Staff Reporter
Newly established black advocacy organisation Vuka Azania plans to fund its activities through donations from supporters inside and outside the country as it campaigns for land return, economic change and the decolonisation of public institutions, it said on Friday.
Its founding directors are high profile South Africans including advocate Muzi Sikhakhane (SC), cleric and anti-apartheid activist Allan Boesak, former State Security Agency director-general Arthur Fraser and academic and advocate Isaac Shai.
“Vuka Azania will raise resources (donations) from patriots within and beyond the borders of this country who are committed to the restoration of African history, dignity, moral restoration, humanity, decolonial education, prosperity, equality and the total emancipation of Black people,” the organisation said in its founding statement.
Vuka Azania said it was registered as a non-profit company with members and would not contest elections.
The organisation said its programmes would focus on African restoration, the return of land, economic emancipation, cultural renewal, decolonised education and changes to the legal and constitutional systems.
Its formation comes amid continuing political debate in South Africa over land ownership, racial inequality, unemployment and the pace of economic transformation more than three decades after the end of apartheid.
It said that the country’s 1994 political settlement had failed to dismantle the economic and institutional structures inherited from colonialism and apartheid.
It said black South Africans remained largely excluded from land ownership, economic power, knowledge production and other centres of influence despite constituting the majority of the population.
“We declare that the land must return to the indigenous people from whom it was stolen. Land is not property alone. Land is ancestry, food, memory, nationhood and power,” it said.
It said it would support black ownership, cooperatives, entrepreneurship, community enterprises, local manufacturing, food sovereignty, skills development and youth employment.
It also intends to campaign for the decolonisation of education, saying that Black children should be taught African history, languages, philosophies and civilisations.
The organisation said African culture, spirituality and knowledge systems remained marginalised and that colonialism had caused psychological and cultural harm that continued to affect black communities.
It said religious communities and spiritual leaders should take part in efforts to address what it described as the psychic wounds of colonialism and help restore self-confidence and the philosophy of ubuntu.
“Vuka Azania will pursue strategic litigation, public campaigns and lawful mobilisation to defend Black people, advance decolonial projects and protect the sovereignty of Azania,” the statement said.
Among its most far-reaching proposals is a campaign to rename South Africa as Azania.
“The colonial name South Africa cannot carry the full memory, pain, struggle and destiny of the indigenous people,” the organisation said.
It will also advocate for a “Second Republic”, supported by a reorganised state and a post-colonial constitution imposing an explicit duty on the government to dismantle racial inequality and colonial patterns of land ownership, economic control and cultural domination.
The organisation said its ultimate vision was a society in which black people owned land, controlled wealth and were able to live with dignity.
“We are not here to varnish the ruins of colonialism. We are here to dismantle and end them,” it said.
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