I want to begin by acknowledging that I am joining you from Perth, Australia, from the lands of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation, and I want to pay respects to their elders — those past and those who are custodians of the lands and waterways on which I live. I want also to acknowledge that their sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
I also want to recognise that those of you in the audience are gathered in Soweto, where 50 years ago, the youth defied the apartheid state and pushed the country towards a new phase of the revolution that was profoundly influenced by Steve Biko and the Black consciousness movement.
I am so grateful for the invitation to speak here today. I want to thank the organisers for thinking of me. The list of previous speakers includes so many women whom I admire and have read voraciously. So, to be among them is a real honour. I am very aware that about a decade and a half ago, after many years working in civil society, I decided to be a writer. With no training and no academic rigour to back me up. With only a hunger to read and learn and put my thoughts on the page. And so, I come to these sorts of events always surprised and excited and grateful for the engagement. I also want to acknowledge Comrade Nadine Gordimer: a writer of fiction, a stalwart, and a person whose commitment to justice was unflinching.
Let us begin.
The first sentence of academic and public intellectual Eddie Glaude's book America, USA reads, "I do not love America, and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious."
When I read these words, my heart stopped. I wondered whether I might say the same thing about my own country, whether I could utter the words, "I do not love South Africa," as effortlessly… Even as the thought came to me, I banished it.
The sentiment — that one might not love South Africa — is unimaginable, heretical even. Too many people fought and died for this project. There is nothing morally dubious about the abstraction of South Africa. The animating ideas that make us who we are are morally sound and have been the driving force of my own life.
Besides, I told myself, Eddie Glaude is African-American. American history has many resonances with South African history, but of course Black Americans do not control the state. They are subject to it.
Theirs is a history of repeated betrayals — from enslavement to emancipation, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Act, to redlining, the war on drugs and mass incarceration — America has never loved Black Americans.
Like America, South African history is a crime scene. We too have a history of settler conquest and colonial betrayal, but we waged a freedom struggle and took command of the politics, if not the economics. So, no, I told myself, there is no direct corollary here.
But once thought, the thought could not unthink itself. Suddenly, I was wondering what it meant to love a democratic South Africa that has given us as many betrayals as it has promises.
As we speak, there is a man or perhaps men who have murdered ten women on the East Rand. And that man, or the men, are free. The women who were murdered, their bodies were found in open fields, near building sites, and close to major roads. In other words, they were sacrificed in public spaces, the violence in places that ought to be communal, a testament to a nation that does not seem to love its women.
Can I say — to these women and their loved ones — that I love South Africa? What is the value of that love? If I do not love South Africa, does that change the scope of my actions? And if I do love South Africa, what actions does that render possible?
And who and what is South Africa? Is it her people, those who live within the boundaries of the territory of the nation-state, or is it her government? What is this South Africa that we claim to love?
I will attempt a few scattered answers in this lecture.
By saying I do not love America, Glaude — who is a student of James Baldwin — was deftly inverting the equation, refusing to offer his country the unstinting love Baldwin offered when he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, "I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
I have always understood my love for South Africa to fall within this category. Mine is indeed a Baldwinian love. My critiques of South Africa come from a place of deep regard, from an expectation that we are a nation that is seeking to be better than our history.
Glaude's refusal of national love, his insistence on withdrawing affection for an America that has not earned his love, feels — for me at least — new. Asking myself whether I love South Africa is a possibility I have never contemplated. I imagine that for many people of my generation — born in the 1970s and 1980s — the idea is unfathomable. How can we not love South Africa?
And so perhaps a better question — or at least an easier way in — is to ask why I love South Africa. Because this question deals with the truth, which is that, like many of you gathered here today, I do love South Africa. And in these sorts of conversations, it is important to start from where we stand. I will presume then that we are here today because in some way or another, we love South Africa. And in the last few years, this love seems to have begun to kill us.
Across our nation a war has been brewing; a war in which the belligerents both claim to love this country. And so, we find ourselves in a moment in which there are competing claims about who loves South Africa more: those who are willing to push out migrants by any means necessary, because they believe it will create prosperity for South Africans, or those who believe the respectful treatment of fellow human beings — no matter where they come from — is a vital pathway to the future our democracy seeks to instantiate. As Alice Walker's character Shug Avery says in The Temple of My Familiar, "Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look like the future you are dreaming."
The present we are constructing has granted permission for men to kill women with impunity; it has given licence to armed mobs to march through the streets beating fellow humans and to pull children from their schools and patients from their hospital beds. This is, then, the future we are building.
The South Africans who rally behind the slogan of Abahambe say it is motivated by a love for South Africans. Their love for South Africans seems to be activated by a hatred of others. Without the crucial ingredient of antipathy, their love for fellow South Africans cannot find expression. And I want us to ask ourselves what is the meaning of a love that hurts, a love that requires the hatred of others to assert itself? Can this love be an organising sentiment for a nation? Is this a love we want to teach our children?
