How South Africans reproduce apartheid’s most dangerous habit

THERE is a particular theatre to South African political life: we know how to gather, how to convene, how to fill auditoriums when history arrives clothed in urgency.

- ALI RIDHA KHAN

We clap where we should clap. We nod with seriousness. We ask familiar questions with grave voices. And then we go home feeling as though participation is enough.

On Sunday, as Francesca Albanese spoke, something in the room felt familiar - a choreography of solidarity, ritualistic and almost liturgical. People repeated what we already know: BDS matters; sanctions work; we must “raise awareness’; what can we do?

There is earnestness there, yes, and a beating heart. But there is also a performance economy ~ an economy of optics that governs public conscience like a currency traded at a premium.

South Africans have built an identity on moral memory. We invoke ’94 like scripture; we rehearse the vocabulary of liberation like catechism. However, too often, the memory becomes the mask. It is easy to say “Not in our name” when the world already expects it.

It is harder to move from memory to material action - to recognise that being anti-apartheid in 2025 is not radical, it is the minimum entry requirement for dignity.

In that room, watching Francesca Albanese speak, I realised the questions rarely change not because we lack information, but because we cling to the performance of inquiry. We keep asking: What can we do? as though we do not already know.

This is the comfort of optics: solidarity as ritual, not responsibility.