Freedom Day should make us beware of selective memory.
Beware the stories that are told too softly. Beware the speeches that turn struggle into sentiment. Beware the version of our history that makes it sound as if freedom arrived because everyone suddenly agreed to hold hands, forgive one another, sing together and build a rainbow nation. That was never the whole truth. It is a comforting story, but it is not an honest one.
I remember 27 April 1994. I remember the celebration. I remember driving near Cato Manor in Durban and seeing people dancing in the streets and joining them. Even the police joined in on that day. It was beautiful. It was sacred. Something had shifted in the air. Nelson Mandela was becoming president. A Black president. In a country where, for most of my childhood, I had heard white people speak of him as a terrorist. In my all-white boarding school, Mandela was not a smiling statue on a T-shirt. He was spoken about with fear, suspicion and contempt.
And yet, even in that moment of joy, we were not suddenly free.
In the build-up to the election, I had been involved in political violence monitoring. I remember KwaMashu, Inanda and Ndwedwe. I remember funerals. I remember communities torn apart by violence. I remember the rumours and allegations of a third force. I remember how hard it was to know who to trust. I was studying social work at the time, and even then our university was working in places of deep conflict, where the promise of democracy was arriving alongside death, grief and fear.
So yes, 1994 mattered. It mattered profoundly. It still matters. But it did not magically undo South Africa. It did not undo landlessness. It did not undo poverty. It did not undo the long distances Black workers still had to travel to work. It did not undo the taxis that remained the primary transport system for people pushed far away from economic centres. It did not undo the suburbs, the inherited wealth, the white homes, the private schools, the quiet confidence of those who had already benefited from generations of dispossession.
What changed in 1994 was not freedom itself. What changed was possibility. A door opened. A vision was declared. A Constitution was eventually adopted that said, at least on paper, that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. That human dignity matters. That equality matters. That everyone has rights. That government exists to advance those rights, not to manage poverty politely while protecting wealth. But possibility is not the same as liberation.
That is why I struggle with the way Freedom Day is often remembered. We speak as though the story ended in 1994, as though the election was the destination rather than the beginning of a much harder journey. We teach children that Mandela taught us reconciliation, but not enough about what Steve Biko taught us about dignity, Black consciousness and psychological liberation. We speak of peace, but not enough about what Solomon Mahlangu taught us about sacrifice, what Ruth First taught us about the cost of truth-telling, what Griffiths Mxenge and Victoria Mxenge taught us about courage in the face of state violence, what Dulcie September taught us about exile and international solidarity, and what Chris Hani taught us about refusing to separate political freedom from economic liberation. Hani taught us that the vote without bread, land, work, dignity and shared ownership would leave the deepest structures of apartheid alive under a new flag. We celebrate the election, but not enough about the workers, students, women, organisers, exiles, prisoners, mourners and ordinary people who carried the struggle long before it became safe to praise it.
Every political victory is in danger of being sanitised after the fact. The dead are honoured once they can no longer disturb us. The revolutionaries are celebrated once their demands have been softened. The people once called terrorists are placed on posters by the same kind of power that would have condemned them while they were alive and dangerous.
And this is where we must be painfully honest. Freedom Day was also born out of compromise. Some compromise was probably necessary to prevent civil war. But some compromises were devastating. They shaped the foundations of the democracy that followed. They gave us political rights without dismantling the economic architecture of apartheid. They allowed us to vote, but left land, wealth, capital and ownership largely where they had always been.
I often return to what Patrick Bond has written about Mandela’s economic deals and the compromises of the transition. Whether one agrees with every detail of his analysis or not, he names something we still have not properly confronted: that political democracy was won while the commanding heights of the economy were left largely untouched. The repayment of apartheid-era foreign debt meant that the new democratic state began by honouring the financial obligations of the very regime that had oppressed the majority, instead of using that money to repair the lives apartheid had broken. The formal independence of the Reserve Bank meant that crucial decisions about interest rates, inflation and monetary policy were placed at a distance from direct democratic pressure, protecting financial stability as defined by markets rather than social repair as demanded by the poor. The IMF loan before democracy arrived came with conditions that narrowed the imagination of the new government before it had even properly begun to govern. Retaining the old finance minister and Reserve Bank governor sent a clear message that political power could change hands while economic management remained reassuringly familiar to capital.