I want to suggest that loving South Africans is not the same as loving South Africa.
When I say I love South Africa, I am saying that I love the people who live in South Africa, because I understand the historical connection between history and geography. I am also saying I love the people who live in South Africa collectively. I do not love individuals who rape, steal and abuse, but I love and understand intimately what this country has been through, and so I love South Africa as an idea. This is the only way any of us can love a place populated by people we do not know. To feel part of a nation is to insist that you are part of that nation's story.
I love South Africa because of the preamble to the Constitution, which includes the words, "South Africa belongs to all who live in it." I love this fundamental promise of inclusion. Because the old South Africa was based on a story of exclusion. It defended the nation as a geography of exclusion. How then can I not love the child born in South Africa, whose parents speak Igbo or Shona, as much as I love the child whose parents — like mine — speak isiZulu? These children — no matter which languages fall from their tongues — have walked the same streets, learned the same dances and navigated the same hurdles.
On exceptionalism
For many years I have joined others in arguing that South Africa is not exceptional. I have insisted — like a good progressive — that our national struggles were like those of any other people. Believing we were different from the rest of Africa was part of our problem. We learned to see ourselves as better than the rest of the continent. There is certainly truth to this idea — that our exceptionalism was born of chauvinism.
Thirty years ago, when I would tell someone that I was born to South African parents outside the country and that I had lived in Zambia and Kenya, I often encountered a strange disbelief, tinged with horror. They would say, "Oh, so you grew up in Africa?" as if South Africa was not part of our continent. Then, I would explain the long story of my birth, "outside", and the person's look would soften, and inevitably they would sigh, and say, "Shame man. It's okay, you're home now."
It took me some time to figure out how to respond to the idea that Africa was a place that began beyond South Africa's borders. In those early years after 1994, I was encountering in real time one aspect of what South African exceptionalism looked like.
I was coming to see that the countries where I had lived weren't understood as geographies with their own histories and cultures and complexities. They were dark landscapes. Zambia and Kenya might as well have been Venus and Mars. They were undefined and undefinable, places of chaos and poverty.
This feeling that Africa is foreign to South Africa — that we are not part of the continent — has only grown stronger and harder in the last three decades. Just as whiteness means nothing until it is contrasted with blackness — the white person must be superior to someone and that someone is Black — similarly, South African-ness relies heavily on the construction of Africa as a place of dysfunction, chaos and violence in order to define itself as functional, orderly, efficient and civilised.
The South African is civilised, orderly and successful, in contrast to the African, who is not. And of course, in the present moment, the African disrupts the prosperity that South Africans would otherwise enjoy. If it weren't for the Africans, South Africa would be paradise.
Many people seem to have forgotten where these ideas about filth, criminality and chaos come from. It is important — especially now — that we guard against forgetting. Because a society that forgets where it has been is bound to repeat its mistakes.
Over the last few months, I have willed myself to remember that the idea that migrants are driving crime, fuelling disease and disrespecting our laws comes directly from the apartheid regime's playbook, a regime that spent decades and millions of rands on propaganda that taught Black people in this country to hate and distrust our neighbours, and of course to think of ourselves as Black people as inferior to whites. It does not serve us to reject what apartheid taught us about racism while holding onto what it taught us about the humanity of our fellow Africans.
Of course, mistrusting the foreigner is not a uniquely South African problem. Hatred and scapegoating of the other are on the rise everywhere — including on our own continent. In that sense, we are not exceptional.
At the same time, I want to insist that while we waged a struggle and then tried to build a new society on new ideals, we did something extraordinary. We can choose to avoid the word exceptional, but we must proclaim that we were ambitious — heroic even — in our efforts to remake the world. That we fell short ought not to nullify the attempt; it should only strengthen our resolve.
The reality is, sadly, that our failures have not had this effect. Instead, as the African National Congress has run increasingly corrupt governments, and as those governments have failed to create jobs, improve women's health and safety, build houses, improve health and raise national standards of education, it has lost all moral authority. And in the process, as the party has tried to monopolise its own place in the struggle for freedom, the specialness, the importance — extraordinariness — of South Africa's story has been difficult for many people to discern. Why should anyone pay attention to a constitution whose drafters have betrayed us in such fundamental ways?
Today, 10% of the population holds roughly 80% of the nation's wealth. Inequality has not budged since the end of apartheid. The difference between now and then is, of course, that there are more Black faces amongst the elite. This is cold comfort for a person who lives now in poverty as did their parents before.
