In September I found myself thinking about 2020 again.
When George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis that May, the video spread around the world and people marched in cities a long way from America. For a while it felt as though everyone had finally agreed that something ignored for too long had to be faced. Watching from Cape Town, it did not feel distant, because underneath the different country and the different police was a question we know well here: whose life is treated as urgent, and whose is treated as a number that can wait?
The energy was real. People showed up, and workplaces said things in public that they had not said the month before. Then the noise faded, not because the facts had changed, but because attention is limited and always moves on to whatever comes next.
Last month I saw a version of that pattern much closer to home. Since July, the bodies of at least eleven women have been found across Ekurhuleni, among them Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, a runner who left home in Kempton Park for her usual run and never came back. There were memorial runs, quiet gatherings in Cape Town, a candlelight vigil at UCT, and men marching through Kempton Park to say they had had enough. The Uyinene Mrwetyana Foundation said women deserve to live, walk, run and exist without fear, and the President called violence against women a stain on the national conscience. It was a crisis long before September; these deaths simply made it harder to look away.
I am glad people went into the streets, and especially glad that men showed up in public and not only online. Still, I am left with the quieter question that 2020 left me with. What happens in a month, or in two, when the investigations are still open, the funerals are over and the country has found something else to care about? As I write, police have made arrests in only a few of the cases and have not established whether the rest are linked, so for most of these families the waiting is far from over.
Gender-based violence in South Africa is not a spike that settles down on its own but an ongoing condition. It was classified as a national disaster in November last year, and women have kept being killed since. The problem is not that we never care. It is that we care in moments, and because a moment of caring feels like action, it is easy to mistake it for change.
I worry that race works in a similar way, including in rooms where people believe the hard work has already been done.
Most of what I mean is not dramatic, and very little of it is malicious. It is unconscious bias, and the people doing it genuinely do not see it. I have been in rooms where I was the only person of colour and where an otherwise all-white team honestly did not realise it was treating me differently. It is the kind of thing where one person is interrupted more than anyone else and nobody notices, or where an idea passes without comment until someone else repeats it a few minutes later and gets the credit. It is the quiet assumption that the one person of colour will be the voice on “diversity”, as though that were their portfolio rather than the whole team’s responsibility. It is in who gets the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong and who is expected to explain themselves, and in the in-jokes and after-work plans that are never meant to leave anyone out but somehow always do.
Most of the people involved are decent and would be upset to hear any of this, which is exactly why it persists. Behaviour that nobody sees is behaviour that nobody corrects, and it usually only comes into view when something outside the office forces the subject open. When that pressure eases, the attention eases with it, and a quiet week in the diversity conversation gets read as proof that everyone is having the same experience. That is a comfortable story, but not always a true one.
My day-to-day experience of race is different from that of people who can treat it as a topic they visit now and then, and I do not need a headline to tell me so. I also do not need everyone to have lived my life for us to work well together. What I do need is room in the conversation for the possibility that what I am describing is real, and not just me reacting to the news. Some things stay true long after the posts stop circulating.
I am not writing this to accuse anyone. I am writing it because I have now watched the same arc twice: the energy of 2020, and then last month’s energy around women who should have come home. Each time we showed up, marched, said the names and meant it, and each time the real test came afterwards, when the month turned and we had to find out whether our behaviour had turned with it.
I do not have a neat plan, and I care less about tidy endings than I used to. What I can do is refuse the easy story that says that because we paid attention, the problem must have been dealt with.
If you marched in September, I am with you. If you posted, I understand why. If you felt, for a few days, that the country was finally looking, I felt that too.
What I am asking of myself for October is smaller and harder than carrying a banner. I want to stay with it after the banners come down: with the women for whom none of this pauses, with colleagues whose reality does not reset when the meeting moves on to the next item, and with the gap between a moment of national feeling and a life that never gets a quieter month. That gap is where these things usually fade, but it is also the only place they actually change.