The real disability barrier is not impairment but exclusion

Fifty years ago, my generation resisted learning Afrikaans as a compulsory language in schools. Here we are today, in a constitutional democracy, promoting our twelfth official language, universally accessible, transcending all abilities, cultures and boundaries. Sign language is a unifier. Like any language, it has variations in “dialect”. Moves to mainstream sign language hit a high note last month.

National award

Hearty congratulations to Andiswa Gebashe who, last month, received the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for her work with the deaf community. She is a self-taught sign language interpreter who works on television, hosts and translates deaf comedy shows and sometimes interprets for the president of South Africa. As the first South African Sign Language interpreter at the Miss South Africa competition in 2024, she has been raising the flag for the deaf community.

Andiswa proves that sign language, like any other language, can be learnt and taught easily. Sign language was her home language. She learnt it naturally – organically – because her father, a stand-up comedian, is deaf.

Similarly, the inventor of telephony and communication technology, Alexander Graham Bell, was motivated by both his deaf mother and wife. People who have meaningful relationships with persons with disabilities commit in profound ways to advancing the cause of the latter. They cannot be the only ones who commit.

Another president inspires

Also reported on the same day was another great news story about another president encouraging a deaf person to persevere. In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping had encountered Wang Yani in a children’s welfare home. Xi told the children that persons with disabilities can live fulfilled lives, like others. At the end of his inspiring address Wang signed her thanks to Xi by raising her right hand and bending her thumb. Xi reciprocated.

The experience left a lasting impression on Wang, enough for her to realise her dreams. Last month, a newspaper was reporting on her success as a special education teacher in a beauty and hairdressing school. Her silent but instructive gestures towards the blackboard were clear to her enthusiastic and responsive learners who soundlessly signed back their questions to her. Manifestly, learning, teaching and working are not the prerogative of the privileged “normal”.

Unique abilities

When I chaired the Essential Services Committee in 1995, at the hearings we held to investigate certain services and determine whether they were essential, the committee received submissions from the South African Defence Force to declare as essential its civilian workers who made parachutes. Why? Because they were specially trained to undertake the meticulous task of making parachutes. The job was so precise and excruciatingly repetitive that persons with a particular mental disability were most adept at it. Paradoxically, the disability was in fact a unique ability.

The parachute makers prove that persons with disabilities have capabilities, unusual ones at that. Many persons with disabilities may not be able to do many things. But there could be that one single thing they do that qualifies them as experts in that field.

Work as dignity

Wang’s and Andiswa’s stories ought to inspire every person with any disability to strive to be independent and self-sufficient members of their communities. Driven by courage and fortitude, they defy being defined by their disabilities. Rather, it is their abilities that count.

Work as dignity is a human right. Persons without work struggle to assert their dignity and claim their rights and the constitutional values of equality and freedom, the prerequisites for being wholly human.

Geriatrics

With a little creativity and commitment some persons with disabilities can be of service to others. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, a book on caring for geriatric patients, is inspiring. Our ageing population is an obvious opportunity for caring and working. Frail people relegated to nursing homes with little stimulation, have medical and nursing attention (excluding Life Esidimeni!). But even well-meaning professional staff are not able to be their companions. Grown-up children are too busy managing their young families and working lives to take care of their geriatric relatives.

Geriatric patients could be matched with companions with disabilities. The interaction would be mutually rewarding. Older persons have life lessons to share; a person with Down syndrome or a deaf mute technology boffin could open an entire vista of information, entertainment and conversation otherwise inaccessible to older persons. Being driven to find ways to communicate would lead to creative and empowering forms of mutual caring.

Agribusiness is another similar field in which working to grow plants and animals and, in turn, the nation – or simply weeding – would advance the cause of unemployed persons with disabilities.

Being useful to another human being is mutually self-fulfilling. Cultivating self-worth and having a stake in a community of communally caring people are the cornerstones of a stable society invested in civic virtues. Accepting that disability is an evolving condition, as is technology, the impact of empowering persons with disabilities to be more than they are is boundless.

UN protocol

Each of these stories make the case for mainstreaming persons with disabilities. Mainstreaming begins with transforming our culture and consciousness of regarding persons with disabilities as social costs and burdens. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol, to which South Africa has been a signatory since 2007, seeks to drive the transformation from welfarism to human rights approaches to caring for persons with disabilities.

Taking time to discover what persons with disabilities can do rather than dismissing them for the things they cannot do, is the difference between being an inclusive and exclusive society. Starting with early childhood inclusive education, having regular assessments, using effective augmentative and alternative ways of communication, and providing trained teachers and staff would lay the foundation for eventually matching persons with disabilities with jobs.

Returning to the recognition of Andiswa and the deaf mute community, being deliberative about celebrating extraordinary persons with disabilities by regularly awarding National Orders would be a commendable way of mainstreaming disability.

As decision-makers of today could be the geriatric patients of tomorrow, starting the transformation now would be a worthwhile, even if selfish, enterprise. The time will come to enjoy the rewards. DM