If SA's National Dialogue is to truly matter, it must be a people's process

In 1977, 14 years after Kenya's independence, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Mirii staged I Will Marry When I Want.

- Busani Ngcaweni

The play follows Kiguunda and Wangeci, a working-class couple whose modest dream to improve their lives through honest labour is crushed when elites, who once stood beside them in the struggle for freedom, conspire to take their land. It is a story of betrayal in a young democracy, where the promise of liberation is diverted to the stomachs of the politically connected.

Ngũgĩ's work was set in rural Kenya, but its truth spans time and borders. Today it speaks directly to South Africa, where the victory over apartheid delivered the vote, the Constitution and the hope of a more equal society, yet too often political settlements have served to entrench the positions of the political and economic elites.

Suppose Ngũgĩ's village was the stage for disillusionment in Kenya. In that case, our imagined place is Kicktown, where poverty does not just shadow the young, but kicks them to the ground, leaving them to crawl towards a future that keeps retreating.

In Kicktown lives the 35-year-old South African who has never had a decent job, whose democratic dividend is a dream deferred, whose horizon is marked by hustles, piecework and the fading hope of a respectable standard of living.