“We are not afraid
We are not afraid today
Cause deep in my heart I do believe
We shall overcome some day.” 

Wouldn’t it be better to start by admitting this, than bravely but untruthfully telling people that “everything’s going to be alright?” For example, I’ve often heard activists say that the current crises we face in South Africa and the world “create a moment of opportunity?”

Pull the other one. 

That’s what we said about Covid-19. “Build Back Better” went the maxim, in reality a catchphrase substituting alliteration for thought (as we do so often these days). But building back better clearly isn’t happening. 

We are building back worse.

As an example of what I’m talking about, consider a claim by Doug Abrams’s, the author of the wonderfully written and evidenced Book of Joy, recording a series of conversations that took place between the Arch and the Dalai Lama in 2014. 

At the 2022 Tutu Memorial lecture Abrams said that “our best days are ahead of us”. 

“Our greatest threat is not the pandemic or fascism or climate change, but the loss of hope that we can solve the challenges we face.”

Perhaps Abrams framed his thought in this way precisely because he knows many people are losing “hope that we can solve the challenges we face”.

Sadly, I found a lament by Roland Baines, the lead character in Ian McEwan’s new novel, The Lessons, more resonant: 

“By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol? [Baines] had thought 1989 was a portal, a wide opening to the future, with everyone streaming through. It was merely a peak. Now, from Jerusalem to New Mexico, walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned. … From peak to middern in thirty years.  … As he saw it, simply getting through intact to the last day of the twenty-first century… would be a triumph.”

***

I am a person who has always lived within hope.

But I have decided to raise these questions publicly because this is how I’m feeling privately and,  judging by the global pandemic of anxiety and depression, I don’t think I’m alone. 

I’ve always fed on hope. But with 40-plus years of human rights activism behind me, I sometimes wonder what we – as small groups of hope fighters – have achieved? While there have been many improvements in the quantum of material well-being, society faces far greater threats now – and inequalities more extreme – than at the time of my political awakening in the late 1970s. And even if we could fix some of the most egregious injustices “time’s winged chariot” is now ushering in the traumas that will accompany climate breakdown and ecocide. Harm is baked into the DNA of the economic system billions of people still subscribe to, as should be obvious from the fact that we have destroyed 69% of animal life in my lifetime, the past 50 years.

Recently, I was awarded a lifetime achievement award for my service to the right to health, but as I stood on the podium I had to ask myself quietly, what has our activism actually achieved? 

The odds are so against us that to tip the balance we are going to need millions more activists on the frontline. The sociologist Margaret Mead may have been right when she said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” But today, mere handfuls of committed citizens, however catalytic they may have been in human history thus far, won’t do.

Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, puts it with characteristic bluntness in her book The Purpose of Power: “When it comes to governing, when it comes to building power, being small is something we cannot afford… movement building isn’t about finding your tribe – it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals [it means] abandoning the practice of building cliques and instead building groups of people who are committed to and motivated by moving people in their direction by the millions.”

***

For most of my life, one of my mottos was a statement attributed to John Reed, the American journalist and communist, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, a great book which described the unfolding of the 1917 Russian revolution:  

“There are great things ahead… worth living and dying for,” Reed is said to have said.

Reed was just expressing his belief that justice is inevitable and that that conviction is worth living and – if needs be – making the ultimate sacrifice for. 

Nelson Mandela put it another way. He said that “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. 

“It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Martin Luther King, who was assassinated for these very ideals, reassured us that: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice…” But, as this essay reveals, even King was slightly distorting the meaning of the original comments made by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker in 1853.

Does history and humanity bend towards justice? 

I believed it did for a long time. Now I’m no longer sure if there are “great things” ahead. In fact the preponderance of evidence suggests there are terrible things ahead. 

***

Overall, the odds now seem stacked heavily against humanity. The conditions are fertile for hate. Nuclear war is back on the agenda and probable at some point. Neoliberals have given way to neo-fascists in power in countries like India, Italy and Sweden. They bay to be back in power in the US and were only narrowly defeated by Lula in Brazil. 

The planet is heating up. 

Yet billions of people still place their hope in a stranded asset called “capitalism”, mainly because they have been taught to fear its alternative, “socialism”.

