The recent furore over the lawyers in the huge silicosis court case focused on race, but the real issue is how lawyers advance the cause of justice, argue Pasika Nontshiza and John Clarke.
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The start of the silicosis class action case. Court room packed. Standing room only. Will the hundreds of thousands of mine workers whose productive working life was halved by respiratory diseases contracted from underground operations finally see the promise of Justice?
Add a commentThe community driven project ´bridgingMzamba` originated in the urgent need of surrounding inhabitants for a safe crossing of the river and included design and implementation of the suspension bridge in a collaborative manner.
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Six or seven years ago the Sigidi village group in the "Simbhademe" development program expressed the vision for a foot bridge across the Mzamba River. The idea went out into the Universe. Today Build Collective.net, an NGO for Architecture and Development founded by Elias Rubin and Marlene Wagner from Austria handed over not a rickety rope bridge, but a beautifully Swiss engineered state of the art structure built with local labour and managed by a steering committee. It has been a remarkable accomplishment. Can local destinies be decided locally?
Cicero would say on the evidence of what I saw today "res et ipsa loquitur" meaning "The fact speaks for itself, that no further comment is necessary".
Let this be a lesson to those who think development can be imposed from outside, and that big problems can be solved by big solutions. This is undoubtedly a testimony that only development that based on a human scale works.