In 2023, I wrote a scholarship paper, for a university course in culture, history and environment, about the Civilian Conservation Corps (popularly known as the CCC) program of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) New Deal.
I began the paper with this remark:
“I will always admire FDR for his courageous leadership and wisdom that freed Americans from the misery of “widespread unemployment, famine, and homelessness” visited upon them by of the Great Depression. But I will forever be saddened by the exclusion of certain members of the human family from experiencing the relief that the New Deal program delivered.”
As The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) at MIT and The Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative (BCDI) collectively observed in their Economic Democracy Training Series on Building Leadership for the Next Economy, “Under Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination, African-American people, Native people, immigrants, and women were consistently denied access to jobs, social programs, and the wealth-generating, growth-inducing solutions that Keynesianism was supposed to provide.”
Furthermore, “In Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, Ira Katznelson goes into detail about the compromises that Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt made when forming the New Deal. Black people and other people of color were kept as a low wage labor force for racist Southern Democrats, while policies to improve the lives of the rest of Americans were passed.”
I was motivated to write the scholarship paper upon reading, in Alfred Emile Cornebise’s The CCC Chronicles: Camp Newspapers of the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942 about how the CCC “employed 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps improving national and state parks, maintaining forest roads and trails, planting trees to prevent soil erosion and building levees and dams for flood control.” In Baraboo, Wisconsin, the Devil’s Lake State Park, where I walked almost 1 kilometer on frozen ice (for the first time), the green infrastructure was built by the CCC. In the process and contrary to the popular capitalist notions, “the program proved that the government must be meaningful actors in how the economy runs.”
Last Sunday, South Africa celebrated 31 years of partial freedom from the stranglehold of apartheid. I say ‘partial’ because as Mandla J. Radebe correctly observed in his opinion piece in the Sunday Times (20 April 2025), “Apartheid didn’t die, it adapted.” In his book, The New Apartheid, author, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh also emphatically posits that “apartheid did not die, it was privatized.”
Sunday’s celebrations, if we can even call them that, took place at a critical moment in the history of our country. Accountability is dying a slow death. The ruction about the approval of the national budget by parliament continues. Since 2017, South Africa has been led by a tainted president whom some have rightly called “a diesel locomotive that takes time to warm up” and to live up to his ‘thuma mina’ promise. Meanwhile, our citizens are literally drowning from negative impacts of a changing climate: devastating rainfalls and forest fires.
On 10 February 1990, a day before Nelson Mandela was unconditionally released from prison, where he had been for 27 years, a woman named Helen Bradford, presented a paper at the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The title of the paper was “Getting Away with Slavery: Capitalist Farmers, Foreigners and Forced Labour in the Transvaal. C1920 – 1950.”
Somewhere on page 12 of that paper, Bradford’s words captured a pending moment that would momentarily define South Africa after the Freedom Day of 27 April 1994: Our stillborn “Rainbow Nation,” that with the benefit of hindsight appears to have been a gambit that, in Bradford’s lexicon, was “mothered by myopia, fathered by compromise, and delivered by coercion”.
Since the sudden death of that erstwhile fairytale “rainbow nation,” a ruse that was coined by former Anglican Archbishop Tutu, the way we, South Africans, now live, work and raise our families has become a burden on the mental health on our national population.
Because of our wobbling mental fitness, since the advent of our ‘disguised plutocracy’, we’ve consistently allowed politicians and the organizations they represent to abuse, with impunity, our so-called inalienable rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Time and again, voters have allowed themselves to be used as voting fodder to sustain a system that treats them as second-class citizens in animal farm where all the citizens are equal, but some citizens are more equal than others.
Ask any sober-minded South African and they will tell you, ours is a country where corruption is on complete autopilot despite our country spending more than R1 billion rands to create the façade of doing something. Even some of the heavy feeders at the trough also know, as well as the rest of us do, that our lived experiences of freedom are far removed from our expectations. Our parliament is full of questionable people with serious cases of corruption to answer.
As we purportedly celebrated 31 years of freedom, many of the vital systems for our human survival and prosperity are unsustainable. Our educational system is dismally failing the majority of our children. The basic things that our citizens need to live productive lives—food, water, shelter, work and energy—are teetering on the brink of a complete collapse. Our obesity-producing food systems, road infrastructure systems, energy systems and health care systems are crumbling.
Each and every one of these systems is failing and unsustainable. More importantly, each and every one of these failing systems sustain the inequality that is the rootstock on which our disguised plutocracy was grafted.
In a so-called democracy that is governed by the rule of law, how can crime, gender-based violence, kidnapping and fraud be all considered normal? In a country where the president recently signed the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land Bill into law, why is fertile agricultural land in the Eastern being allowed to be eroded into ‘dongas’ or overtaken by alien vegetation whilst scores of local youths are idling without employment?
When will our government realize that “the movement towards Economic Democracy — a system of governance that puts capital and resources under democratic control and ownership — cannot happen without the people most impacted by the current economic paradigm.” In our case the poor on the urban edges and our vast rural communities.
Most importantly, when will our rural citizens realize that the situations in which many find themselves is a clarion call for self-reliance. Because as Ralph Waldo Emerson warned,
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
Until I was 10 years old, I never knew that vegetables were sold in a shop. I thought food was grown on the good soil. I grew up attending something called ‘ilima’ where village people shared resources, knowledge and skills to grow nutritious food (sorghum, wheat, legumes and vegetables) to sustain themselves. Maybe it’s time we revisited how we propagate and use the indigenous knowledge of our forefathers.
Let me leave you with this beautiful story from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World:
“When linguist Daniel Everett was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest, he observed a hunter that had brought home a sizable kill, too big to be eaten by just one family. Everett asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying techniques were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store my meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire. This seemed inefficient to Everett, who asked again: why didn’t the hunter store the meat himself for later, which is what the economic system in the researcher’s home culture would suggest. I store the meat in the belly of my brother, that’s why. The hunter told Everett.” [Source: Oprah Daily]
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words, “You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance.”
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