MICHAEL MORRIS | The promise of a new day is yet to be fulfilled - Business Day

Michael Morris

You’d have to be familiar with Setswana idiom to know the meaning of “mahube a naka tsa kgomo”, but if you’ve spent any time on a South African farm or among the huts that encircle the kraals of our hinterland or have walked the hills in the dimmest first light of an African day, you already know what these words describe.

The Setswana phrase is at once a precise account and a lyrical evocation of those blue-black moments when the night is not quite over and the day has not quite begun, when “only the tips of the horns of the cattle can be seen etched against the morning sky”.

The words offer a persuasive metaphor, not of dawn but of a dawning of the dawn, and it is doubtless apt that these very words were used in precisely the context that suited them: to reassure a country waiting for dawn, the promise of its new day.

They were spoken by Thabo Mbeki on the occasion of democratic South Africa’s second presidential inauguration in 1999. What used to be called the New South Africa was already five years old when Mbeki drew on the horns-against-the-sky image to tell his waiting country that, though apartheid was over, liberation could be realised only once people were also freed “from the dehumanising legacy of deprivation we inherited from our past”.

Meaningfully, the date of Mbeki’s speech was June 16, one of the early Youth Day anniversaries of the Soweto uprising of 1976, when ― as I wrote elsewhere 30-odd years ago ― “politics tilted steadily away from old certainties”.

These days, an almost routine cynicism tends to sour national anniversaries, even when just the briefest glance at the trajectory surely shows how unfounded cynicism really is.

The first 10-year anniversary of June 16, in 1986, was bleak. A car bomb in Durban, violence across the country claiming 22 lives in four days, a mass stayaway, mass detentions, draconian emergency regulations and a ban on “unrest” reporting ― with every detail of news having to be cleared by the detested Bureau for Information in Pretoria.

Ten years later, in 1996, young people spent Youth Day at the movies or hanging out at the mall, demonstrating in their unworried adolescence an almost cheering indifference to elders chiding them for supposedly ignoring history … even as they were making it. Within six months, after all, South Africa’s transitional feat would be sealed with the signing of a constitution that would prove a bastion.

And yet, we all know, these many years later, how it all falls short.

Only last week, colleague Hermann Pretorius drew attention in a press release to another June anniversary ― June 17 1991 ― of parliament’s repealing the Population Registration Act of 1950, the “foundation stone of statutory racial rule”.

As every dehumanising abuse of the 40 years after it was predicated on that law, you’d have thought the transition of 1994 would have put all that behind us. Yet, as Pretorius notes, the real choice in 2026 is “between race laws that enrich the connected and needs-based laws [such as the Institute of Race Relations’ own No More Race Laws Bill] that uplift those most in need”.

Is this not everywhere fundamental? If ever there was a dawning-of-the-dawn moment, June 17 1991 was conceivably it, but can there be any doubt that night’s shadows have been allowed to creep back in to so much policymaking since, which, in a phrase, has only sustained the “dehumanising legacy of deprivation we inherited from our past”?

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

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-06-22-michael-morris-no-new-dawn-as-nights-shadows-creep-back/