South Africa’s entry into global trade arrangements exposed local industries to pressures they were not ready to survive, with devastating consequences for workers in sectors such as clothing and textiles. Corporate taxes were lowered, exchange controls were relaxed, and major companies were allowed to move their primary listings and headquarters abroad, meaning that wealth generated here could more easily leave here. Parts of the state were privatised. GEAR replaced the redistributive promise of the Reconstruction and Development Programme with a more market-friendly path, shifting the centre of gravity from reconstruction for the poor to reassurance for investors. And perhaps most painfully, property rights were written into the Constitution in a way that made land justice far more difficult than the struggle had promised. These were not abstract policy choices. They helped build the road from political freedom to continued inequality. They explain, at least in part, why so many people could vote in a democracy and still live inside the economic geography of apartheid.
Section 25 of the Constitution sits right at the heart of this unresolved wound. It speaks of property, expropriation and land reform. It contains some space for redress, yes. But it also reflects the compromise of the transition: we can have democracy, but we must not too seriously disturb ownership. We can have the vote, but we must move carefully around land. We can speak about justice, but we must not frighten capital too much.
And so the great contradiction of South Africa was born. We became a constitutional democracy with one of the most beautiful rights-based visions in the world, while leaving largely intact the economic structure that had produced the need for liberation in the first place.
South Africa is not merely a parliamentary democracy. It is a constitutional democracy. That means the Constitution is not decorative. It is not a nice document we quote on public holidays. It is meant to discipline power. It is meant to bind government. It is meant to set the direction of the country. It is meant to say that the poor are not a problem to be managed, migrants are not scapegoats to be hunted, workers are not disposable, and land is not just a commodity for those who already have title deeds.
And yet, again and again, it has been civil society, social movements, public interest lawyers, communities and ordinary people who have had to fight for the Bill of Rights. Government should have been the primary vehicle for advancing these rights. Instead, it has too often had to be taken to court to honour them. The people have had to force the democratic state to behave democratically. The poor have had to litigate for dignity. Migrants have had to litigate for basic recognition. Communities have had to fight for housing, healthcare, education, sanitation, safety and land. That tells us something very serious about the unfinished nature of our freedom.
This is why Freedom Day cannot be reduced to nostalgia. It must become a day of reckoning.
Because the deepest corruption in South Africa is not only the brown envelope, the inflated tender, the politician’s cousin getting a contract, or the councillor who steals from the poor. Those things matter. They are real. They destroy lives. But beneath them is a much older and deeper corruption: the corruption of a political settlement that protected capital while asking the poor to be patient. The corruption of an economy that treats profit as more sacred than people. The corruption of a democracy where the majority can vote, but a minority still owns the land, controls the wealth, shapes the economy and benefits from the labour of those who remain trapped in poverty.
And now, as we move towards local government elections, we face another danger. There are white supremacist and fascist political forces learning how to capture the language of delivery. They will tell us they can fix the potholes. They will tell us they can restore water. They will tell us they can bring back order, efficiency and discipline. They will point to collapsing municipalities and say, “Give us power, and we will make things work again.”
But we must ask: work for whom?
Yes, we need roads we can drive on. Yes, we need water that runs. Yes, we need electricity that works. Yes, we need housing for all. Of course we do. But if the potholes are fixed while apartheid spatial planning remains untouched, then workers will still wake up before dawn and travel long, unsafe distances in overcrowded taxis. If the water infrastructure is repaired through tenders that enrich company owners while the workers doing the digging, lifting, welding and laying of pipes are paid poverty wages, then what exactly has been fixed? If the electricity grid is restored through the same economy that exploits miners, truck drivers, labourers and communities living near pollution, while coal continues to move through global systems of violence and profit, then we have not escaped injustice. We have simply made it more efficient.
This is the contradiction of the false promise now being offered to us: fascism with functioning traffic lights. Racism with clean audits. Xenophobia with repaired roads. White supremacy with efficient billing systems. A politics that says it will fix the city while leaving untouched the deeper violence that made the city unequal in the first place.
