Editor’s Note
Freedom of movement is a myth. It took me several years to realise that, although as an “acceptable” black person, I can walk/ dine/ drink/ socialise/ live wherever I want, it’s actually just one of the endless rainbow-nation fairytales we’ve been sold. In theory I can holiday wherever my wallet will allow, but in reality I could be ostracised — explicitly or otherwise — for being the wrong colour.
But that’s a middle-class problem. Being the only black patron in a restaurant in a Joburg suburb and feeling uncomfortable because of it is a middle-class problem. Discouraging my partner from taking a walk at night in our neighbourhood lest he ends up being the “suspicious BM” in a neighbourhood WhatsApp group is a middle-class problem. Because I’m still a black woman with a lot more privilege than most.
If you’re poor in SA, getting around is 10 times harder for you than it is for anyone else. It costs a lot of money. Public transport is often insufficient and dangerous. If you have to leave your home — which probably has shoddy service delivery — to work in places where the grass is indeed greener (the fact that they have grass in the first place is great), sometimes
you have to carry the rainbow nation version of a “Dompass” to show that while you do not belong there, you have permission to temporarily be there.
Freedom of movement is a myth, and it’s a lens through which I often view our democratic rainbow nation.
April 27 — the date the black majority voted for the first time — is a few days away, and with SA turning a millennial 25 years old, we look at how far the country has come by examining the history of our flag.
Yolisa Mkele delves into how it all came together, and what it represents, in a beautiful piece about a new book,
Flying With Pride; the Back to the City hip-hop festival tackles the Freedom Charter; and Keith Tamkei remembers attending the Mandela inauguration as a student.
This freedom we have is beautiful, and we’re grateful for it. We’ve come far from the days of not being allowed to sit on the same bench as someone of a different skin colour, but we still have so much further to go. Is postdemocratic SA just a shinier version of apartheid? I don’t think so. But then again, I am viewing it through a privileged black lens, even though I too feel uncomfortable being black in certain spaces.