PETER BRUCE: How Winnie has lightened our load
Complexity is the enemy of the new ‘identity politics’ that seems to have taken a grip of the whole millennial generation
I’ve been away for two weeks and seem to have come back to a slightly different country. It looks the same and smells the same. But it feels somehow lighter and I’ve figured out what it is. It isn’t Cyril Ramaphosa. It is the late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. In her passing and in the often ugly arguments that raged on social media about her life, one simple but powerful fact emerged: Madikizela-Mandela was complicated, or her story is complicated. Before my holiday the most depressing thing about life in SA was how the very notion of complexity had become a swear word. Madikizela-Mandela has given it respectability again and I’ll guarantee that we will be the better for it if we hold on to it. Complexity is the enemy of the new “identity politics” that seems to have taken a grip of the whole millennial generation. Nowadays everything is about identity, rather than action. It started in SA, as it did elsewhere in the world, as a feature of the political Right. Afrikaners trekked north...
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