My name is Ann Jacobs. I am here because of the people who came before me.

I am a 3rd generation forest dweller who have become accustomed to being labelled “marginalised”, “vulnerable”, “poor”, amongst other labels so lavishly bestowed upon my people.

I find it vexed and troublesome, to an extend condescending, because to me those labels used out of context took on a meaning that stirred the very core of my human beingness. It alienated me. It came to mean that I am incapable. That I am incapable of standing up for my own rights.

It came to mean that I will never amount to anything.

I am not ashamed of those labels, but I have come to learn that I and our people are so much more than what we are depicted to be with those labels, because we are all more than our circumstances, we are all more than our situations.

I am here to defend human dignity and to speak truth to power, of our forestry ancestors and my fellow forest Dwellers, as a South African, as a claimant to all the rights set out in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.