For Busisiwe Madikizela-Theu, a social worker from the Mpondo community, the hardest questions about South Africa’s democracy do not arrive in lecture halls or policy documents. They arrive at a clinic, in a social grant application, in a child-protection meeting, in the search for disability support, or in a family trying to get help while facing unemployment, violence or insecure housing. A person, she argues, experiences the state through whether services are reachable, respectful and responsive to the language and circumstances of their community. That is where the unfinished work of decolonisation becomes tangible.
Madikizela-Theu, a lecturer in the department of social development professions at Nelson Mandela University whose work explores social work education, Indigenous knowledge systems, community engagement and inclusive development, describes some days as sitting at a nexus of disease: between the promises of democratic belonging and the unfinished work of decolonisation, amid contested histories and claims of belonging. The questions she carries are direct. Whose project is decolonisation in democratic South Africa? Is it owned by the liberation movement, the state, or by the people whose lives were shaped by colonialism and apartheid? And what does it mean to call that project African?
She sees these questions most clearly in the daily lives of the people she works with. South Africa’s developmental welfare policy, she notes, linked people-centred services to wider realities such as health, housing, employment, rural development and land reform. Social work’s commitments to social justice, respect for diversity, collective responsibility and Indigenous knowledge, in her view, ask practitioners to work with people and communities rather than merely assess individual needs and refer cases onward. They raise questions about whose knowledge shapes an intervention, who defines the problem and whether people hold power in decisions affecting their lives.
Her unease is sharpened by identity questions now visible in public life. In the Eastern Cape and elsewhere, there are competing claims about history, authority and belonging. She does not read this as proof that people have stopped seeing themselves as South African, still less as African. Instead, she sees it as a reason to ask whether democracy made enough room for people to negotiate belonging rather than inherit categories imposed on them.
A recent survey gives that question some texture. Among South Africans, 58% felt equally attached to their ethnic identity and their nationality; 26% felt more or only ethnic; and 16% valued national identity more. Only 31% said they trusted members of other ethnic groups somewhat or a lot, and just 8% said they would not mind or would welcome a neighbour from another ethnic group. Madikizela-Theu urges precision here. The figures compare ethnic identity with South African nationality and do not measure continental or Pan-African identity, so they cannot prove that South Africans do not see themselves as African. They do suggest that cultural attachment and openness can coexist even while trust between groups remains low, and they invite a question about what African belonging means in ordinary life, beyond political speeches and foreign-policy strategies.
To understand how the country arrived here, she turns to the transition itself. We often describe 1994 as a peaceful transition, but peace did not mean an absence of violence. Political violence marked the negotiation period, and some historians describe the 1985 to 1995 period as a civil war. The ANC’s 1992 strategic document acknowledged that the movement lacked the immediate capacity to overthrow the apartheid state and that resuming armed struggle was neither preferable nor viable. The chosen strategy combined negotiations with mass mobilisation and international pressure, a political decision made under pressure rather than evidence of an unprepared democratic future. It does, however, leave open whether people were prepared for the social and political compromises through which democracy would arrive.
Meanwhile, Madikizela-Theu has wondered whether a wider civil war might have produced different alliances with African states. Tanzania, Zambia, Angola and Zimbabwe supported the liberation struggle but were not one actor with one interest, and whether they would have intervened militarily must remain an open counterfactual. What can be examined is how the transition shaped the new government’s place in the world.
Nelson Mandela’s presidency brought a strong language of human rights, democracy and peace into foreign policy, rebuilding relationships across the Global North and South while maintaining liberation-era ties. After the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Mandela called for sanctions against the Abacha regime, demonstrating both the force and the limits of that ethical approach: he did not secure broad support from African or Western governments, and South Africa’s position was isolated. Moral conviction did not automatically become continental consensus. The episode also raises a question about external pressure, since Western governments pressed the ANC to negotiate and embrace market-oriented policies, which narrows how much space the new government had to define a different future. This does not erase the agency of Mandela or the ANC; it asks us to examine the constraints and partnerships that shaped the democratic state.
Under Thabo Mbeki, the African dimension became more structured. The African Renaissance was tied to building continental institutions, and Mbeki played a central role in advancing the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development while positioning South Africa as a bridge between Africa and the Global North. Yet his approach carried contradictions. His quiet diplomacy on Zimbabwe prioritised negotiation and regional stability even as critics argued it protected an authoritarian government after a disputed election, and South Africa’s regional economic relationships were unequal. The presidencies after Mbeki did not simply erase those foundations; a recent review argues that later administrations changed methods and emphasis while carrying forward objectives established under Mandela and Mbeki, which complicates the idea of a clear Africanist period followed by complete departure.
The harder question, for Madikizela-Theu, is whether those founding visions entered the country’s shared political life or remained mostly visible in diplomacy and official language. Apartheid did not invent every ethnic or cultural identity, but it classified, territorialised and used them to divide people through reserves and homelands, and those histories did not disappear in 1994. They must be confronted without treating cultural identities themselves as the problem.
She is not asking whether South Africa is African. She is asking whether African belonging has become a shared project that people can shape and recognise in their daily lives. Decolonisation, she argues, cannot belong only to the leaders who negotiated the settlement, the parties that inherited the state or the institutions that speak in its name. It must also belong to communities whose histories were divided and whose futures remain connected. The work ahead, she concludes, is to ask what kind of common life makes difference possible without turning it into a boundary of exclusion.