In the interview, the Local Ordinary of South Africa’s Klerksdorp Diocese who doubles as the Liaison Bishop for the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office (CPLO) of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) said, “As Christians, we cannot afford to lose hope and to give into despair.”
He said that Freedom Day provides an occasion to celebrate as it marks the liberation from apartheid regime.
“1994 marked the time when all black South Africans could enjoy a democratic vote for the first time, and could vote for the government of their choice; 1994 marked the time when our country opened to a multiparty democracy”, Bishop Phalana said.
That year, the South African Bishop added, “ushered in a new parliament, where blacks for the first time were to be represented by the people they had chosen as their representatives in various parliaments, both the provincial parliament and also in national parliament.”
“The new dispensation is not to be taken lightly. People died for this democracy. People were in prisons, people spent most of their lives in prison for this democracy,” he recalled, and continued, “People lived in exile while their parents and relatives were buried in their absence, while they were struggling for this freedom. So let us not take freedom for granted”.
He went on to recount the plight blacks suffered under apartheid saying, “Ordinary citizens were suffering under the pass laws. Many were arrested and killed. Young people were killed during the Soweto massacre in 1976. We had so many massacres, the Alexander massacre, Sharpeville massacre, Langa massacre… There were too many massacres, blood was flowing all over. We lived under a very, very brutal regime.”
“Having freed ourselves from the Commonwealth, colonial colonialism, which was mostly sponsored by Britain, by the UK, we were now under the nationalists, Africa under apartheid colonialism. And that period was marked by the oppression of blacks, and ensuring that blacks do not enjoy human rights, that their dignity was undermined”, the 61-year-old Bishop recounted.
The rights of the black South Africans “were curtailed, and they did not have freedom in the country of their birth,” the Bishop who has been at the helm of Klerksdorp Diocese since his Episcopal Ordination in January 2015 said.
“We look at Freedom Day as a day of commemoration. We look at the past, and we realize that we have this experience as South Africans, a unique experience of having to have lived under a very brutal apartheid system, and a very brutal regime, a regime where most of our political leaders were in exile, or in prison,” he told ACI Africa April 28.
Bishop Phalana expressed his awareness of some of the failures of the South African government, including poor service delivery, corruption, unemployment, crime, and poverty.
