Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 8
A birthday month practice
For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what over here.
Last year, I spent a week in the Western Cape in South Africa as part of a board retreat for Electric South, one of my favorite organizations. I decided to write about last year’s trip today because the U.S. has moved to cut funding to South Africa in reaction to the ICJ case of South Africa against Israel and for its project of land reparations to Black people who were dispossessed and removed during apartheid. There’s a bitter irony that the US, one of the countries that eventually came to support the toppling of apartheid, is now isolating South Africa in this way.
I was there in May of 2024, in the middle of the 30th anniversary celebrations of apartheid’s end, the ruling in the ICJ case against Israel, and general elections. It was fascinating to be there then. It felt alive, as if the country was vibrating from possibilities for change.
Change towards what, no one exactly knew ahead of the elections. South Africa is complicated — what country racked by decades of colonialism isnt’? — and the possibilities for change, toward progress for all or for resource capture by the few, are many. People’s conversations were full of both concern and hope brought on by South Africa’s rising global influence — especially in its stance on Gaza and its place in a growing movement towards Pan-Africanism in business, civil society, and creatives — and its domestic matters, with the fate of the ANC in the balance against economic and power critiques from the left and rising authoritarianism from the right. I could hear it buzzing in the restaurants, and on television, and it in the streets, from Bo Kaap with its colored walls painted with Free Palestine signs to Kalk Bay with its waterfront walkways full of families out to enjoy late autumn weather.
In the midst of this, while at the Bertha retreat center — a center made for global social justice practitioners to rest and gather — I kept thinking about political hope. The decades-long fight against apartheid was (and ultimately locally-led but also internationally mobilized, with the US eventually applying pressure. The work of the global anti-apartheid movement is a roadmap for justice in our present era. But this kind of hope isn’t only fossilized in past movements or captured only in electoral politics. The belief that collective action can help create better futures can be found today in South Africa’s movement builders and creative advocates.
I’ve been thinking about that kind of political hope and those movements again over these past few days. And I’m thinking about the lessons we can learn and distill from each other and how we might keep our resilience up. There will be more to come on this. For now, those of us asking and answering these questions are all going to need each other.
Essay 9 is here.
