PEDRO MZILENI | Recognition of Sign Language triumph of human rights

On  May 4 2023, the parliament voted for the amendment of Section 6 of the Constitution to add Sign Language as an official language. For the past three decades since democracy began, numerous social movements and activists have protested, lobbied, litigated and raised awareness about this systematic exclusion of people living with disabilities such as being deaf and/or hard of hearing.

In 2009, Westville Boys High School learner Kyle Springate took the minister of basic education to court demanding that Sign Language be recognised and provided for in his matric subjects. The court ruled in favour of the learner and this moment began a wave of activism for Sign Language to be made an official language.

The South African Schools Act had recognised Sign Language since 1996 but the absence of this requirement from the Constitution gave the basic education department options to either provide the service or disregard it, depending on their budgets and priorities. There was no definite and compulsory requirement in place with absolute legal obligation.

As a result, the government continued to treat Sign Language as a secondary matter that was placed in its welfare programmes.

Welfare services such as pension benefits to military veterans, early childhood development facilities, disability-friendly infrastructure development and psychiatric health care services for mentally ill patients have all been disregarded services that this government has defunded and removed from its budgets time and again.

The Life Esidimeni tragedy is a living example. Former Gauteng MEC of health Qedani Mahlangu is currently in court for defunding public health care for psychiatric patients. She outsourced the entire service to privately owned NGOs that had no capacity to care for the patients – and as a result, more than 150 mental health patients died and many more are still not yet accounted for today.

At the memorial service of Nelson Mandela at the FNB Stadium on December 10 2013. The then US President Barack Obama delivered a worldwide televised tribute to Madiba standing next to a fake Sign Language interpreter, Thamsanqa Jantjies. This embarrassing episode was a brutal and a frightening evidence of how much the government did not prioritise Sign Language as a human right that is worthy of serious investments and recognition.

That moment turned the tide of the campaign for the recognition of Sign Language. In 2014, the KwaZulu-Natal Blind and Deaf Society launched a nationwide Talk Sign Campaign as an advocacy strategy to influence different sectors of society to make Sign Language accessible for basic communication, information sharing and other general norms of the human experience in everyday life.

Still, the government moved at a slow pace to take this matter seriously with urgency. The main reason behind that boils down to the capitalist social relations embedded in our  society. In this type of a society, people only begin to be recognised as human beings when they can be productive labour that can produce and consume commodities. Those who do not have jobs, the unemployed, the elderly, children, those living with disabilities and the mentally ill are all wasteful bodies that get dehumanised.

To adopt Sign Language therefore is to adopt an anti-capitalist stance. It is to care and prioritise people who are disregarded by capitalism. It is to honour human rights, transformation and true democratisation. It is to practice social justice.

The untiring campaigns by the deaf advocacy community and other progressive formations across the country and around the world is finally beginning to yield results. On December 19 2017, the Permanent Mission of Antigua and Barbuda to the United Nations, supported by 97 Member States, adopted and declared September 23 as an International Day for Sign Languages.

The UN resolution came at the backdrop and submission by the World Federation of the Deaf which consists of 135 national associations of deaf people that represent approximately 70 million people around the world.

The worldwide spirit for anti-capitalism and human rights is finally being realised and this recent decision by the parliament must be welcomed by the progressive movement of the left as the beginning of further struggles for the liberation and restoration of humanity.