Madiba's legacy: Time to reclaim the soul of the struggle

Zamikhaya Maseti

As the world paused to observe Mandela Day this week on July 18, 2025, we are reminded that this day, solemnly declared by the United Nations in 2009, stands not as a decorative event on the calendar but as a global summons to political and ethical conscience.

Mandela Day was never meant to be reduced to a moment of philanthropy. It is a moral provocation. It demands reflection, honesty, and action from all of us, particularly those who profess to walk in the shadows of the long and unfinished journey that began long before 1994.

On February 11, 1990, President Nelson Mandela emerged from Victor Verster Prison with his fist raised high in the air, a gesture that immediately entered the symbolic archive of revolutionary imagery. It was not a sign of triumphalism. It was a signal. A political message carved into the conscience of this country and the watching world.

That image did not mark the end of the struggle. It marked its transformation. It did not signify closure. It announced a continuation. It called upon the oppressed and the marginalised, the landless and the working poor, to pick up where he and his fellow Rivonia Trialists had left off. The prison gates had opened, yes, but the gates of justice remained locked for millions.

He did not emerge bitter after twenty-seven years of carceral humiliation. He came out with the integrity of purpose intact, preaching reconciliation, peace, and coexistence. The reconciliation was meant to be just, it was meant to be transformative, and it was meant to be rooted in redress.

This year’s Mandela Day finds South Africa at a historical crossroads. It coincides with the build-up to what may become a defining moment in the life of our post-Apartheid democratic project, the much-anticipated National Dialogue, now just a month away. In a previous reflection, I described the National Dialogue as a conversation we did not know we truly needed.

It is now apparent that we are a society adrift, lacking a common moral vocabulary and torn apart by deepening social fragmentation. In the context of Mandela Day, we must be courageous enough to pose the most uncomfortable but essential questions. Have we remained faithful to the founding ethos of our democratic transition? Have we honoured Mandela’s radical legacy, or have we betrayed it?

We were once a society celebrated for the moral imagination of our negotiated settlement, hailed as a Rainbow Nation that chose dialogue over destruction, political patience over military confrontation. That fragile consensus has disintegrated. Today, we speak less like a Nation and more like a federation of bitter factions divided by race, class, geography, and ideology. The dream of non-racialism has withered into suspicion.

The national unity once imagined in the fervour of 1994 has been replaced with racial scapegoating and retreat. This is not the country Mandela sacrificed his freedom for. This is not the inheritance his fellow Rivonia Trialists hoped to bequeath to future generations.

Mandela Day must not be reduced to cooking for communities or painting classroom walls. These gestures are not inherently wrong, but they are dangerously insufficient. They become symbolic bandages on wounds that require political surgery. We need to elevate Mandela Day beyond gestures. It must become a platform to interrogate structural injustice, economic exclusion, and the social distance that continues to define our post-1994 reality.

The uncomfortable truth is that we have regressed. The South African Nation, post-February 11, 1990, defined by an ethos of Rainbowism, has collapsed into a contest of parallel grievances. The original project of inclusive nation-building has been corroded by policies that, while well-intentioned on paper, have had contradictory consequences in practice.

The Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy, for instance, while aimed at redressing apartheid-era dispossession, has inadvertently alienated certain sections of the Black majority (Africans, People of Colour, People of Indian origin, and the Khoisan People).

When I refer to Black people, I do so in the tradition of the liberation movement as a historically defined social category forged through a collective struggle against colonialism, land dispossession, and Apartheid. That Black unity, painstakingly built in the trenches of resistance, is today fraying at the seams.

We are witnessing a tragic reversal, a balkanisation of the oppressed into fragmented groupings, each speaking a different political grammar, each wounded by a different historical wound. Instead of deepening national unity, certain policies have created perceptions of intra-Black competition, fuelling resentment, bitterness, and ultimately disunity.

We must confront the ideological implications of this drift. The emergence of what I call the Lumpen Bourgeoisie, a predatory class in itself, lacking revolutionary consciousness, obsessed with accumulation and proximity to power, stands in stark contrast to the National Bourgeoisie, a class for itself with a progressive mission, national vision, and clarity of purpose.

The former is transactional and extractive. The latter, at least in theory, is meant to be developmental and historically conscious. The BEE unintentionally fostered the rise of the former while neglecting the ideological nurturing of the latter.

This is not an attack on BEE per se. It is a call for its recalibration, for its redistributive potential to be realigned with the historic aspirations of the Freedom Charter and the social compact imagined at the birth of our democracy. Policies must not only transfer wealth, but they must build productive capacity, foster unity among the oppressed, and dismantle systemic privilege at its root.

Equally important is the role of White South Africans in the post-1994 Nation. We cannot build a united country if significant sections of the population continue to self-isolate and insulate themselves from national challenges.

The recent episode involving forty-nine self-exiled White farmers who left South Africa under the illusion of genocide and were caught in the geopolitical crossfire of a now-fractured Trump-Musk alliance is telling. It reveals the continued racial distrust, the misinformation industry, and the alienation of White South Africans from the collective destiny of this country. It also reveals a troubling reality that we are once again singing from two hymn books, one Black, the other White.

These wounds will not heal through sentimentality. They require political honesty, institutional courage, and leadership with historical memory. That is why the National Dialogue is important. It must be a space where these contradictions are surfaced without fear. The Dialogue must ask why Mandela’s Rainbow Nation has faded.

The reconstruction of national unity cannot be subcontracted to slogans. It must be lived, nurtured, and constantly renewed. Mandela Day offers us a moment to recommit to the work of Nation-Building.

It invites every South African, Black or White, rich or poor, urban or rural, to become an active participant in the unfinished struggle for a just and equal society. We all have a role to play in bridging the fissures of mistrust and despair.

Mandela Day must be a call to civic renewal, to ethical leadership, and deep, principled reconciliation. Not the reconciliation of forgetfulness, but the reconciliation of truth, justice, and inclusion. In the name of Mandela, we must confront the fractures, realign our compass, and rebuild a Nation worthy of his legacy.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst with a Magister Philosophiae (M. PHIL) in South African Politics and Political Economy from the University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), now known as the Nelson Mandela University (NMU).

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.