A Love Letter to South Africa
On Friday, 15 November, 2024, AFRE’s Fellows, Staff, Board Members, partners and friends gathered at Sanctuary Mandela, the restored former home of Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, to commemorate the first 30 years of South Africa’s democracy. Titled “A Love Letter to South Africa”, the event honoured our roots in the country, even as our work has gone global.
Remarks by Senior Fellows Siphelele Chirwa (CEO, Activate!) and Axolile Notywala (Councillor, City of Cape Town), and Board Member Sean Jacobs (Founder and Publisher, Africa Is A Country), took stock of the long sweep of history in which contemporary South Africa lives and invited reflection on the work that remains to create a nation where all people—especially the most vulnerable poor, Black communities—thrive.
Though they emerge from South Africa’s particular realities, Siphelele, Axolile and Sean’s insights about inclusive politics, histories of solidarity across borders, and the duties of different generations in struggles for justice, speak to the work to build beyond anti-Black racism, across the world.
Read their full remarks, edited for clarity, below.
Remarks by Siphelele Chirwa, CEO, Activate!
Good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here.
When the invitation to this event came, I took the words “love letter” literally and I thought, how do I do this? Because we know, writing a love letter to South Africa is not an easy thing. But then I realised that I have a personal reference for a love letter: I am of the generation that has physically touched a love letter. Because I came of age as the granddaughter of a migrant worker in South Africa, and because I was the one who could read, I got to read the love letters between my grandmother and my grandfather.
So in writing this love letter to South Africa today, I stole from my ancestors.
“Because I came of age as the granddaughter of a migrant worker in South Africa, and because I was the one who could read, I got to read the love letters between my grandmother and my grandfather. ”
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The first thing I remember about my grandfather's letters is that they didn't begin with the love of one individual to another. This was supposed to be a love letter between two people, but my grandfather didn’t start by saying, “I love you.” Instead, the letter started with, “How is everybody doing at home?” He also asked about the village, and then he would later ask about the cows, and the plowing of the vegetables.
In reflecting on this, I realise this love letter that I’m sharing today, is not just about me and South Africa, but about the love of everything within South Africa, the good, the bad and the ugly.
I also realise that the details of my grandfather’s letters could be seen as an analogy, and an invitation to reflect on different aspects of our national life.
When he asks, “how is the house?”, we can think of the House of Parliament. So the question is, “how's the House doing, South Africa?”
The question about the children becomes, “how are the children of South Africa? How are we doing?”
The next question about the village is, “How are we doing as a country?”
And, “are the vegetable coming? Is the rain coming?” becomes “Is there food on the table? Are our children fed? Are we fed?”
After these questions, the tone of my grandfather’s letters would change. He would say to my grandmother, “how are you, my person? Are we even going to meet each other during the holidays in December?” As he asked that, there was pain and longing over the distance between them. “Am I going to make it?” he would ask. “Is this hole going to swallow me? Are you going to get tired, and leave the children to return to your mother's home?”
Those questions remind me of how much we don’t ask each other in South Africa today.
As the letter turned to its close, he would say, “I hope it's all going to get better.” I too ask, how do we get better as a South Africa that's so distorted, so separated?
Finally, the letter would end with, “I love you, I love you.” So to South Africa I say, I love you. I love with all your pain; I love you amid all of our wrestling and struggle.
This land has given us so much; it has come through a lot. How dare we forget what we have in our hands? How dare we leave it to those who don’t care?
Those people who wrote letters to each other, they are gone now. But I believe the question before us is, will we disappoint them?
Remarks by Axolile Notywala, Councillor, City of Cape Town
Good evening, everyone. Thank you to AFRE for the opportunity to speak today.
I’ll ask you all to decide if what I have written is a love letter; I’m not sure that it is, but it is a provocation:
I started my activism in 2008, spurred by concern over the xenophobic attacks at that time. Later, I focused on campaigns and advocacy for clean, safe and dignified toilets for people living in informal settlements and townships in Cape Town. There are some former colleagues here who know about some of these stories.
