Download PDFThis is the first edition of Karibu! for 2022 and together with Khanya College and the social justice movement we bid farewell to cde Oupa Lehulere, an organic revolutionary and intellectual of the working class who passed away on 29 November 2021.
Cde Oupa was the Coordinator of Khanya College for 25 years and the Editor of Karibu!. Under his leadership the college transitioned from an academic orientation to building working class movements at the workplace, in schools and in communities; and the working class was organised, educated and gained many victories.
In 2008 in response to the outbreak of Xenophobia against people from Africa, under Cde Oupa’s leadership Khanya formed the Anti-Xenophobia Coalition to educate communities in response to the xenophobic violence that had swept across the country. In this struggle Karibu! was born to unite and organise the working class.
Karibu! has come a long way and is an important vehicle for the working class to organise itself, to assist the working class to self-educate and to self-organise. Under capitalism workers are constantly divided by colour, class and gender, to make it easier for the ruling class to control them. Working people are constantly fed capitalist ideas in all the main media and so we begin to see and accept the world from the eyes of the rich, powerful ruling class.
For cde Oupa and revolutionaries like him, the working class must have its own newspaper, to read and discuss its own realities, the sources of poverty and unemployment. It is therefore critical that all working people learn to read and to write, especially in their own languages. In this way newspapers like Karibu! help the working class to understand the world from the perspective of the working class itself.
Cde Oupa was always clear that no matter how much the working class protests, without organisation it is nothing. It is clear that people are fed up and did not vote in the last local government election. But that is not enough, we must translate that into more active engagement so that we can build strong organisations to advance our struggles.
In his life Cde Oupa dedicated his time and Khanya resources to develop young activist journalists, to write for, and about the working class and to consult working people. Cde Oupa wrote only for Karibu!, for the working class, for his class.
Today we pay tribute to cde Oupa, with the same gratitude and love that he showed us, the working class. We commit to strengthening Karibu! and building activist journalists in every township. It is more than time, organise!
Yours In Solidarity.
This article was submitted in January 2022. You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Karibu! Online (www.Karibu.org.za), and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
