MICHAEL MORRIS | Liberalism looks forward, not back - Business Day

Michael Morris

Towards the end of June, writer Sisonke Msimang penned a note drawing attention to an online essay, “I Call Her Home. She Calls Me Foreign”, which said simply: “If you read one thing as a South African who loves our flailing, wonderful, broken, rising country and the continent to which we belong, let it be this.”

The essay was written by Lovelyn Nwadeyi, a not unfamiliar or uncontroversial figure in South African activism, who describes herself as “a South African, who is also a Nigerian”.

And there is indeed something poignant, and unsettling, about her writing (and this is the excerpt shared by Msimang) that “I love this country with everything in me. I have not needed the official conferring of diplomatic privileges on me to be a loud and proud ambassador for South Africa whenever I have been afforded an international platform to speak or to write. I am not saying this because I think I deserve … applause or for reward, I am saying this from love ― everything I have done, thought, felt, said about South Africa, is because I love this country. And yet, every few years, no matter how much I call her home, she reminds me that I can never fully be hers".

There are layers of irony in this confluence of people and ideas and notions of what being South African means.

I couldn’t help noticing, for example, that, while Queenstown has been formally known as Komani since 2016, Nwadeyi’s website refers to her as being “a young and vibrant Nigerian-South African woman who hails from Queenstown”. In the mouth of a white-skinned South African, this would likely be “legible” as intransigence.

Msimang’s website, on the other hand, has a note ― which those so inclined might be tempted to read cynically ― saying: “We acknowledge, recognise and respect the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which our places of work are located, and value and embrace the cultural diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.”

She lives in Perth, though; it makes sense.

And, anyway, I like complexity and freedom – and, I suppose, anything that undermines the narrow, fervent self-obsession that is always true of nationalists, political, cultural or racial.

In their conservatism, I sense, they fear letting people choose how to live, perhaps suspecting (doubtless with some justification) that they risk being among the first to be swept aside in modernity’s ineluctable churn.

I was quite struck last week by Solidarity Movement chair Flip Buys’s confidently writing: “They may dislike hearing this, but liberals who spent the 1980s dismantling an illiberal system should have become conservatives once constitutional democracy had been established. Instead, many remained intellectually trapped in the struggles of the past.”

One’s never sure what people really mean by “liberals” ― except that they are assuredly not conservatives.

This much is made clear in Buys’s closing argument in favour of a “strong cultural ecosystem that enables Afrikaners to continue living freely, securely and prosperously in Africa”, believing “this is the only way in which we can make a lasting contribution to the well-being of both South Africa and all its people”.

He concludes: “Our ambition is remarkably modest. We simply want to restore a sense of normality and, in doing so, help make this country a better place for everyone.”

Buys might have used the word “restored” unguardedly, but, for liberals, the only “sense of normality” that can be trusted to “make this country a better place for everyone” lies in the future, not the past.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-07-20-michael-morris-liberalism-looks-forward-not-back/