Slaves were officially freed in 1834, but were bound by indenture to their "former" owners for a further 4 years, and were thus only truly freed on 1 December 1838. Those of us who schooled in SA will remember from primary school history lessons that this gave rise to the Great Trek, and everything that followed from that.
Tourists passing through - or the 90% of UCT academics who have holiday homes in - the coastal town of Hermanus will have stumbled across the memorial commemorating the centenary of the Great Trek in 1938. While the rest of the world was finally deciding that fascism, and the extermination of Jewish, black, Romany and gay people was perhaps a bit crass, back here in SA there was a group of people with access to enough resources to stage a mini-rerun of the Great Trek to celebrate their frustrations with these verligte Ingelses who continued to emasculate them and threaten their economic survival.
So what does any of this have to do with us, here, today? Well, it probably doesn't take a rocket scientist to piece together the links between racism, slavery, and economic oppression. And just as the boere / voortrekkers were outraged at the "progressive" legislation which freed "their" slaves and threatened their economic wellbeing, so today there are those who benefited from a previous dispensation of unfair legislated privilege, who are feeling unhappy about a new "progressive" dispensation that they find threatening to their economic wellbeing. We're talking Employment Equity legislation / policies / plans / frameworks here, and so it's perhaps not altogether misplaced that today, as we remember friends who have fallen to the ravages of AIDS, and celebrate the final emancipation of slaves in the Cape, the Joint Consultative Forum on Employment Equity gathers to take forward, and reflect on, the new struggles.