There is no question that our people are suffering. The litany of government failures is extensive and heartbreaking. While the ten percent Uber their children from one place to the next, children living in poverty die in taxis because the government has not built safe public transport. And amongst women, the statistics for violence do not bear repeating — many of us have learned that it doesn't matter how many times we mourn, cry and recite statistics, the government doesn't care, or won't act. And men have not stopped brutalising us.
And so, in the midst of this despair and frustration, the turn against the stranger is both the most natural thing on earth, and the one thing we simply cannot afford to do as a nation.
If we love South Africa, then we must collectively remember who we are and how we came to be. We cannot rage against the Constitution — as we have seen people doing this week. The government, yes. But to conflate the Constitution and the government is a grave mistake we simply cannot afford to leave uncorrected.
There has been a profound failure by those who know the story to tell the story of South Africa, to explain the choices made in our founding moments — not to defend them but to make the principles that underpin them explicit.
Earlier this year, when the vigilantes set a deadline for the state, the President was silent. He was silent until he could no longer maintain his silence, and then he called a family meeting. I was in Joburg at the time and I was appalled. His speech was transactional — to quell the fires, but not to stand for the Constitution.
In the weeks and months since, I have begun to think about how I might find my own way to tell the story of the idea of South Africa. The silence of those who know the story and have chosen to prevaricate has been painful to watch. But it falls on all of us to remember. Part of that remembering requires us to go back to the founding moments, to the ideas that animated the democratic ideals that today are under attack by people who say they love South Africans.
On the TRC
In her book Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston writes, "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." Janie, the novel's main character, is being forced to marry a much older man. The scenario is familiar to us all: Janie's Gogo wanted a good marriage for her, one that would provide stability and economic security. Being only sixteen, Janie knows nothing about marriage, and she knows even less about love.
What Janie knows is that she wants to fall in love. She wants desperately for her husband to be the love of her life. And he isn't. And so she learns the hard way what we all must learn, which is that some chapters of our lives are defined by confusion, searching and trial (the years that ask), while other periods bring clarity, resolution and the fruits of experience (the years that answer).
2026 is a year that has asked. It has been, by any measure, a defining year for those of us who are seekers, who want to know more. It is a year that has thrown up many, many questions about who we are and what our nation stands for, and so I am speaking to you today from a place of profound unknowing.
And yet there are years that lie in the past now, in which South Africa did have answers, and you will forgive me for the nostalgia of my generation — I do not intend to make unpretty things beautiful, but I want only to say that liberation is a striving and there have been moments when we have striven for the higher value, for the thing that was hardest — which is always love — and turned our backs on the thing that is easiest — which is more often than not, hate.
Between 1980 and 2000, the people's leadership of this country — that is to say the mass democratic movement and its structures working in close connection to the liberation movement outside South Africa — had the answers, and we moved in their direction. And as we did so, sometimes we stumbled, but that did not mean the answers were wrong. Sometimes we soared, and that too — in retrospect — did not mean our answers were correct.
Beginning in 1995, the Truth and Reconciliation movement championed a national process that many of us have come to criticise for its performativity. The TRC focused on the personal stories of spectacular violence — and they were horrific. It asked the white men who had performed those acts to confess their sins and offered them forgiveness in exchange. We can all see how pre-emptive this forgiveness was.
As Panashe Chigumadzi has written, "Ubuntu demands costly forgiveness; you cannot receive forgiveness without giving something up as an act of your contrition." And yet, nothing was given up in those founding moments.
Beyond the problems of amnesty, the TRC focused on spectacular forms of violence but was unable to grapple with and address the ordinary violence that constituted apartheid. In other words, while 20,000 cases were heard at the TRC, millions more went unaddressed because the TRC largely avoided the issue of structural violence. As I have written in the past, the TRC spent over nine days in hearings discussing Winnie Mandela, and half a day each on the mining houses and the media — both of which played significant roles in upholding apartheid.
I do not want to be misunderstood. The violence of apartheid was brutal and spectacular, and it needed to be looked at directly. It needed to be spoken out loud, remembered in public. This word — remember — is important.
In Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, Toni Morrison riffs on memory, writing about the powerful concept of re-memory, which she spent so much of her life writing into. She notes, "Re-memory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past." This is what, in its finest moments, the TRC was able to achieve.
The TRC may have been a way of gathering the population of the past and bringing them into the present; a way of honouring the dead by saying their names. But having said their names and traded information about their whereabouts for amnesty, having begged for confessions from men who were not sorry, after all of that the TRC gave only the smallest, merest of settlements to those who had been remembered. And then there were the many others whose pain the TRC was not constituted to address. The miners, the farm workers, the women who worked in white people's homes, raising their children only to be strangers to their own sons and daughters.
And so, the TRC — by its own standards — was both a soaring triumph and a deep disappointment. This contradiction — the ability to chart new ground and put in place institutional mechanisms to deal with the past in innovative ways, and the failure to address the structural violence that affected so many — lies both at the heart of the TRC's complicated legacy and at the heart of our new nation's story.
