What we need is a politics of progressive thinking, which South Africans have demonstrated a proclivity for in the past. The desire to go beyond one’s muscles and glands, the will to journey into the realm of reflection, always strikes one as a pinnacle in the history of this country, a profound metaphor that sustains an indelible position in youth consciousness.
As former president Thabo Mbeki put it, as youth, “they had to decide whether fear and the instinct for self-preservation would predominate in their minds and hearts, turning their own conscience into their everlasting and constant tormentors, because of what they had been afraid to do.”