On the occasion of Women’s Month, Pressenza is publishing a series of video interviews entitled “Women builders of the future, towards a culture of non-violence”.
In this interview, Veronica Tarozzi talks to Makoma Lekalakala, director of Earthlife Africa, a civil society organization for environmental justice and against nuclear power. She has long been active in social movements that tackle issues ranging from gender equality and women’s rights to issues of social, economic and environmental justice. In recent years, Makoma has focused on targeting environmental corruption.
His commitment to climate justice in South Africa helped civil society win South Africa’s first climate change lawsuit against the government and the quashing of the nuclear deal between South Africa and the Russian government. For her efforts, she received the award Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa 2018 and the SAB Prize Environmentalist of the year 2018. Makoma has her roots as a liberation fighter and is a strong activist for a just and equitable society.
In this interview, she talks about the role of women in protecting the environment and the life around us, and the African philosophy of Ubuntu, that all living things are linked. She describes the future to which she aspires, a future where justice prevails, where there are no wars and where everyone has access to food and clean water. Finally, she tackles a subject close to her heart, that of the tendency of various African governments to invest in the construction of nuclear reactors and insists on the dangers of a technology responsible for endless disasters, producing radioactive waste that will affect the life of future generations. She talks about creating an African network of anti-nuclear and renewable energy movements and how Pressenza and other media activists can help their struggle by showing the really important issues and sparking a global debate in their subject.
The video is in English, to see it (19 ′ 23 ″) with the French subtitles: 1. Click on the icon Subtitles (white rectangle at the bottom right of the video player window). 2. Click on the icon Settings (cogwheel lower right), then click successively on Subtitles, then on Translate automatically. 3. In the window that opens, scroll through the list of languages and click on French.
Here is an excerpt from Ubuntu:
“This kind of talk, this kind of philosophy that connects everyone to each other, it’s Ubuntu. It has been the center of what people in Africa call by different names, but in South Africa we generally use ubuntu as this interconnection between us.
Interconnection is not limited to human beings, it is also interconnection with what surrounds us, it is our interconnection with living beings, be it trees, rivers, helpers that we find ourselves among us.
Then we are interconnected to the environment around us, we are interconnected in the future, we are interconnected to who we are, and so it is not limited to what we experience as a collective, as a community, but it is much more than that.
For example, in our locality we have clans or tribes, we have what you call totems and most of our totems are animals or what surrounds us; if my totem is a bird, it means that I have to protect the birds; if another person’s totem is a cow, it means that he or she has to protect the cows. So it is that we are interconnected with what surrounds us, in fact, we have to educate ourselves to ensure the protection of the life around us, because if the life disappears, it means that we can no longer have any life. “
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