession, settlement expansion and military rule.

Genocide continues Nakba
The genocide in Gaza — with more than 75,000 Palestinians killed, mostly women and children, in three years of war on the besieged enclave – and the ongoing theft of land in the West Bank had continued the process begun with the Nakba.

“We must also recognise that the Palestinian experience has become more terrible in certain respects than the experience of apartheid South Africa,” Zikode said.

“The scale of the destruction of Gaza, mass displacement and the killing of civilians have horrified people across the world.

“But we must be clear that, within South Africa itself, the apartheid state did not carry out mass killing on the scale that we have witnessed with the genocide in Gaza.

“Recognising this difference does not diminish the suffering of South Africans under apartheid.”

He acknowledged that the Palestinian people had not yet won their freedom .

“There must also be a single free and democratic country with equal rights for all and one person, one vote in historic Palestine – ‘from the river to the sea’.”

Warning against betrayal
Zikode warned also against sabotage of the path to freedom.

“In South Africa, we have been betrayed by the ANC who have enriched themselves, repressed popular movements and struggles, and left a devastated country with mass impoverishment, mass hunger, and mass unemployment – including more than 60 percent youth.”

Question time was lively with queries about solidarity organising, the global drift to the far right and fascism, stronger solidarity with Palestine, and why had South Africa requested more time for its genocide lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

“We were proud when South African lawyers stood before the [ICC] court in The Hague and presented the case that Israel’s actions in Gaza violated the Genocide Convention.”

Zikode said this was an important act of international solidarity but South Africa was “paying a price” for the lawsuit and subjected to severe diplomatic pressure and threats from the United States. He also criticised the fact that South Africa had continued to “sell coal to Israel” and ANC-aligned trade unions had not blocked ships heading to Israel.

One young woman in the audience asked what worldwide protesters over the Israeli genocide should do when governments were failing to take action: “I am only 24, and already I am tired.”

Zikode replied it was important to not act alone, and to join others in solidarity and keep their spirits up.