Every year on Freedom Day, we celebrate the arrival of political freedom in 1994. But freedom, like memory, is selective. For some, it marks a rupture with the past. For others, it is a reminder that the past did not disappear; it changed form.
As we commemorate freedom, a familiar chorus returns: that South Africa has too many “race laws”, that redress has gone too far, that equality now demands forgetting.
It is a curious kind of freedom, one that asks us to remember 1994 but forget everything that made it necessary. There is a new kind of courage making the rounds in South Africa.
You can hear it on podcasts. You can read it in opinion columns. You can feel it in the confident tone of men who have suddenly discovered injustice.
Their grievance is simple. South Africa, they say, has “144 race laws”. The solution, they insist, is equally simple: abolish broad-based black economic empowerment (broad-based BEE).
One must admire the efficiency: three centuries of racial engineering reduced to a soundbite.
But what is most fascinating about this moral clarity is its timing. It arrives roughly 30 years after the end of apartheid, which raises a small, inconvenient question: Where exactly were these defenders of equality when race laws were doing their most enthusiastic work?
The part of the story we keep skipping
You cannot begin South Africa’s story wherever it is most comfortable. You cannot start in 2026 with a procurement policy and pretend the previous 300 years were incidental.
The story begins earlier.
It begins with land taken without consent in 1652 and with a system that hardened over time into law. By the early 20th century, legislation, such as the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936, had confined black South Africans to roughly 13% of the land, reserving the remaining 87% for white ownership.
This was not administration. It was design.
In 1948, apartheid formalised the design into a governing logic. By 1950, the state moved beyond separation to classification. Identity was fixed through the Population Registration Act, reduced to categories in a register. From the single act flowed an interlocking architecture of control.
The Group Areas Act determined where people could live. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 structured what they could learn and by extension, what they could become. The pass laws regulated movement, work and daily existence.
Race was not incidental to opportunity. It was its organising principle. When democracy arrived in 1994, it did not reset the system. It inherited it. Land, capital, networks and advantage had been accumulated, carefully, deliberately and over generations.
Some looked at the inheritance and said: We must change it. Others looked at the same reality and said: Can we not simply begin from here?
That second position is easier to hold when history has worked in your favour.
The luxury of forgetting
There is a privilege in being able to forget history. It belongs mostly to those whose lives were not fundamentally shaped by it.
If apartheid did not determine where you were born, which school you attended or whether your family accumulated wealth, it can begin to feel distant, almost abstract.
Once history feels distant, redress begins to look excessive. Why correct something that happened long ago? Why be held accountable for a past you did not personally design?
It is a persuasive argument. It is also incomplete. Because history does not disappear. It compounds. It lives in bank accounts, in suburbs, in boardrooms and in the quiet assumptions about who belongs where.
Redress is not revenge
Policies such as broad-based BEE are often reduced to a racial caricature, presented as a simple transfer from one group to another.
But the framework is, in fact, more expansive. It recognises a broader set of designated groups historically excluded from opportunity, including women and people with disabilities — categories that complicate the neat binaries often used to dismiss it.
But redress is not about redistributing guilt. It is about redistributing opportunity.
If a system systematically excluded the majority from ownership, education and capital, you cannot declare the playing field level the moment the rules change. That is not fairness. That is convenience.
It is like stopping a marathon halfway through, releasing the runners who were held back and insisting that, from this point forward, everyone competes equally.
Technically fair. Morally absurd.
The comedy of selective outrage
What makes the debate interesting is not the argument but the performance.
There is a theatrical indignation in the sudden discovery of “race laws”, as though South Africa has only recently developed an interest in race-conscious policy.
For decades, race determined everything. During that time, the loudest defenders of merit were notably quiet. Now, as the country attempts, imperfectly, to address the imbalances, merit has become sacred.
Merit, it seems, becomes most visible when it begins to feel threatened.
Of course, simplification is not confined to one side of the debate.
There are also voices that speak in a different register — louder, more confrontational, often carried by the language of historical reckoning.
Here, justice is imagined as reversal. The past is not something to be understood but something to be settled. It is a powerful language. It draws on wounds that are real and unresolved.
But it too reduces. It flattens a complex society into opposing camps, where every tension must resolve in one direction. In doing so, it risks reproducing the logic it seeks to dismantle, with the roles rearranged.
A complicated country
None of this means that policies like broad-based BEE should escape scrutiny. They have, at times, been poorly implemented. They have, at times, benefited a narrow elite. They require constant refinement. But there is a difference between improving redress and denying its necessity.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. That inequality was not accidental. It was constructed. Systems that are constructed do not dismantle themselves politely.
A world that is beginning to wobble
What is striking is how quickly the language of stability shifts when uncertainty is no longer confined to the Global South.
As conflict reshapes parts of the Middle East and as global markets respond to the disruption of energy flows and trade routes, long-held assumptions about economic certainty begin to fracture. Supply chains strain. Markets wobble. Security, once taken for granted, becomes negotiable.
Suddenly, the world begins to feel a little more like South Africa has always felt: contested, unequal and unfinished. History, it turns out, is not something that happens elsewhere. It is something that structures everywhere.
A word to those returning
In recent months, another shift has emerged. Some white South Africans who left years ago, many for the US, are returning. Some left in search of opportunity. Some left out of fear. Some left because the new South Africa felt unfamiliar.
As uncertainty grows elsewhere, home begins to look different.
To them we say: welcome home. You are South Africans. This country belongs to you too.
But home is not the place you left. It is the place we have been building while you were away — a country wrestling with its past, trying, imperfectly, to create something fairer. Returning home means joining that project, not pretending it was unnecessary.
The work of remembering
South Africa’s future will not be built on selective memory. It will be built by those willing to confront history honestly and act with responsibility. That includes those who suffered under the old system. It also includes those who benefited from it, whether intentionally or not.
A nation cannot move forward if some insist on forgetting how the road was built. Perhaps the real test is this: not whether we are comfortable with redress but whether we are courageous enough to face the history that made it necessary.
Freedom Day was never meant to be a day of selective remembrance. It was meant to mark a break from a past we are learning how to confront. Freedom is not the absence of responsibility. It is the obligation to reckon honestly with what came before and to build differently because of it.
To celebrate freedom while resisting redress is not principle. It is amnesia dressed as fairness.
Let us celebrate Freedom Day but let us do so with memory intact, with honesty about what freedom was meant to undo and with the courage to continue the work it began.
Welcome home. Now let’s get to work.
Professor Armand Bam is the head of social impact and the postgraduate diploma leadership development for NPOs at Stellenbosch Business School.