Living Rights Festival

The inaugural Living Rights Festival (LRF) was help from October to December 2024. With 18 local project partner organisations, the festival focused on intersectional justices and realising constitutional rights. Primarily aimed at, for and by youth, the festival hosted a weekend of art, culture and human rights at the activist Bertha House in Mowbray. Friday afternoon 25 October was a specific multi-genre session, both curated and dynamically open mic, titled Youth Speak Truth to Power. Participants were asked: “What does the state of the world say to me?”. They used poetry, music, comedy and other forms of verbal inputs. I was privileged to facilitate the session, supported by comedian Goldie Shevlane.

The inaugural Living Rights Festival (LRF) emerged from a deep yearning for a more just world, a world where social justice was more than a buzzword and transcended its status as a trendy phrase to become the lived experience for all. It was a bold undertaking, launched at a time of pervasive and seemingly intractable conflicts, none more devastating and enduring than the ongoing crisis in Palestine, which has been under occupation since 1948, ironically the same year 3 that South Africa became an Apartheid state.

Diane Ferrus is a poet, writer, performance artist, activist, founder member of Bush Poets, the Afrikaans Writers Association (Afrikaanse Skrywersvereniging) and Women in Xchains. She is a member of the Women’s Education and Artistic Voice Expression (WEAVE), played an instrumental role in the repatriation of Sarah Baartman’s remains from France to South Africa and was a recipient of the Minister’s Award for Women. Her work has been published in various collections and some serve as prescribed texts for high school learners. She worked for 25 years at the University of the Western Cape until she retired in 2016. She has completed a postgraduate degree in Women’s and Gender Studies. Diane performed this poem at the ‘Unbroken Spirits: Concert for Humanity’ that formed part of the Living Rights Festival. She has graciously given New Agenda permission to publish this poem.

Bertha House, 25 Oct 2024

In initiating the inaugural Living Rights Festival, the Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA) has introduced a new term — ‘living rights’. The term, initially coined by IFAA’s Acting Director Ari Sitas, developed through iterative discussion and was eventually penned by festival organiser Nazeema Mohamed. Once the concept of ‘living rights’ was clear, organisers deliberated on the what, who, how, when and where? The big questions to Sitas from the team were: Why a festival? Was it appropriate in a world in mayhem? What were we celebrating? And should we even be celebrating at all in the face of global crisis?

Many people have asked me in a rather bewildered tone, what was it that we staged during the Living Rights Festival at the Avalon Theatre at the District Six Homecoming Centre in Cape Town? The performance was not a play but felt like one! It was not a political statement although it sounded like one, it was not a musical but it was full of music and it was not an art work but it was full of art! And it was about Gandhi without Gandhi appearing on stage once!

Many countries call themselves democracies simply because they hold regular elections. At a panel discussion in October 2024 as part of IFAA’s Living Rights Festival, participants were reminded that elections are a necessary but not sufficient requirement for democracy. A key question that surfaced in the debate, titled “Holding the Powerful to Account in Africa,” was what actions could promote accountability in a so-called “democracy” in which the ruling party is able to act with impunity and disregard the will of the voters?

How do we conceptualise and develop a global development agenda that is attentive to the needs, requirements and entitlements of all the world’s people? In this contribution I problematise dominant approaches to development and the ways in which these approaches, firstly, conceptualise ideas about the ‘universal’ and, secondly, erase, silence and marginalise particular groups of people. With this backdrop, I focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and particularly their conceptualisation. Of particular interest is how the design of the SDGs deal with the fundamental objective underpinning this global intervention – that of inclusion. The argument I will make is that dominant development discourses, including the SDG project, have struggled to deal with the realities and effects of exclusion and marginalisation as they take expression and are manifested in processes of racialisation, gender discrimination and class formation.