Photo by Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images
Today (18 July), South Africans are urged to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s birthday by performing 67 minutes of charitable acts, each to honour his 67 years of fighting for social justice. Mandela Day, as it has become known, is a somewhat manufactured (and corporate-sponsored) example of a lingering throwback to what is referred to as “rainbow nationalism”, an attempt to forge a new post-apartheid national identity based on non-racialism. As the opening line of the 1996 constitution, as well as the historic 1955 Freedom Charter, goes, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”
Rainbow nationalism is now a faltering project, subsumed by the African National Congress’s failure to redress the wrongs of the past and deliver an egalitarian, growing economy. South Africa is ranked by the World Bank as the most unequal country in the world; it has an unemployment rate of around 35 per cent, basic services have collapsed in much of the country; and most South Africans are poorer than they were in 2010. All of which makes for ripe conditions for mass unrest and political instability.
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