MICHAEL MORRIS: South Africans defy the odds with resilience - Business Day

Michael Morris
South Africans, ever capable of defying the prophets of doom, and sometimes living a life of blithe optimism in the face of appalling odds, also have a grim affection for pessimism.

It’s a sin, I know, to quote oneself, but I feel at least partly justified in borrowing this line from my 2004 book, Every Step of the Way — the journey to freedom in South Africa, on the basis that all these years later I suspect those last half dozen words carry a flawed idea.

On the contrary, I think most South Africans, despite their warranted complaints and anxieties, have an affection for optimism (I do, as it happens), and are perhaps naturally embarrassed about admitting it. Could it mean, after all, that we do too little to make the change without which complaint and anxiety can only grow?

The line I begin with prefaced a narrative aside on popular South African perceptions of how apartheid would end. Finding this detail turned out to be harder than I’d bargained for, but on the way I came across something else that captured a keener truth about the dynamics I was thinking of.

This was a remark by the novelist Barbara Trapido on her new work, the autobiographical fiction Frankie and Stankie, in a 2003 interview with The Guardian’s Libby Brooks. (Trapido had left South Africa for London in 1963, but returned to her childhood world in this novel.)

“What I was trying to put across,” Trapido told Brooks, “was that people just get on with their ordinary little lives, and often that’s ignored in literature about places that are living through hard times. People carry on living, having fun with their friends, getting married, going to birthday parties, buying new shoes, and the victims of oppression do it as well.”

Two decades later, I am persuaded that despite all the evidence stacked against the notion, an almost absurdly large number of South Africans still fondly believe that our next decisive historical moment will inevitably follow the gesture of a powerful few plotting our fate in some distant capital.

If this suggested some seeming like-mindedness, a striking contrast was offered in two intriguing attempts — at very different junctures in the 20th century — to imagine how apartheid would end. Arthur Keppel-Jones’s When Smuts Goes (1947), published on the eve of the National Party’s almost inconceivable victory against Jan Smuts in 1948, and Tom Barnard’s South Africa 1994-2004, published as the Nationalists were relinquishing power in 1991 — presuppose foreign intervention in the spirit of US President Donald Trump and his administration’s someone-had-to-do-it approach to hammering wayward states into line.

As I noted in 2004, “(t)here is always, it seems, this fearful focus in South Africa on a future that doesn’t work”, founded on the “fundamental assumptions” that “South Africans themselves are incapable of creating their own settlement, and that the resolution of the country’s history would depend on foreign intervention”.

Two decades later, I am persuaded that despite all the evidence stacked against the notion, an almost absurdly large number of South Africans still fondly believe that our next decisive historical moment will inevitably follow the gesture of a powerful few plotting our fate in some distant capital.

I am not, of course, suggesting that in an ineluctably globalised world the decisions of potent outsiders can be discounted as remote and thus benign. Yet what we know to be true of our story no less than of anyone else’s is that for all the shock and awe that avowedly decisive intervention from afar is guaranteed to produce in the moment, the only dependable agent of history is the “ordinary little lives” of Trapido’s imagining.

This agency has served us well, but we should know a shared familiarity with our crisis is not automatically its solution.

Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-01-19-michael-morris-south-africans-defy-the-odds-with-resilience/