DAY 3: AMERICA DAY

“My mother was a kitchen girl; my father was a garden boy; that’s why I am a communist (pronounced ‘comm-a-nist’)” rings the freedom songs of social activists and Marxists who cry out for the land and freedom that has been unjustly taken from them. Now, if your parents were never subjected to these humiliating and shameful career paths or if their names were not changed to fit the convenience of the colonialist rule it is understandable why you wouldn’t be able to relate to this R49 million cause.


Through the ages, dignified men and women of all races, demographics and cultures have been subjected to the knee-scathing humiliation and belittlement by people with money mostly on land that belonged to them and usually with the use of the cultural resource (minerals etc) that belonged to that land. As to whether or not the intentions of the colonialist were to steal this land and enforce their cultures onto the native people of these lands is not the point. The point is that native people all over the world have always been forced to deny their heritage and deem their very cultures inferior of those of their oppressors in order to accommodate these hostile takeovers.


America Day provided the people of Latin America, Canada, and those in the US, who have always disagreed with the manner in which their government forces its military power and ideologies on other countries, with an opportunity to share their cultures, practises and the initiatives that they take to rewrite the injustices that the US and other world powers have enforced on them. Currently at the top of the all this mayhem is the plight for the Cuban 5 to be released by the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Five.What is interesting to note is that the current President of the USA, President Barack Obama had assured the Cuban community of America that upon his election he would help facilitate the release of the 5. To date that has still not happened. Eight international Nobel Prize winners have written and sent a document to the US Attorney General calling for freedom for the Cuban Five, signed by Zhores Alferov (Nobel Prize for Physics, 2000), Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize, 1984), Nadine Gordimer (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1991), Rigoberta Menchú (Nobel Peace Prize, 1992), Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (Nobel Peace Prize, 1980), Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1986), José Saramago (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1996), Günter Grass (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1999)



Though this day was a day for the Americas, Western Sahara (Saharawi) took the radical opportunity to march to the Moroccan embassy and demand their liberation from torment and suffering that the Moroccan government has subjected on them for many years. Recently 5 Saharawi comrades were arrested by the Moroccan government for attempting to attend this youth conference.

As you can see, this youth and student festival isn’t just about youth coming together and celebrating ideas, but also to address socio-economic and the unfair representation of young people around the world.