In 2016, eight years after my work began, a young woman was raped and killed in a communal toilet 200 meters away from her home because she didn't have a toilet in her home. Those who committed these acts of violence have still not been arrested. Her family was failed by both the City of Cape Town and the police who bungled that investigation.
In 2021, 13 years after my work began, my best friend's nephew, a two-year-old boy, drowned in a sewer after the City of Cape Town failed to enclose a manhole just outside his home.
So 30 years in, challenges from apartheid still linger. The ANC [African National Congress] government, with the assistance of the DA [Democratic Alliance] government in the context of Cape Town and the Western Cape, has failed to address and, at times, actually compounded these challenges.
We must then ask a question: is there hope for any betterment of the lives of the poor majority, with the current Government of National Unity that is helmed by the ANC and the DA? Is there hope without us as citizens, activists and civil society playing a role?
We cannot build, or rebuild a South Africa that takes care of the poor majority without disrupting the self-centredness and corrupt nature of current party politics and politicians. We also cannot disrupt the current nature of South African party politics and politicians, if some of us are not occupying the corridors of power, or at least working hard to get better people in those spaces. Many of us have fought hard and for so long on the outside, but many are still dying today due to political neglect. Something must shift.
Of course, we can't all be politicians, but we can do more in making sure that the right politicians are elected to positions of power. I believe we can all be activists when it comes to electoral and participatory democracy, and even civic and political education. And in fact, I believe we must.
I also find myself thinking about elections across the world this year, the campaigns in South Africa, the U.S. and Botswana being the ones I have paid the most attention to. The outcomes have led me to reflect on the ways that we, privileged progressives, can get bogged down by political and ideological purity to the detriment of a unified progressive left. This is something I challenge us to seriously introspect about.
So what about the future?
In the context of the failures of South Africa’s city governments, emblematic in the case of Cape Town that I laid out earlier, I’d like to share a quote from Ada Colau, an activist politician who I take inspiration from. She says, “we're living in extraordinary times that demand brave and creative solutions. If we are able to imagine a different city, we'll have the power to transform it.”
Ada was an activist on housing issues who went on to become the first woman to occupy the position of mayor in Barcelona, Spain in 2015. She got re-elected in 2019 for a second term and served until 2023. Over the course of her tenure, she made some progressive changes in the city of Barcelona. She is also one of the the pioneers of a concept known as radical municipalism, or new municipalism, which my AFRE Fellowship project explores in the context of South Africa.
New municipalism is defined as a strategy for implementing the transformative demands of grassroots movements at the local level; demands that are consistently oriented towards the common good, that aim to overcome various forms of exclusion and improve everyday living conditions, and that include the democratisation of political institutions through expanded co-determination procedures and the feminisation of politics. New municipalism aims not just at progressive policy to reform the city on behalf of its citizens, but to place power in the hands of the people by transforming the way politics is done.
“We must approach these politics at the very local level with radical generosity, radical care and radical solidarity.”
Current municipal challenges in South Africa present opportunities for this type of politics. We need to go back to the origins of political governance, and must approach these politics at the very local level with radical generosity, radical care and radical solidarity. We will not agree on everything, but we can work on a minimum program of action using the social capital that we all have for the South Africa that we love, especially for the Black, poor majority who remain marginalised and oppressed.
Remarks by Sean Jacobs, Founder and Publisher, Africa Is A Country
Thanks to AFRE for the opportunity to share my love letter to South Africa.
I'm speaking here as a Board Member, but also because I guest-edited an issue of Moya magazine on the long history of Black solidarity between the U.S. and South Africa. I recommend reading Robert Vinson and Drew Thompson's pieces on how this history of solidarity played out in the 20th century, and Khanya Mthsali’s reflection on Trevor Noah, the most recognisable South African figure in the US after Nelson Mandela, and for many the most recognisable avatar when it comes to that relationship these days.
Instead of talking about those articles, I want to pivot and highlight someone else, Audre Lorde, who is not in that Moya issue, and who many people don't know had a very deep connection to South Africa. As I am learning for a project I am working on with a South African filmmaker, Palesa Shongwe, Audre’s actions offer powerful examples, aspirations and sources of hope for how to live, solidarity, and ideas we can look to as models for our own lives.
