Reverend Jesse Jackson during a protest march against apartheid and colonialist oppression. His hope-against-hope attitude to changemaking can inspire all who yearn for change in this troubled world.
Image: Social Media
When the late Reverend Jesse Jackson first ran for president of the United States in 1984, black South Africans like me, still suffering under apartheid, drew a lot of hope and inspiration.
Jackson trusted the changemaking process by running for president, ignoring those who said “only blacks would vote for him”. Of course, the charismatic activist-minister didn’t win the race to the White House, but succeeded in opening the campaign gates to the running field for everyone to dream and run. And, years later, his dream was fulfilled when Barack Obama made it into the White House, the first black person to do so.
When Obama eulogised Jackson last week he was speaking to his countrymen and women, but I found his speech particularly poignant and pertinent for us too in South Africa.
Our young democracy isn’t as sick as America’s – perhaps the most divided and politically dysfunctional industrial democracy in the world. We are pretty much united in our diversity. Our problem is corruption.
Obama's speech resonates when one substitutes the unbelievable fear and hatred dividing America today with the cancer of corruption that has metastasised to South Africa's key organs of state.
“We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope,” said Obama closing his moving speech.
“Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offence to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn't think were possible.”
You’d think he had been following the ongoing corruption inquiries in which the Augean stables of filth in the police and justice system are being exposed.
Yes, indeed, fellow South Africans, those hearings can leave one with zero hope. But listen to Obama’s call to action, what he says we each need to be doing in such situations of hopelessness.
“Wherever we have a chance to make an impact. Whether it's in our school or our workplaces or our neighbourhoods or our cities - not for fame, not for glory, or because success is guaranteed, but because it gives our life purpose, because it aligns with what our faith tells us God demands, and because if we don't step up, no one else will.”
Indeed, if we do not do something about our cancer of corruption, who will?