By Saadia Gani
The Maghreb Sumud Flotilla is part of an international convoy of nearly 50 vessels sailing to Gaza to break Israeli blockade and deliver much needed aid to its children and people . These fifty ships are sailing towards Gaza., carrying no weapons political manifesto, no race for political power or mayoral position .
They embody the voice of humanity carrying brotherhood and love, offering support , food, and medicine. Tney carry the peaceful but thunderous message that the people of the world have not turned their eyes and hearts away from Gaza.
It is a flotilla of hope, a convoy of love and conscience, a reminder of the voice and power of ordinary people who can and must rise to defend human dignity and the future or humanity in the face of the unbridled aggression and genocide of the Palestinian people.
In their sails is written a truth that cannot be erased: for over 700 days the world has witnessed the calculated erasure of Gaza ..its constant bombardment ,planned and precise destruction , massacres , amputations ,bleeding ,suffering and starvation. To call it anything less than genocide is to betray reality itself.
Yet here, at the tip of Africa, a prominent political figure offers exactly that betrayal. Helen Zille, in her bid to become mayor of Johannesburg, dismisses the use of the word “genocide” for Gaza as nothing more than a “big word.”
She fuses language meant to name the worst kind of atrocity into the politics of semantics, as though words have no blood on them or bones beneath the rubble or no dark history etched into their meaning.
This is far from harmless rhetoric. It is denialism. And denialism is pure and unfettered complicity.
To call genocide a “big word” is to erase the weight of history. Genocide is not a fancy rhetoric; it is the word humanity had forged to encompass the greatest of crimes: Rwanda, the Holocaust, the Herero and Nama, Bosnia, Sudan and even the systematic massacres under apartheid. South Africans can testify to what happens when the world looks away and hides behind semantics.
Imagine if, in 1976, as Hector Pieterson’s body was carried through Soweto, someone had said “apartheid” is just a “big word.”
Apartheid was not a big word but the lived reality and nightmare of millions of people …
Johannesburg is no ordinary city. It remembers Sharpeville and Soweto. It houses generations who recollect how apartheid’s defenders once claimed “apartheid” itself was just exaggerated language. Yet it was through naming and shaming injustice that resistance gained global force.
So the fundamental question that Zille’s flirtation with language raises is: what kind of leadership does Johannesburg deserve?
A city of resistance, struggle, and survival cannot afford a leader who trivializes and willfully ignores atrocity abroad. It is common sense that a leader who refuses to see genocide in Gaza cannot be trusted to see injustice in Alexandra or Hillbrow either.
The flotilla sails willfully because people of conscience believe that words , values and ideals matter, suffering matters, lives matter. Zille’s embrace of politics without conscience reduces everything to wordplay, exposing the shallowness of her campaign.
It is a universal truth that history will not remember the deniers. It will remember those who stood and courageously fought with the oppressed. As the ships are bravely moving toward Gaza, the choice for Johannesburg becomes clear: will we stand with a politics of denial, or with the flotilla of humanity?
Saadia Gani
Property lawyer with masters in multi – disciplinary human rights