Today our petition blasted through the 67 000 mark and is continuing to rise as we prepare for our days in court, starting tomorrow, 19th January. Jeff Bezos is not the only person experiencing rocket power. The difference is our petition is rocketing upward because it is driven by people power, not by money power or by the power of influence. Tens of thousands of people say no to this development (yes, James Tanneberger, though you like to claim in the press we are a small bunch of misfits, we are more than 67 000 people). We say NO because it is an affront to human dignity to disrespect a sacred site by placing 150 000 square metres of concrete to host high-end businesses like Amazon who could easily choose a less sensitive site.

We also held an Inter-faith event today on the steps of St George’s cathedral in Cape Town, to bless the team challenging the Liesbeek Leisure Property Trust (LLPT) and its allies in the City and  Provincial government.  At the ceremony, first nation leaders and shamans blessed our struggle and we heard leaders of different faiths, including Imam Rashid Omar, Mr Marc Turok and Reverend Rachel Mash speak about love, about belief, about caring about protection of the environment, about respect for the dignity of indigenous people and about our common humanity as people.

Reverend Mash relayed a message of hope and determination whose source is as diverse as coming from the old testament and from the work of Cornell West, “one of the most recognizable and provocative intellectuals in the US.”

 It is the idea that we are not optimists but we are “prisoners of hope”.  

Optimism relies on the idea that there is sufficient evidence out there for us to think things will get better. We are not optimists because we know that the odds are stacked against us by a system that wanted this development to go ahead. A system that witnessed public officials ignoring public interest in favour of “… fruitless and wasteful contestations”, “political posturing” and “alliances with developers”, in an effort to prevent heritage grading of the site in 2018. A system that saw the decision-maker in the Environmental Authorisation ignore his own Department’s Standard Operating Procedure to over-ride the clear rejection by Heritage Western Cape of the development proposal as incompatible with law. A system that sees the authorities bring these same mischievous claims to Court as if they render the destruction of the Liesbeek Riverine Valley acceptable.

So, rather than optimism, we embrace hope. Hope, as Cornell West explains, is the refusal to succumb to despair and nihilism – the despair that former Mayor Plato sought to encourage with his fiction that it is pointless to oppose this development; the nihilism that the developers propose by saying there is no alternative to a world decided upon by rich people with money and influence.

Hope sees the evidence, full of perfidy and injustice but, in the words of Cornell West, transcends that evidence “… to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds.”

We want you to be infected by hope. By a vision of turning back this deep injustice and allowing a process that will create a heritage park, that will respect the rights of indigenous people and protect a sensitive environment. A future where we have a UNESCO site celebrated across the world, rather than a set of skyscraper buildings serving private interests, cruelly and heartlessly.

The court hearings will be livestreamed on Facebook at this link. We are still awaiting confirmation of the You Tube channel link and will post that as soon as we can.

And, as always, please help us fund these legal costs by contributing at our fundraising site. 

Visit our website and follow the Liesbeek Action Campaign on twitter: @LiesbeekAction.

Make the Liesbeek Matter.