The markets rule, okay. 

I’ve suddenly realised that not all people do have a shared humanity, and it’s pointless to pretend that we do. They may be a minority, but there are some very evil and callous people out there and they wield a lot of power. 

In recent decades powerful governments and corporations, with a Murdoch-inspired media as their advance guard, have normalised the abnormal, adjusted us to acceptance of a violent, visible inequality. 

In the same vein, I realise, the elites will adjust to climate breakdown and global heating. As long as they can protect themselves they are not going to do the right thing for society. Perhaps, silently they are thinking that the world could well do with losing a few tens of millions of people. Remember, for them there’s no such thing as society and reflecting that belief, government capacity has been asset-stripped.

Unless it’s for making war.

***

In this context, good ideas alone are not enough. Evidence alone isn’t enough to sway or shape policy. For either to make a difference they have to be backed up by power, and despite the overwhelming preponderance of good people in the world, good definitely doesn’t have power. 

Don’t get me wrong. The rebellion is on. There are millions of sites of struggle; there’s innovation; imagination; ideas; solidarity. There are even occasional victories. But nibbling away at the superstructure, in campaigns that are mostly reactive, is not altering the system. It’s not altering the balance of power between good and evil.

When I look at my fellow activists in civil society I frequently see people happy to perform opposition and critique indefinitely; damning the system, but living in comfort with it at the same time. Human beings who are often showing themselves to be short-sighted, fragmented, self-interested, risk averse; capable of very little self-critique and introspection. 

They speak a language that doesn’t move or inspire people; we need to work out what it is that does.

The struggle has gone on for too long. Bob Marley’s youngest son, Damian Marley, says in a song that he cheekily titled The Struggle Discontinues:

“I don’t wanna sing a song that says
‘The struggle lives on’
When I wish it would die and wither away
No more struggling for all”

The great British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who for decades saw the poetry in the struggles of black communities in Britain, speaks for me when he writes: 

“We need more time for leisure/
more time for pleasure/
more time for edification/
more time for recreation/
more time to contemplate/
more time to ruminate/
more time, we need more time… ” 

These are the thoughts that haunt parts of my every day. Is it time to throw in the towel? I ask myself. Is it time to cash in on the unfair advantages that accrue from my class, race, gender and try to live out my remaining life immersing myself in the things I love and that bring me joy? 

Take off my X-ray specks and put on some blinkers.  

I don’t think so. 

A luta continua, I think with a sigh and an exhausted heart. But if the struggle must continue, it must continue very differently and be approached with a different philosophy. It’s time we admit that despair is metastasising and unless we act in a way that stops it, hope may soon be as extinct as all the other species we are killing off.

If activists are to revive hope, rather than burn out another generation of change-seekers, it’s time for “activism unusual”. 

In his new book, Letters to my Mother, The Making of a Troublemaker, Kumi Naidoo puts it this way: “Having tried to bring about positive change in the world over the last 40 years, I am forced to admit that activism, in its current form, is failing… just as some say it cannot be business as usual, we should also be saying it cannot be activism as usual either.”

That’s why, as the struggle goes on, activists need to question every behaviour we have been lulled into; we need new alliances, especially with creatives and people who act from the heart; we need to act intersectionality to break down the issue silos in which we have operated without sufficient questioning. 

In South Africa we need to stop performing opposition and take risks with our lives.

Personally, I want to discard the term “civil society”, a label that seems to pre-commit its members to certain behaviours of opposition and limit my thinking; it’s time to build organisations without walls; to build power through working at convergence rather than polarisation. 

At the end of the day I can’t abandon hope, because if I did, what would I do with the remains of my life? Luckily, as so often happens, the wise words of other activists came to my rescue, in this case the closing lines of Alicia Garza’s The Purpose of Power:

“Hope is not the absence of despair – it is the ability to come back to our purpose, again and again. My purpose is to build political power for my community so that we can be powerful in every aspect of our lives. My work is to transform grief and despair and rage into the love that we need to push us forward. I am not, and we are not, defined by what we lack – we are defined by how we come together when we fall apart.” DM/ML/MC