Never has the future of South Africa’s politics been more uncertain, but the one certainty is that the ANC’s standing as a liberation movement is dead.
Critics of the 1994 political settlement largely hail from the black middle class, even though it has been one the principal beneficiaries of South Africa’s social democracy.
The vision set out by Cyril Ramaphosa has the seeds for galvanising South Africans to get back on the right path. But it urgently needs a plan to make it happen.
Barack Obama was asked to give the Mandela Lecture because he represents what the global liberation struggle icon stood for. He struck the right chord.
South African struggle stalwart Ahmed Kathrada believed in non-racialism to his core, even as others around him began to argue for an Africanist approach.
The foundation founded by Nelson Mandela in 1999 has done a major revision - it has written off most of his reign as comprising “grand symbolic gestures”.
Vasti Roodt is Associate Professor and Head of PROSPER (Promoting Social and Political Ethics Research) in the Department of Philosophy, Stellenbosch University