We forged our new South Africa — the country we finally had permission to love — but we did so through a series of contradictory acts that reinforced memory and healing even as they fostered impunity, allowing the apartheid generals to walk free without giving up anything, as Chigumadzi says. The nation taught its young journalists to privilege the telling of spectacular stories of violence over stories of ongoing humiliation and suffering tied to poverty. And yet it also invited them to tell stories that had lived in darkness for far too long. I am saying here that for every decision there were unintended consequences, and that is the nature of doing hard things.
I am saying that, for all my criticisms — and I have many — it does a disservice to oversimplify the moment they navigated and the choices they made. To pretend they were mere sellouts, duped by whites, is to move from storytelling into the terrain of lies.
Tutu's forgiveness was wide and big, and with the benefit of hindsight we can all see it was wrapped in fear; in an almighty fear that if we did not forgive, we would never be free of the hate that apartheid had planted in our nation.
The fear that we would not heal is given positive expression in the highest law of our land, which insists that the Constitution exists to "heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights." What was once our superpower — our insistence on healing — has now been turned into a weapon. Human rights, I now hear, is ruining South Africa, because it extends grace to people who do not deserve it.
It is difficult to know how to respond to these charges. The thing that saved us — the embrace of human rights embodied by the Constitution — is the thing we are now told is destroying us.
In an interview a few years ago, former Deputy Chief Justice Albie Sachs said, "In South Africa we are very good at doing the impossible. The miraculous thing is that we're not so good at doing the ordinary. The idea that one day black and white South Africans could live together in dignity, peace and equality, seemed completely unimaginable after 300 years of oppression, dispossession and warfare. A disenfranchised black majority driven off the land, we thought: how can we possibly live together?"
In 1994, we insisted on asking the shadow question: how can we possibly not live together? We developed a system to help us live together, not simply side by side, but together. Thirty years later, having made very particular choices about dismantling hate and banishing it from our society, some among us want to turn around and embrace hate ourselves.
There is an unsightly parallel between those who whip up violent sentiment against fellow Africans and the Israeli settlers whose vigilante gangs terrorise Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.
The difference, of course, is that many of those who have been mobilised as part of the campaigns of terror in South Africa have legitimate frustrations against the state. Their suffering has been weaponised, but it is real and legitimate. But to say the Constitution is the enemy is simply untrue. The answer to people's pain lies in peacefully voting out a government we all agree has failed us.
This brutal shortcut of violence that has ravaged our nation serves no one except those whose egos and pockets benefit from it.
The truth is, of course, that the loudest voices tend to attract the most attention. The truth is, love doesn't care what language you speak, and so the babies whose heritages criss-cross the Limpopo and the Zambezi, whose grandparents live in Sierra Leone or Kenya — those babies are another kind of true story. A story thus far ignored.
As I prepared to deliver this lecture, I listened to a conversation in which Nomzamo Zondo, the director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), told the story of 17 July 2025, when Operation Dudula members marched on SERI's offices in Braamfontein to protest against a case SERI had taken to the courts on behalf of a range of civil society groups concerned about the hatred that was seeping into the soil around them. Sis Nomzamo said the Operation Dudula crowd were surprised when they were met by a counter-rally whose members far outnumbered their own, a rally where Abahlali baseMjondolo and Kopanong stood strong and firm in their love for South Africa.
So, I went online to look for the images, and I was shocked to see almost all the media coverage of that event focused on Operation Dudula. I could not find many interviews of people defending democracy. Instead there were dozens of clips of an angry man spewing his rage at fellow Africans. The media has many questions to answer.
Contrasting the story Nomzamo told with the images in the media underscored a point I had not yet fully embraced. There is a vocal minority that is speaking over an exhausted majority that has neither the time nor the inclination to hate.
And that minority voice is being amplified by a media that is invested in the spectacular rather than the everyday. As the voices of the vocal minority grow louder, it becomes harder for the exhausted majority to speak the truth. It becomes more dangerous, as they are emboldened, to remind people of the story that brings us to this moment. A story of a people who were tired of being ill-treated and decided no one in this land would ever be ill-treated again. A nation that said here, we would stand as a beacon against discrimination.
Our president, who has ultimate custodianship of the Constitution, has maintained a terrible silence in the face of the vocal minority. He has allowed them to bully his ministers and railroad government officials. He has only spoken when it became unavoidable — to avert crisis rather than to remind us that we overcame hate through dialogue and wrote a new chapter for ourselves out of sheer determination to be better than our past.
If our own president will not do it, it is time for the exhausted majority to find the language and strength to reclaim our story.
Thank you.
* Sisonke Msimang is a South African writer and activist
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL