With the help of the Jewish community in Durban, he was sent to the Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire for treatment and rehabilitation, and remained there for a year. On returning to South Africa , he resumed his education and was offered a bursary at Durban University. He originally planned to study architecture but soon decided that it was not for him, and studied psychology instead at the University of Pietermaritzburg, with the intention of eventually pursuing a career in rehabilitation.
Despite the banning of the various resistance movements, Vic was a member of the Congress of Democrats, the organisation for white people in the anti-apartheid Congress Alliance, and, with others, he provided covert support to banned groups. In the flat he shared with his cousin was raided. With no possibility of escape in his wheelchair, he was arrested and sent to prison.
During his incarceration under the day detention laws, Vic endured torture, deprivation and much hardship before eventually coming to trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to 18 months, 15 of which were suspended.
On discharge, he went to live with his brother in Johannesburg and completed his studies at the University of Witwatersrand. During this time he became involved with anti-apartheid activism. When, in , Bram Fischer, the Secretary General of the South African Communist Party, Nelson Mandela's trial lawyer, went underground to support the liberation struggle, Finkelstein was one of the group who supported him. In April he was detained under the day laws and sentenced to 18 months' hard labour, with 15 months waived because he was "a cripple".
On his release he was issued with a five-year banning order under the Suppression of Communism Act. He would later claim that this limited his activities little more than the restrictions already placed on him as a disabled person. When, in , Paul Hunt wrote to the Guardian to propose the creation of a new consumer organisation to represent residents of disability institutions, Finkelstein responded, and the two founded the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation.
At an early stage, the document contains the statement, "In our view it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society.
Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society. This was one of the earliest formulations of what would come to be known as the "social model" of disability, the big idea on which the modern disability movement has been founded. Finkelstein was to continue to develop this case for the next 30 years.
We will suppose able-bodied people do not often visit the village and that the wheelchair-users control all aspects of their lives. They make the goods that they sell in their shops with special aids, they work the machines that clean the street, run their own educational colleges, banks, post offices, and transport system of the village, and so on.
In fact, for the villager, being in a wheelchair is like everyone else in their world of people that she or he meets in daily life. They see wheelchair-users on television and hear them on radio. Able-bodied people, however, are only rarely seen and little understood. In the course of the life of the village the wheelchair-users plan their lives according to their needs.
They design their own buildings to suit their physical situation. One thing the wheelchair-user architects quickly discover in this village is that because everyone is always in wheelchairs there is no need to have ceilings at 9 feet 6 inches high or door heights at 7 feet 2 inches.
Soon it becomes standard practice to build doors to a height of 5 feet and ceiling or rooms to a height of 7 feet 4 inches.
Naturally the building codes set out in the regulations made these heights standard. Now everyone is happy in the village; all the physical difficulties have been overcome and this little society has changed according to the physical character of its members.
At last the buildings and environment are truly in tune with their needs. Let us say that when all the adjustments had been made and became fixed, in this wheelchair-user society, a few able-bodied had, through no choice of their own, to come and settle in this village.
Naturally, one of the first things they noticed was the heights of the doors and ceilings. They noticed this directly, by constantly knocking their heads on the door lintels. Soon all the able-bodied members of the village were also marked by the dark bruises they carried on their foreheads. Of course, they went to see the village doctors, who were, naturally, also wheelchair-users.
Soon the wheelchair-user doctors, wheelchair-user psychiatrists, wheelchair-user social workers, etc. The doctors produced learned reports about the aches and pains of the able-bodied in society. They saw how the bruises and painful backs from walking bent double so frequently were caused by their physical condition.
The wheelchair-user doctors analysed the problems and wrote their definitions. They said these able-bodied people suffered a 'loss or reduction of functional ability' which resulted in a handicap.
This handicap caused a 'disadvantage or restriction of activity' which made them disabled in this society.
0コメント