Letters from Tomorrow:
Ihave heard from the chatter among the adults around me that today is the biggest of days. South Africa, these early years of my life have been overwhelmed by this very big and heady history in the making, which will become the spine of my future. Living through this history is both the greatest gift and the greatest curse of my life.
My heart, mind, voice and hands have all, for better or worse, been shaped by these days of darkness and light, violence and hope, fear and love, destruction and imagination, and endings and beginnings.
I may not know it now, but my politics, poetry, work and aspirations will be, for better or worse, moulded by the choices the adults around me are making at this moment. My faith in change as real and material, not as just fanciful and elusive, will be shaped by what I have glimpsed in this era. Everyone is describing this moment as a miracle. And years from now, even when those words fall to disuse, I will claim it as such, not in a triumphalist sense, but in awe of just how improbable it is that we find ourselves here.
South Africa, I have never known you to be at peace, but in my short life I have known people, both kin and unrelated, who have gifted me with that sense of peace, who have held me, fed me, healed me, taught me, sustained me and saved my life every day when I was growing up in a country whose laws, policies, politicians and institutions rendered me and my kind unworthy, unseen and unheard.
Years from now I will learn that these first democratic elections will not usher in an era of peace as I imagine it right now. For many people these first democratic elections will not mean the redemption of their subjugated lives. Many people will remain, decades into our democracy, unworthy, unseen and unheard by a neglectful democratic government. Democratic by name and not deed.
There will be neglected black children in the future. There will be state violence in the future. This violence will be all the more devastating because it will be at the hands of those we have democratically chosen and empowered. It will be at the hands of those whose hands are the same colour as mine.
The violence will continue because we will fail to exorcise the demons of our past. Many of the people who will take public office have been traumatised by the horrors of apartheid, and that unchecked and unhealed trauma will become our culture, to be passed down to generations to come.
The legitimacy of this monumental step we are taking towards democracy will be compromised by the failure of the perpetrators of colonial and apartheid-era crimes, their accomplices, bystanders and beneficiaries to repair what they have broken, to return what they have stolen and to restore what they have plundered.
The wisdom that is to come will also reveal to me that blaming solely our colonial and apartheid-era past for the challenges that we will face is incomplete, and blaming just the present for where we find ourselves will be dishonest. Our problems
Lwando Xaso.
will always be a blend of the inherited and self-created of the historical and present, and of the black and white and in between.
By virtue of a combination of luck, strategic plotting and planning by my parents and community, aided by my own hard work, my life under this beckoning democracy will be beyond any dream my grandparents could have dreamt for me. However, what will it mean for our democracy for some of us to make it when most of us will remain in perilous circumstances? When most of us are vulnerable, then all of us are vulnerable. That’s the lesson we will fail to learn from apartheid.
In the years to come it will dawn on me that today does not mean that the struggle ends, but that it continues under marginally better conditions. When I am older, I will not see this as the day we became a democracy because democracy is a state and a practice of becoming. Today we are starting that journey of becoming and, unfortunately, of unbecoming.
South Africa, my limited thinking of you as a nation state will be replaced with thinking of you as a daring idea. An idea that can be held by anyone, anywhere, citizen or not. An idea of you as a bridge. The proverbial bridge away from our pasts marked by violence, inequality, injustice, pain, oppression, wretchedness, trauma, lovelessness, abandonment, strife, conflict and untold suffering towards a future of peace, equality, justice, joy, freedom, redemption, healing, love, ubuntu, security, abundance and care.
The defining question that will plague my adulthood is whether South Africa is possible. “No” is an unthinkable answer.
South Africa, we need for this idea to work.
Lare be undiluted. There et your joy history of a person moments in the you must just a nation when and of has been before, there be jubilant. Grief there will be of grief. And grief oceans elections,
masses of it. But afterwards,
vote, the first inestimable one person, one of
achieving our goal in great leap forward
lifetime – wow! freedom in our unadulterated
with
Celebrate today
it! Other delight. We did purity and independence
with their nations mark
elite invitfront of an band playing in and the
old flag comes down ed audience; the
case, 20 milIn our new flag rises up. in a forward
will move slowly lion people paper
drop a piece of to long, long lines independence!
is our into a box… This iafrika
mayibuye
Brilliant! Mayibuye,
(Come back, Africa)!
might follow, disappointments
Whatever people, are
we, the never forget what done it once;
achieving. We’ve capable of
iafrika, mayibuye! we can do it again.
at the Extraordinary
1994: Professor
of the Centre, University Community Law
Western Cape Constitutional
of the
2024: Former Justice
Court