Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
People, perhaps
of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
In 2013 she formed the political platform AgangSA – an interlude, including her failed political marriage with the DA in 2014, which she deals with in some detail in her new book, concluding that the disappointments and inevitable strategic machinations of the terrain convinced her that she was “not a party-political animal”.
She has written extensively and often provocatively about her life and her country, always affirming the idealism that impelled her earliest activism and which finds her today as determinedly engaged.
In an interview at her Camps Bay home, Ramphele observed: “There is a drive in me, which is the dream I talk about, that will not rest until we have achieved what we fought for when we were young activists.
“We grew up poor – in a country that was exceedingly rich – simply because of structural injustices, so I am driven to do all I can to bring the country closer to the one we dreamt of. It is perfectly possible.”
South Africa had “everything we could wish for”, not least the “patient hope” of its people.
She added: “The reason we have not had an ontploffing (explosion) is because South Africans are truly patient people, perhaps to a fault… but they live in hope that tomorrow will be better. Even as they feel betrayed by their leaders, they keep hoping.
“This is an enormous asset… but it’s not an asset that will always be there.”
It was time to commit to realising the hope.
The settlement of 1994 held out the promise of the dream “but we were too early in declaring victory”.
Key sectors of society – including but not limited to the corporate sector – “checked out” back then, once the political settlement had been achieved, leaving unfinished what Ramphele calls the “emotional settlement”, the demanding task of establishing new values in every aspect of life, as a distinctive break with the past, and a foundation for the future.
In the book, she writes frankly about the challenges facing people history placed on opposite sides of an abyss of inequality.
“The healing process to effect an emotional settlement requires deep introspection by black citizens to acknowledge how their woundedness undermines their ability to assume the responsibilities and rights of citizenship.
“We have allowed ourselves to accept a narrative of the Struggle that reduces us to the status of passive recipients of freedom with the ANC as our liberator.
“We have, over the past 23 years, acquiesced in the erasure of our agency as active participants in the struggle for freedom.