Maybe? Hopefully.

I remember going to a photo exhibition at the Michaelis Gallery at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus some years back, which stayed with me for weeks and now years on. It was titled, Promises and Lies: The ANC in Exile. The part of the exhibition that stayed with me was the opening words from the Freedom Charter, “The people shall govern”. It was painted in big black letters on a white wall. Other parts of the charter were also visible on the gallery’s walls, but this bit, right at the beginning of the exhibit, remained etched in my head.

Flashbacks to that exhibition came rushing back in the last few two weeks, as purple profile pictures flooded our timelines in the build-up to the women’s shutdown on Friday, November 21. Discourse about the performative nature of the protest, the optics of the timing, the work already being done to fight gender based violence (GBV) at policy level, the classist nature of the ways people could show solidarity, the difference between a crisis and disaster and and and. What cut through the noise, ultimately, was that very deluge of performative profile pictures, which garnered enough international and national attention to force the South African government to first declare GBV a national crisis and then later a national disaster. A move, which will hopefully lead to the kind of accountability and urgent action this crisis demands.

Living in this country requires being fuelled by immense amounts of hope, hope that you will make it through the day unscathed, that things will get better, that we might get better. This constant dose of delusion you have to down, coupled with the cognitive load of hyper vigilance, makes for a heady mix. The very threat of violence can alter the way our brains work. Violence is an unfortunate hallmark of our culture, one either has scars from being its victim or the precarity of becoming one.

Anyway, the reason this brought that exhibition back into my mind’s eye, was the realisation that messy but deliberate action can still bring that idealistic principle to life. Even and especially when we don’t have all the answers, but have something to say. That persistence is still viable. That different, better is possible.