South Africans are not the ideologies and fears of their politicians. South Africans are far bigger in spirit and being than the fears and the anaemic utterances of their politicians.
Over the next 12 months the battle between instilling a deepening fear of the future and a faith in who we are as a people will become a battleground in South Africa. The next generation of political leaders is loading and they will either be from a cohort that seeks to tell us that this is not yet uhuru or from that group that tells us we have gone too far with this uhuru thing.
If you have lived long enough you will know that politics is an evolutionary response to past or existing contexts. In a macabre way, the current crisis in South Africa is exactly what we need right now. While soap box politics and street-side populism is being practised by all and sundry, there is an emergence taking place. People are discovering themselves and each other.
They are beginning to see beyond the politics of the politicians and their populist sideshows. Over the last few months, I have participated in several conversations where people are pitching up to have town hall and home-based dialogues about what we as people want to see for South Africa.
These dialogues are not led by politicians but by ordinary people.
The energy in these spaces is amazing. Locally organised movements of people are emerging that are calling for a braver and bolder human engagement than the fear-mongering we are sold by politicians.
Those old enough to remember an Andries Treurnicht, a Jaap Marais or a Eugene Terre'Blanche who traded on toxic fears of black people, or those who spewed forth warped views about white people in general, know that the politics of fear sells. Elections are as much about who we want in power as well as who we wish to keep out of power.
However, when I sit in these community conversations in cities and towns, I see South Africans who are beginning to defy the fear and the ideologies of both simplex power and complex difference.
A new people's movement is emerging. Rooms are filling up with people who hold diverse ideologies and views and have voted for a range of political parties. In conversation, however, they are first and foremost South Africans realising that unless they take control and rein-in the destructive and fear-spreading narratives doing the circuit, they won't have a country left to vote for.
For too long South Africans have allowed politicians to define the country and the conversation for us. They have told us what to think and what to believe. They have orchestrated our realities for us. Suddenly it is being challenged by ordinary people who are inviting diverse people into their homes to talk about the future. Ordinary people are meeting in town halls.
Businesses are inviting clients in for conversations about the future of South Africa. The angry face of our political discourse is being challenged by the emergence of the “more human face” of being South African, which Steve Biko references in his book I write what I like. We are a great country, populated by people of African, Euro and Asian descent.
Sadly, issues of land, language and culture have become weaponised and act as barriers to accessing each other instead of pathways to help build a great country. Embedded self-enrichment, even in the 1994 settlement, has rightfully angered South Africans. Politicians, becoming a class of nobility, have nauseated us all.
In kwaDesi, Oudtshoorn, Gqeberha and the Cape Town CBD and suburbs, ordinary people are meeting in small and large gatherings to talk to each other about the country they desire to live in. It is inclusive and it is brave. People are wanting to fix things. It is time our politicians woke up to what is happening around them.
* Lorenzo Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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