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Imagine — a better world (and South Africa) is possible and within our reach

Imagine — a better world (and South Africa) is possible and within our reach
Mark Heywood
By Mark Heywood
12 Dec 2023
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‘Movements are the story of how we come together when we’ve come apart.’ — Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

This is the last editorial I will write as editor of the Maverick Citizen. It’s been a privilege and to those of you who do, thank you for having read my weekly efforts to make sense of South Africa and the world, and to do so through the lens of activism, human rights and social justice. We have been trying to bring you the world from the ground up.

Please keep supporting and reading Maverick Citizen. I think that we have cut a path and the small, dedicated team will continue to do so. Hats off (or rather shoes on!) to Anso Thom, Zukiswa Pikoli, Estelle Ellis, Tamsin Metelerkamp, Takudzwa Pongweni, Naledi Sikhakhane, Lerato Mustila and Joyrene Kramer (all women, you might notice). 

2024 will prove a very important year in the history of the world. Maverick Citizen is where you will find news about people that matter (rather than people who think they matter), stories that awaken hope in you, and truth-telling that depresses the hell out of you. 

But the aim is not to debilitate you. It is to get you off your seat to take action; to help you unleash your power.

How to achieve positive change?


As you may have heard, I am leaving Daily Maverick to contribute to building a new political movement, Change Starts Now. From scratch. Change Starts Now aspires to win the trust, and more importantly, inspire in millions of people the sense of possibility to fix our country. And, next year to persuade people to vote for change to start now. 

It’s a long shot, rather than a moon shot. But every movement starts with a first step and a handful of committed individuals rather than a constituency. The biggest constituency is the constituency that is not in any constituency. Yet, judging by our learned commentators, political movements emerge ready-baked, like a Woolworths pie! As I was driving home yesterday afternoon I was listening to some of these learned friends discussing the proliferation of new political parties on Radio 702. It almost made me want to throw in the towel before we started.

But change and its attendant risks, not comfort zones, is what social activists must embrace.  The media and civil society play a vital role in shaping decent societies, but they are being largely ignored. Not only that, they are being emasculated, starved of funding, criminalised and battered.

To advance human rights we have to square up to political power, take civil society struggles to the inside and engage in persuasion. That means we have to confront the issue of electoral power.  

The 702 discussion reminded me of the naysayers and “this can’t be done-ers” who buzzed around us when we started the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) 25 years ago. They told us you had to “fix the health system before you could start providing life-saving antiretroviral medicines (ARVs) to people with HIV”. They told us we “didn’t know what we were doing — we were activists, not health experts”.  

But we were not deterred. Then we built the most respected Aids activist movement on the globe. We saved five million lives after we won our campaign for access to ARVs. The health system as a whole emerged stronger.

Read more in the Daily Maverick: TAC celebrates 25 years of victories, but HIV fight ‘is still not over 

We are living in a material world … 


People invent all sorts of reasons for continuing along broken roads: “Activists shouldn't work with capitalists; social movements shouldn’t get tangled up with business or government”. They jump to conclusions on the basis of ill-informed media articles. As a result, we go on in splendid isolation. 

However, one thing I have learned from five years in journalism is that it’s much easier to critique than to do. I’ve also learned that between black and white there’s a hell of a lot of gray. 

In her latest book, Doppelganger, Namoi Klein describes this phenomenon as “Binaries where thinking once lived”. Unfortunately, that’s a state of being that’s infecting us all.

But not only do people expect social justice activists to think in binaries, they expect us to live and act in binaries.

I am a socialist. My lefty credentials are impeccable! 40 years ago I read Das Kapital aloud, line by line, in a dingy London flat with a person who later became a leading advocate at the Cape Bar. We discussed every point in fine detail. As modern writers like Terry Eagleton and Yanis Varoufakis attest, Marx made a huge contribution to political science. In fact, his writings changed the course of human history.

But at this moment in time — because, not in spite of, the utter despair in which millions of people are forced to live — I would argue the most important thing we can do RIGHT NOW is try and make democracy and social democracy believable again; to try and make the state capable; to fill it with willing and able people; to ready it for protecting society from the depredations the rapidly worsening climate crisis has in store for us. We need to be successful “reformists”, because for billions of people access to bread and butter, not political correctness, is what now counts. Performances of leftness, absent a realistic strategy to save our society, make the performer sleep easy, but not the poor.

Welcome to dystopia


The dystopia we are already in struck me as I drove home at midnight on Sunday night from the TAC’s all-night 25th-anniversary vigil in Newtown, inner city Johannesburg. There was a storm, the streets of Mayfair and Brixton were dark because there were no lights, difficult to drive because of the potholes, people were sleeping in dozens on the pavements, wandering the streets clutching blankets and small bags with their possessions. 

I felt like I’d accidentally driven onto the set of District Nine or Mad Max.

Real life like this is why I think activists should now leave performance to artists, and get on with the business of change. Civil society has played a heroic role for 20 years in protecting and defending fundamental rights, but it has rarely been able to impact the system. Hence inequality has got deeper and deeper and the state has got weaker and weaker in the areas that we most need it to perform. 

Read  more in the Daily Maverick: Thought for 2024 and beyond — think, again

To this end I will work from the conviction that there is something that unites us that is deeper than the ideologies and assumptions that divide us; that is humanity, empathy, compassion and solidarity. I know it’s hard to believe, if you look at what the state of Israel is doing to Palestinian men, women and children. But rogue states like Netanyahu’s Israel are what we are trying to avoid — allowing brutes to take over by democratic manipulation and intimidation and then seeing all humanity being blasted to hell in between.

Most objective analysts agree that capitalism is a system whose time has gone. As we can see from another disastrous failure at COP28 it is the logic of capitalism that drives the deepening crisis of society, aided by the 1%, a few tens of thousands of deeply cynical and morally corrupt people. 

But I also still believe that there are good people in business, good people in government, good people in civil society, good people in communities and that we must find a way to get out of siloed activism and unite them with a common vision to win power again to make government work to protect and advance these values for everyone. 

As Alicia Garza puts it (in The Purpose of Power: How to Build Movements for the 21st Century, a book I would highly recommend): “Organising is about building relationships and using these relationships to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish on our own … the mission and purpose of organising is to build power … it is the work of building relationships among people who may believe they have nothing in common so that together they can achieve a common goal.”

Today that common goal is a simple vision: a capable government running a clean and service-oriented state to ensure peace, safety, sufficient food, dignity, access to joy and love, equal education. 

That’s my next mission as a maverick. Good luck in 2024 and do the right thing! DM

Declaration: Outgoing Maverick Citizen Editor Mark Heywood has joined the Change Starts Now movement. His last day with Daily Maverick will be 14 December 2023. 

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