This year the University of Cape Town had invited Alice Walker to give the Steve Biko memorial lecture. I went with a friend and as expected she was superb. She spoke about how the world had watched us South Africans rise to greatness and how we had been admired for our ability to overcome. Now, she said, the world was watching us in utter amazement, stunned by the scandals, the corruption, the greed and the violence. Our choices of leadership seem incomprehensible. She ended by saying that it was time that we reminded ourselves of how great we are and that we should rise again. Her advice was that we should form circles and work from within those circles to bring about change. Alice Walker received a standing ovation.


I left the hall admiring her rhetoric, but otherwise uninspired and surprisingly, mildly irritated. I recognised that what she had said rang true and yet I felt judged by an outsider who could not possibly understand the circumstances that lead to our "unintelligent" choices. We are living in a country where the majority of people live in poverty, are illiterate and find themselves without prospects for a better future. Given these circumstances, can we then expect people to elect a cold and distant intellectual over a rogue who promises to deliver? Why is it that when we as a nation choose to turn the other cheek to all  the whites who have wronged us in the past, the world smiles upon us. Yet when our nation choses to do the same for a black man the world condemns us? 


Should we be judged like that? Or should this so-called intelligent world do some introspection and admit that the idyllic post-apartheid South Africa was created because the world needed to believe in it? The world needed to  believe that we were super-humans who could overnight forgive and forget, because by doing so problem South Africa went away.


In reality we were no super-humans. We were no more willing to forgive and forget than anyone else. Nelson Mandela, our beloved Madiba, had many years away from the madness and when he walked out of prison he was a man with a mission. He chose to move forward with humanity. Those of us who were ready to receive his gift embraced it and began to fight our demons. Most were not ready for his gift though. Too much hurt, too much pain had been inflicted. Poverty was too great and the need to survive over-shadowed everything else. So we chose a leader with a plan and we stuck with him. We did not go to war, because Mandela said so. Had Mandela said otherwise, who knows what our country would look like today. 


So the world should not be shocked that we are human. The world should not want to remind us of our greatness when we chose being human. The world should not say we have lost the plot when we collectively fail to rise above our circumstances, all the time. We have seen moments of greatness as a nation. Every day ordinary people do extraordinary things and reach greatness, but all of us all the time? No. We are too fragile, too human for that. So world, please do not preach to us about how great we were and should be again. Instead, see us, our humanness. Accept it  and let that be our gift to you.

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