Is it Still Democracy, or Have We Gone ‘Demo crazy?’

KASI PATRIOT

Political Theatre in Rubber Ducks

Ours is a confusing country. It is a country where, ever so often — usually after announcing plans to construct a wall to separate the “undesirables” (read: Black and poor) from the “respectable” mostly White middle classes — leaders of so‑called liberal parties arrive, cameras rolling and livestreams primed, to perform compassion.

An AI generated image of Cape Town's Dividing Wall, dubbed by others as the Berlin Wall of Cape Town

One day they’re rowing through puddles in rubber ducks in Gauteng to show solidarity with the poor. The next, they’re on live television, belting out Vulindlela, insisting that “it’s not about Black or White, but about service delivery for all.” So you’re building walls in the Western Cape to keep certain people out and, in the same breath, preaching social cohesion in Gauteng? Sounds less like nation‑building and more like political theatre to me.

Wonderland Logic Meets Apartheid’s Blueprint

At times it feels like we’ve stumbled into a political version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — where logic co‑exists side by side with contradiction. And yet, we are expected to forget where we come from? Forget that our cities still carry the blueprint of apartheid — hundreds of sub‑cities, deliberately designed to marginalise, deprive and confine? Spaces where infrastructure was not just lacking but intentionally inferior?

I don’t know about colonisation and its much‑vaunted civilisation, but what I do know is that it was colonisation, and later its surrogate, apartheid, that made sure my childhood memories of a visit to the toilet meant swatting a well‑fed green fly eager to settle on my anal orifice when all I was trying to do was take an unencumbered crapper. That’s what the bucket system does to you — strips your dignity so bare that even flies don’t respect your Black behind, literally.

Gratitude Without Blindness

And so, when I look back on the 32 years since democracy, I hold two truths at once. I am grateful. Grateful for the eradication of the bucket system. For electricity in streets once abandoned to darkness.

For opportunities — through institutions like the National Student Financial Aid Scheme — that now allow Black children to imagine futures as engineers, actuaries, scientists; no longer stuck with a choice between either becoming a teacher, nurse or a policeman.

But gratitude does not require blindness. Because the same democratic project that delivered me from indignity has also been marred by corruption, weakened by poor governance, and threatened by rising crime. Our borders remain porous, and in the absence of coherent strategies to deal with illegal immigration, which brings with it drug proliferation, a vacuum has been created.

A picture of the apartheid era bucket toilet

Democracy as a Work in Progress

Into that vacuum have crept blighters and nincompoops, armed with little else save for narrow and very dangerous nationalism, and a few songs and slogans. Though their concerns may be genuine, their modus operandi carries the risk of turning the vulnerable against each other, as did happen before the birth of our democracy.

But still, warts and all, the past three decades and a bit have improved the nervous conditions of the native. Ultimately, we are left with one truth to confront: our democracy is not a finished product. It is a contested space, a work in progress. TQ