30
October 2001
Dear
friends and comrades
Last
night Vusi Nsuntsha was shot and killed by hijackers in Soweto,
Johannesburg.
We have
suffered a devastating loss. As an organisation we lost one of our
stalwarts. As individuals we were deprived of a friend we believed was
going to be with us for decades to come.
In the
wake of terrible events we can be paralysed, lest the slightest action
forces us to confront this awful reality. If we sit still and do not act
we can pretend that our grief is in our imagining and that someone will
wake us out of our stupour with a denial of the reality that brings us
shock and anguish.
At such
times we need to be able to remember that life is shaping us as she has
always done, sometimes with joy, sometimes with pain, the way she shapes
mountains and oceans, the way she shapes us at birth and death. This is
the process of every living thing, this is our learning.
Vusi’s
untimely death has broken open our hearts. We have been joined together
spontaneously by this collective feeling of loss and total disbelief.
And in the process of being joined together, for some moments we will
forget our individual concerns.
I ask
you to stop awhile and ponder Vusi’s life work before we go back to
our old ways of doing things and this sense of solidarity that
bereavement brings is forgotten.
Vusi
worked with all of us to try to bring about a change for the better in
the society in which we live. He applied himself to a process, that at
its very core, sought to help those who were socially and economically
excluded rediscover their dignity and self-worth as a pre-condition to
combating poverty and injustice.
It is
left to those of us whom Vusi has left behind to redouble our efforts,
to continue to contribute in our small individual and much bigger
collective ways towards the creation of a better future for all.
A
future in which the gap between rich and poor is not so great that
joblessness and landlessness lead to poverty inspired crime
A
future in which abundance no longer thumbs its nose at the poor with
every commodity that is out of reach.
A future
in which human life is precious and never ever sacrificed for a bloody
car or a damned cell phone.
A friend
of ours in New York wrote these words on September 11th. They
are just as appropriate at this sad time when we mourn Vusi’s death.
“When
the things of the shadow come into the light they are born again with
new possibility. This is the task of our time: to bring light to the shadow
parts of ourselves and our world and let them bring to us all the life
that suppression has distorted and turned into fear and hatred.”
Thami
reminded me this morning that in MK, and now in the SANDF, there is a
saying that when a warrior falls it is left to those who survive to pick
up his spear and continue the battle.
Hamba
Kahle, S’bali.
Joel
Bolnick
(Director,
People’s Dialogue)
