Africans rising
South Africa: University of Cape Town to confer Zackie Achmat with honorary Doctorate
The University of Cape Town (UCT) will award an honorary doctorate (LLD honoris causa) to activist Abdurrazak ‘Zackie’ Achmat at a graduation ceremony scheduled for Friday, 14 July 2017. The award will be conferred in recognition of his contribution to activism for social-justice in South Africa.
Published
8 years agoon

The University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa will award an honorary doctorate (LLD honoris causa) to activist Abdurrazak ‘Zackie’ Achmat at a graduation ceremony scheduled for Friday, 14 July 2017.
The award will be conferred in recognition of his contribution to activism for social-justice in South Africa.
In a statement, the University Vice Chancellor, Dr Max price said: “Zackie Achmat’s life work exemplifies UCT’s values which seek the fostering of an institutional culture that protects and advances the transformative values of the Constitution, and promotes a more equitable and just society based on respect for human rights and human dignity.”
Achmat who is also a film director, is the co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), where he devoted his life to fighting injustice and oppression. The organisation was founded in December 1998 to campaign for access to AIDS treatment. It is widely acknowledged as one of the most important civil society organisations active on AIDS in the developing world. It had a significant victory was the 2002 Constitutional Court ruling in which the South African government was ordered to provide anti-retroviral drugs to prevent transmission of HIV from mothers to their babies during birth.

Activist Zackie Achmat addressed around 200 protesters outside Parliament in Cape Town, gathered to protest against President Jacob Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp
At the age of 15 in 1977, Achmat was detained by the security police for 14 days, as a member of the African National Congress (ANC) underground and United Democratic Front (UDF) structures, taking a leading role for a period in the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC.
According to UCT, after South Africa’s Independence in 1994, Achmat co-founded (and later directed) the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE). In his work with the AIDS Law Project and the NCGLE, he was involved in number of cases from the mid-1990s onwards that first established, and then enforced, the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian people in South Africa. Establishing a pattern that continued into other work, litigation was accompanied by political organising, education and mass mobilisation.
In 1995, Zackie and his colleagues secured an interdict preventing police harassment on the grounds of sexual orientation. This was followed by the decriminalisation of gay sex; ensuring that same-sex couples were not discriminated against in their access to medical aid and pension benefits, or denied rights to permanent residence.
More recently, Achmat has been instrumental in the formation of social movements, Equal Education, the Social Justice Coalition, Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim The City, focussing on schools, policing, sanitation infrastructure and access to urban land.
These campaigns are led principally by young black people, a representation of Achmat’s approach to overcoming racism, sexism and social inequality through active political campaigning.
“Zackie Achmat’s life has been devoted to the struggle for the building of a new social order based on dignity, equality and non-racism. He is indeed a worthy recipient of this honour,” says Dr Price.
You may like
Kenya’s presidents have a long history of falling out with their deputies – Rigathi Gachagua’s impeachment is no surprise
The remarkable career of Tito Mboweni: from South African freedom fighter to central bank governor and trusted politician
Wretched of the Earth has been translated into South Africa’s Zulu language – why Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary book still matters
I refuse to die in vain
Kenyan Protests, Part Two: How not to clean up a fiscal mess
In the face of autocracy the Togolese Civil League movement pushes for justice, accountability and democracy