When ‘western’ politicians and media talk about liberation, some still believe the concept be about basic human rights or self-determination.
That is wrong. Liberation is now understood to be an exclusively economic concept. The word used today describes the freedom of rich people to do whatever they want to do, robber barons in the new cloth of neo-liberal junk-science. As far as it is related to lesser persons, liberty is reduced to their capacity to consume.
That description is too radical you say? It isn’t – it is pure mainstream. A piece in the Labour friendly British Guardian today makes this abundantly clear.
It is headlined: Shoppers hail new monument to South African liberation.
Nelson Mandela opened Soweto’s latest monument to liberation yesterday, but few of the people pouring through the doors of the huge new shopping mall took much notice of the corner reserved for those who died to make it all possible.
The glitzy glass and steel Maponya mall, modelled on a London shopping centre, is the first of its kind in the township, which was the crucible of the uprising that rocked the foundations of apartheid.
Alongside a Woolworths and a Toys R Us, the first toy store chain in the township, there are locally-owned boutiques, hair stylists and a diamond shop among the 200 stores. The £47m complex also has Soweto’s first multiscreen cinema.
So while there were past times when people hailed the Statue of Liberty
as a sign of throwing off colonial rule, a monument for the liberation
of the United States, the new symbols of liberty are malls. The masses
hailing the new monument are shoppers.
Woolworth, Toys R Us and a multiscreen cinema – monuments of liberation in the twenty-first century.