Overwhelmingly, it is black South Africans and black migrants who are being ghosted in democratic South Africa. Our country is haunted by too many ghosts. Living ghosts.
Human well-being, it could be argued, is unimaginable without a lived sense of belonging somewhere; of having a place one can call home and experience as home; of the material and the spiritual dimensions of life being inseparable and equally nurtured.
This line of reflection emerged very powerfully for me through a reading of a just-published book - uMbuso weNkosi's "These Potatoes Look Like Humans: The Contested Future of Land, Home and Death in South Africa".
It is seldom that a book comes along that at once stimulates one's mind with its ideas and moves one's soul with the depth of its feeling and its poetry. This is one of them. It's a short book with a very accessible text, and is a must-read for anyone grappling with the task of both imagining and contributing to the making of a just South Africa.
Our Constitution, and the Freedom Charter before it, established the principle that South Africa belongs to all who live in it; to all who call it home.
The corollary to this, of course, is that all who call it home belong in a South...
