MICHAEL MORRIS: Lasting empowerment attained by hard slog, not unearned ownership - Business Day

Michael Morris 
An especially cold spell in winter is almost always the guaranteed trigger of what I think of as a memory but is actually an aggregate of recollected impressions that have remained vivid for decades. 

In that faintly suspect but nevertheless unignorable cinema of the mind I see – I remember being – a young boy taking his jersey sleeve to the chilled, misted back seat window of a warm, fuggy car, and through that swipe of crystal clarity witnessing what he knew was the cold-tautened face of unjust hardship in the legions of unnameable figures, bundled against the icy air, heads down and blowing steam in the half light of early morning or late evening, work-bound or home-bound, always on the same gritty path, worn to a shallow groove by this one depleting routine, and the boy knowing that the car – that he – was bound always for a wholly different destination, another life entirely.

Those trudging figures were, for much of my life, the unfairly burdened subjects of history, of apartheid no less than all that went before. They are, of course, still real to me — those unnameable legions — in large part because our history tails us like a shadow, even if it is tantalisingly out of reach.

Years ago, historian Bill Nasson drew my attention to Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that “[t]rue, the past remains another country. But its borders can be crossed by travellers.” That is something, and I do think it’s a failure of imagination, and probably of morality, to decline this strange journeying. 

In 2025 it seems important to underscore two things in particular. For many the routine subaltern status of the decades preceding 1994 remains not just a spectre but, in the contemporary idiom, a lived reality.  

In those grim decades before “the liberation”, there was no shortage of agency, determination, resistance or self-invention among many families who might outwardly have seemed to be only abject subjects of discrimination and abuse. This, after all, was how apartheid was actually defeated. 

Which is why the lived reality of 2025 calls for attention. Colleague and Institute of Race Relations fellow Sara Gon argued perceptively in a Daily Friend piece last week that the ANC “has long failed or refused to understand that empowerment of a genuine and lasting kind is not to be found in legislative injunctions to put people on company boards or give them ownership that is not genuinely earned”. 

“Like most things in life,” she went on, “empowerment is achieved through long, hard slog, and giving children a decent education that sets them up for life. It was a commitment made to democracy that has been observed in the breach for 30 years.” 

I think Gon is right in judging that the ruling party of most of the past about 30 years “may have gambled that if it artificially created an elite whose children could then benefit from the education necessary to make it in a 21st-century world, society could prosper”.

Doubtless that worked for a few. To be sure — let’s not fall for the lie that nothing for the better has happened since 1994 — many thousands have grasped every opportunity to thrive in these 30 years. But let’s not kid ourselves either.

As Gon puts it, “empowering the few and not doing the hard work to empower the many is dooming us to fail”. Nothing, she writes, can “replace the constant work required to ensure that succeeding generations are educated sufficiently to access opportunities leading to better lives”. 

Journeying into history confirms that. 

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

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