Posted by by Salaminah on January 15th

Salamina is a real life activist from South Africa. She once got a standing ovation from Desmond Tutu. When she came here to speak to People & Planet we asked her to document her visit .

I’m Salaminah Motsoagae. I’m 23. I live in Johannesburg, South Africa and I’m part of ActionAid’s Global Youth Network. I have just been to the UK to speak to students about what we are doing for the HungerFREE campaign in Africa, and how they can get involved in the UK.

In my community 66% of people are unemployed so you can imagine it causes problems like crime and children dropping out of school to earn money to eat. Food is getting more expensive and even the people working get a small salary which cannot feed the whole family so yeah, it’s very difficult.

I got involved with Actionaid by doing voluntary work in my community. I heard about their HungerFREE campaign and joined their youth network. ActionAid gave us training about the right to food, and then we came up with our own way of campaigning.

We went to radio stations talking about the campaign. The government know people are getting hungry every day but I think they are just ignoring it. We want them to act against hunger. And not only the South African government but worldwide, we need our leaders to do something about it.

First we went to City &Islington College in London to talk to students there about how they can get involved with Bollocks to Poverty. I told them about my life and they asked me questions about the situation in South Africa. Afterwards lots of them wanted to do something at the college to raise awareness so lets hope they do.

That night we went to a Bollocks to Poverty gig that some supporters had organised in Old Street, London. It was very loud! You know, I like music so have always wanted to do sound engineering or be a radio DJ, but this was very different to what we listen to in South Africa.

Then we went to Birmingham for the Shared Planet conference. This is the annual conference for the student campaigning group called People & Planet, so there were students from all over the UK there. It was very cold – you know in South Africa it is summer now so I am used to lots of sunshine!

At the conference I had the opportunity to attend workshops and discussions around fair trade and fundraising. I don’t even know if there are conferences in South Africa that bring young people from different universities together to share about these kinds of issues. It inspired me and it would be great if we could have similar things happening in our country. Many people are not given an opportunity or a platform to stand up and express themselves, but these kind of events can do that for them. They would really like that.

People & Planet had invited me be the speaker to close the conference so I had to wait until the last day for that. It was a very big room with about 500 people sitting there but it was a nice crowd and I got a good response. Afterwards I had people coming to me, complementing me and wanting to know more, saying I had inspired them. I feel great that people want to know more about ActionAid and activism now.

We really need young people to get involved in campaigning and influence the government to assist Africa, to make policies which will have a positive impact on us. Because things are really happening there, it’s not just stories.

I am not that educated, I’m black, I’m poor, but I am doing this. It’s beautiful to be an example for young people and I wish they could follow my steps and stand up and be powerful everywhere.

To see the video of Salaminah's speech, click here