Prof Armand Bam is the Head of Social Impact and PGDip NPO Leadership Development at Stellenbosch Business School.
Prof Armand Bam
South Africa has never been one thing. Before we were provinces, we were kingdoms, communities, languages, migrations, memories and wounds. Before we spoke of “foreign nationals”, people moved, traded, married, worked, worshipped and built lives across a continent whose borders were drawn long after its people had already found one another.
That is the first thing xenophobia and supremacist thinking asks us to forget. It asks us to imagine South Africa as pure, fixed and easily protected from the outside. But there has never been such a South Africa. Not in our food. Not in our music. Not in our languages. Not in our faiths. Not in our struggle. Not even in our families. We are not a nation made weaker by difference. We are a nation made possible by it.
Every Mandela Day, we remind ourselves of this. We quote Nelson Mandela. We speak of ubuntu. We spend 67 minutes serving others and doing good. We celebrate the idea that our democracy was born not simply from political victory, but from the belief that a country broken by division could still choose shared humanity.