Not everyone knows that Audre Lorde collaborated closely with Black South African women, starting in the early 1980s, forming a deep connection to the country and the majority of its people that lasted until her death from cancer in 1992. It began when Audre Lorde and her partner Gloria Joseph saw a documentary about working-class Black women in Soweto. Moved by their story, Lorde raised funds for the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council and the Maggie Magaba Trust through her organisation Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa.
The Audre Lorde collection, which is housed at Spelman College in Atlanta, includes several references to this connection. This includes letters between her and the Sisterhood, and between her and the trade unionist Ellen Kuzwayo, with whom she became friends. She collected South African music from bands like Sankomota–actually, they are from Lesotho, but we claim them–Mzwakhe Mbuli and Sakhile.
In her poetry, she often compared her cancer to South Africa's police state or its racist leaders. But it's perhaps in descriptions of a relationship and collaboration with the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council and the Maggie Magaba Trust that we see some of the best examples of the cooperation and reciprocity between her and her Black South African sisters. The best description of this comes from an account by Gloria Joseph, who was her partner for most of her life.
Lorde had invited her South African comrades to a conference in London. As Gloria writes, after the events in London, the South African women traveled to southern France for a brief respite and vacation before they had to return to their homes where horrific apartheid laws ruled their lives.
The group went to a farm owned by a friend of Lorde’s in a rural part of southeastern France. It was a beautiful old, reclaimed silk factory restored to a grand old villa. As Gloria describes it, the grounds were very beautiful, with majestic stone buildings and a stone yard, “the scent of lime trees mingled with the lovely fragrance of other blooms and the swimming pools sparkled.”
She writes that she and Audre's time with the group of South African women was “exquisite and enjoyable and soul-wrenching.” There was a feeling of shared, deep friendship. The days were spent in relaxation with no evidence of stress or pressure. “Our daily activities consisted of collectively preparing and sharing meals, taking walks around the surrounding grounds of the villa and discussing quilting, hairstyles, marriage and raising children.”
But it wasn't all fun. One incident revealed an underlying anxiety. Writes Gloria: “During one of our walks outside the villa, we came upon cherry trees loaded with luscious fruit, Audre and I started to pick a few from the low hanging branches, and the South African women were immediately stricken with fear. They worried that we could all be severely punished, sent to jail and held in detention. Such were the realities of life for them in South Africa.”
Later, Gloria writes that the most stressful - but simultaneously funny - moment occurred when they were all in the swimming pool.
“The South African woman had observed me swimming and were eager to follow suit, though they had no experience or skills. All in all, the scene was quite humorous. The woman struggled to stay afloat. Audre and I vainly tried to support their bodies in the water, and Betty Walpert [she owned the house] panicked at the thought of having them survive South Africa's apartheid only to drown in her pool.”
Gloria finishes this section of her essay remembering Audre: “The evenings were exceptional. We had our meals outdoors under a wide, spreading lime tree with the sweet sand of blossoms perfuming the air. Here we were, two African American women learning a few words in Xhosa and Zulu as we shared the stories of the 15 women of the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council and the Maggie Magaba Trust. They told us their stories in the evening and at night in her room, Audre wrote and wrote. There was uniqueness to each tale, yet an underlying similarity in terms of suffering, a commitment to struggle and an appreciation for accomplishment and the strength of unity. As Audre and I discussed the stories we had heard, emotions alternated between melancholy and an unwavering anger against the devastating effects of apartheid.”
“I believe this is what we're trying to do now: build on what Audre Lorde, Gloria Joseph, the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council and the Maggie Magaba Trust [and others] created.
We have the privilege of making these connections in less dangerous times, but the world is becoming more challenging.”
So what can we take from this? I believe this is what we're trying to do now: build on what Audre Lorde, Gloria Joseph, the Zamani Soweto Sisters Council and the Maggie Magaba Trust— or even the Garveyites or the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement covered in the Moya issue—created.
We have the privilege of making these connections in less dangerous times, but the world is becoming more challenging. I invite us to draw on their history as we reflect on how to create the conditions for others to forge these connections and sustain ourselves and with new realities in South Africa, the U.S. and globally.