We must not be fooled. A city is not free because the roads are smooth if the poor are still pushed to the margins. A city is not just because the water runs if the workers who repair the pipes cannot afford a dignified life. A city is not well governed because it removes shack dwellers from sight while leaving them without land, safety or proper housing. A city is not restored when migrants are excluded, informal traders are harassed, poor people are displaced, and the wealthy are reassured that their suburbs will be protected.
Look at what we now call alternative accommodation. We used to speak of RDP houses, and for all their limitations, many were at least brick houses, small attempts at permanent shelter. Now, in Johannesburg, after fires and evictions and disasters, people are placed in tiny temporary structures, sometimes little more than shacks, while contractors are paid amounts that ordinary people know do not correspond to what has actually been built. People are warehoused in poverty, and someone profits from the warehousing. Even emergency shelter becomes a tender opportunity. Even displacement becomes a business model. Even human suffering becomes a site for extraction.
So when parties promise delivery without justice, we must listen very carefully. Delivery can be violent. Efficiency can be violent. Order can be violent. Infrastructure can be built in ways that deepen inequality. A government can fix a road and still betray the people walking alongside it. A municipality can repair a pipe and still leave intact the system that decides whose neighbourhoods deserve dignity first.
Freedom Day must teach us to ask better questions. Not only who can deliver, but deliver what, for whom, through whom, at whose expense, and into what kind of society?
We must ask whether South Africa truly belongs to all who live in it when migrants are blocked from clinics, blamed for collapsing systems they did not create, and used as convenient targets by politicians who refuse to confront corruption, austerity, unemployment and administrative failure. We must ask whether the people truly govern when money still speaks louder than communities, when party elites negotiate futures over the heads of the poor, when local government collapses while consultants, tender networks and political careers survive.
We must ask whether we are free when Black poverty remains normal, when white wealth remains protected, when informal settlements are treated as eyesores rather than evidence of unfinished justice, when workers still travel across the geography of apartheid, and when children inherit inequality before they even learn how to name it. And we must ask whether Freedom Day means anything if it does not teach us to stand with those who are unfree now.
That includes Palestinians in Gaza, where the world has once again shown us that memory alone does not protect anyone. “Never again” was supposed to mean never again for everyone. But when memory is captured by power, it can be twisted into a weapon. It can be used to excuse the very violence it was supposed to prevent.
It includes the people of Congo and other parts of Africa, where land, minerals, labour and life are still sacrificed to global greed. It includes migrants and refugees in South Africa, who are forced to carry the anger of a society betrayed by its own leaders. It includes workers, shack dwellers, unemployed people, women, queer people, children, informal traders, waste pickers and all those who are told to be patient while others continue to profit from their suffering.
So today, I do not want a Freedom Day that simply tells us to be grateful. I want a Freedom Day that tells the truth.
I want us to remember the dancing in the streets, yes. I want us to remember the miracle, yes. I want us to remember the courage of those who stood in queues for hours to vote for the first time. But I also want us to remember the funerals. The fear. The compromises. The deals. The dreams deferred. The promises not yet fulfilled.
Freedom was not completed in 1994. Freedom was made possible. And possibility can be betrayed.
So the question today is not whether we celebrate Freedom Day. The question is whether we are willing to fight for the freedom that Freedom Day only began to imagine.
Not freedom as a flag, not freedom as a speech, not freedom as a smiling statue, but freedom as land, bread, water, housing, documents, safety, healthcare, and the right to move, work, love, organise, protest and live without fear.
There can be no true Freedom Day until all are free. Until then, Freedom Day is not the end of the story. It is a reminder of the work still waiting for us.
Nigel Branken is a Johannesburg-based social worker, pastor and activist. He is the founder of Neighbours and works through Ordinary Activist on issues of social justice, migrant and refugee rights, anti-xenophobia organising, community resilience and solidarity with oppressed peoples. He is a member of the South African Communist Party.
On 27 April we should remember not only the dancing, but the funerals, the compromises and the unfinished work of liberation
