Isinamuva liyabukwa: The Nature of ‘Hard Work’ in (South) Africa’s Culture

I hope you’ve missed me, I certainly did. Sehahabi sa bakoena sea dumedisa,

ke Tloholo sa Marena a Mafahla

Motho oa ho nesa pula ka sefako

Koena e Tshweu Lekgowa!

Not too shabby an introduction if I do say so myself. Especially since we’ve been in ‘commemoration mode’ these past few months. Freedom Day, Worker’s Day, and Africa day today (as I’m writing it) have all a special place in South Africa’s story, never mind the entire continent in its own ways (context matters ankere). And I dare say, the more I watch current news in the country and continent, the more I’m worried if we actually need to ‘re-educate ourselves as a Mmuso on why we chose to revere these days in our yearly calendar.

It was in 1999, when our (former) President Thabo Mbeki, then deputy to the late President Madiba, a man who towered the echelons of statesmanship even to his grave, who uttered the Zulu proverb, isinamuva liyabukwa (English: He who dances last will garner all the attention or He who laughs last, laughs best) in our now semi-charred chamber of parliament (ba qeta neng ho lukisa/when are they even finishing renovations) and his words then make even more sense now, and ‘let me cook’ on this question, who is even laughing ho le tje?

picture accessed from https://www.robinesrock.com/blog/a-long-long-line-of-victory-and-hope

Firstly, Freedom Day isn’t just a day where we just fly the South African flag, but rather it was a ‘war cry of victory’ on its inception in 1994. the queues of black and brown men and women, domestic workers and gardeners, miners and nannies, men whose hair is as white as the experiences they’ve cried over, women whose hands were as wrinkled as the clothing of ‘supremacist masters’ they’ve served; and it all came to a showdown on that date…

“1 man, 1 vote”

a sentiment we ought to take seriously in our Mmuso and Sechaba today. With local government elections heralded in October of this year, one must ask her/himself, are we truly going to ‘go in blind’ again? I get it, democracy in 1994 was a new experience for EVERYONE,

but democracy in 2026 can’t be the infant it was, for Pete’s sake THIS INDIVIDUAL IS 32 years old! and with any 32 year old loafer (this means no disrespect to anyone, but we’ve all seen the ‘Lokshin bioskop’ films on this individual), HY MOET OPSTAAN EN WERK/HE MUST GET UP AND STAND ON HIS OWN TWO FEET (now, the Afrikaans there is deliberate. Vrystaat grannies showed mental prowess using this language, call it colonial trauma if you will). This stadium’s attendance surely tells me something, how about you?

“Mmali oa ipalla…”

Secondly, Worker’s Day in South Africa, and the continent to vicious degrees, can be discussed sociologically, politically, philosophically, medically, psychologically and a host of other ‘allys’ which I won’t bore you in mentioning here. To start, rural urban migration and to this, I feel the jazz legend and musical activist of his time, Hugh Masekela explains it best:

“There’s a train from Namibia and Malawi, there’s a train from Zambia and Zimbabwe, there’s a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique, from Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland, from all the hinterlands of Southern and Central Africa,

This train carries young and old African men who were conscripted to come and work con contract in the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg, and its surrounding metropoles. Sixteen hours or more a day for almost no pay…”

I highly encourage you to stream the song, what a masterclass and may the soul of Ntate Hugh Masekela rest in peace.

Now, it’s one thing to engage issues of work and unemployment from a point of laziness as mentioned one time by a certain ANC politician. It’s a whole different thing to abandon the sense of challenging work it took to maintain this country and a host of others directly/indirectly by African men and women who were urged by the need to survive, rather than a desire to be rich. More so, the nature of hard work was communal, and the family/tribe/community/nation treated any migrant as one who represents them.

Even today, to a certain extent, in the height of democracy and educational freedom (who which I know is a whole topic on its own), parents, families, communities send out their children as ‘representatives of them, their heritage, their nature and their pride, to which I dare make the argument that individualism is counterproductive in certain respects (but I digress).

And this ties perfectly with the notion of Africa day and the issues we face as citizens with identity and documentation or the lack thereof. In 2026, Africa day in South Africa seems to present an un-unified African conscious, depending on how you look at it. South Africans did not face the Apartheid regime in a vacuum, and this is the truth. from MK camps in Lusaka and Angola, to schools for comrades in Eswatini and Botswana by churches, to educational training in London and Brussels; Africans have always been part of each other’s struggle, in some or other ways, positively and negatively.

picture accessed from https://aaregistry.org/story/organization-of-african-unity-oau-formed/

The formation of the OAU as a testament to a cohort of leaders who felt this had to be the notion to survive as a continent. BUT is the now African Union effective? Do countries in Africa even support its financial feasibility? what about regional institutions, are they more effective in trans-national cooperation? or are South Africans xenophobic in their argument for government’s conscious un-involvement in maintaining law and order, for both citizen and foreign migrant? Personally, I can’t answer all these questions, but I can quote myself:

“We cannot overrule this aspect on distrust and our adherence to ‘ubuntu’ being compromised. We also have to look at the culture of our people as paramount to our conception of relations with other nations and discipline to the notion of protocol and reactions which don’t mess up our aim to build.”

• Tsolo T. (2026) WHO is WHO and Where? Identity and Pan-Africanism in Hindsight

Essentially, even Africa Day seems more un-African to some and irrelevant to others. and this heightens my stance that there must be something wrong in how we view our reverence for days where they meant something to our forebears but mean almost the opposite to us.

Africa’s culture of humanity, community, and faith, in our land as a source of life, our people as a tool to mutual growth and our belief as a shield against all forms of oppression, stand to be lost if we don’t review and revisit. and I don’t mean living in the past, but I stand to see any nation who utterly understand that WE CANNOT GO BACK to imperialism and subjugation again, since governments fell into hands that are seemingly doing the very same thing in a different form now.

Hard work is not a genealogical trait, nor is it centred round a particular type of people like Colonials used to insult us with. It is not gendered nor is it centred around where you come from. these are all tricks which will destroy us if we allow them to permeate in the minds of the future generation. We celebrate these days as a way to reconnect with our past, but also as a way to teach future Africans that ‘the lives we live were paid for in blood, sacrifice and hard work’ of men and women who believed that ‘wise men plant trees knowing fully well, they will never live to sit under their shade’

As I return to the proverb I started with, in all of this, Isinamuva liyabukwa, He who dances last, WILL garner all the attention. Unfortunately, Mmuso le Sechaba have been leaving the stage open to a myriad of dancers, one more destructive than the last.

But hey, I still maintain my saying previously, Mmali oa ipalla (the reader reads/sees for him/herself) …