By Sipho Singiswa
As a student leader in the 1976 uprisings in Gugulethu we were trained to recognise the war behind the war. We were taught to ask who speaks, from where, and in whose interest. We studied sabotage, misinformation, soft infiltration. On Robben Island, we sharpened that lens through sessions with comrades like Harry Gwala, Mountain Qumbela, Sindile Mathanjana and more . Political education wasn’t separate from survival, it was our bread, our weapon, our inner revolutionary compass.
That same war is raging now. But this time, it’s not fought with boots and bullets. It’s being fought through language. Through platforms. Through the curated performance of struggle by people who carry none of its weight.
Today, the South African story, specifically the Black working-class struggle, is being misrepresented by a parade of self-appointed narrators. They appear as white commentators, Indian filmmakers, and polished social media activists. They use our history as set dressing. They pluck out slogans. They turn trauma into marketable content. What we lived, they now perform.
And they are being rewarded for it.
One Indian filmmaker has made a name by exporting a series of skewed versions of our struggles in South Africa, in Marikana, in institutions of higher learning. His speciality is flattening our pain into a donor-ready product, stripped of context and white accountability. In his award winning film, the massacre becomes a theatre of endurance, not a confrontation with violent capital. He slaps Black faces over a story in which the key agents of exploitation are London-based mining CEOs, but they are left untouched. The real power structures are cushioned. The state-corporate alliance is reduced to background noise. What remains is a consumable storyline that makes no demands.
This is the liberal aesthetic of struggle: beautiful images, no danger to power.
Meanwhile, a white woman on X (Twitter) has anointed herself the moral voice of Black South African pain. One borrowed slogan at a time, she transforms herself from suburban kugel commentator to revolutionary proxy. She appears on both African and African American platforms, representing us without our consent. Her language is paternal. Her tone, cringe-inducing. Her entire posture is steeped in privilege and reductionism. And yet she is listened to. Reposted. Applauded. Funded. Her performance is mistaken for presence.
She speaks about us, for us, never with us.
Hot on her heels is the young white boy performing anti-whiteness for TikTok. He recites what Black revolutionaries have been saying for decades, but now, through the soft lens of white liberal acceptability, it becomes “brave.” He repackages rage into a digestible confession, perfectly algorithmic, risk-free. His hair is tidy. His tone is moralistic. His reward is virality. His presence is proof that whiteness can be rebranded, without ever being dismantled.
Revolutionary African voices are not being platformed. Theirs are.
And we let it happen.
The Black middle class, many of whom were raised by workers and taught by township struggle, now reposts these acts of narrative theft with wild applause. They have abandoned political memory. They confuse visibility with power. They mistake white moral theatrics for revolutionary clarity. In doing so, they allow the outsourcing of our history, our memory, and our current fight.
What these pop-up liberal saviours and white middle-class gatekeepers enact is something deeper than erasure. It is epistemicide, the killing of Black knowledge systems. They overwrite our theories with common sense renditions, displace our elders, mimic our slogans, and remove the cost. They reduce revolutionary complexity into personal moral branding. They take our scars and turn them into scripts. Let me state here that those who walk the struggle beside us, who treat our epistemology with respect are our friends. Those who eat our ontology for likes are not.
The Indian filmmaker erases the politics of Marikana women and all South African Black women. The white woman flattens liberation into feigned sympathetic instruction. The white boy rehearses guilt as performance art. And the Black middle class cheers. My heart breaks. Can they not see that this is extraction?
Why do they lap it up as representation?
I want to remind them: you cannot subcontract the wound. You cannot delegate the telling of your own story. You cannot outsource resistance.
The media sector plays its part in this betrayal. It platforms reductionist versions of African politics. It manages dissent. It packages voices for “impact.” It prefers emotions over analysis and anecdotes over theory. It rewards those who offer concern without critique. It punishes those who speak about actual land seizure, anti-imperialism, and organised revolt.
Social media plays along. It ramps up the safest message. The most polished video. The most palatable voice.
Real politics doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t trend.
It organises in rooms with bad lighting. It happens on dusty roads, under trees, between people who will never be invited to speak for their own pain. It lives in the hands of those who never stopped resisting, even when the world stopped watching.
The Sahel is rising. Burkina Faso is charting a new future. Mali is resisting. Niger is standing up. But South Africa remains sedated, pacified by curated content and middle-class applause.
To the Black middle class: the story is being stolen in front of you. And you are letting it happen. You are not victims of it. You are accomplices.
To those of us who never stopped organising: the mic has never been ours. But the struggle always was.
We are the authors of our liberation, and we do not need those who do not do the work, who do not march boots on the ground besides us, who use the African subject as a social media content, to speak on our behalf. When the Sahel moment finally reaches us, it is not you who will be on the frontlines.
Those who have plundered our epistemology, carelessly, egotistically, and for their own gain, will not be rewarded.
Sipho Singiswa is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and social justice activist with a long-standing commitment to documenting and amplifying the voices of South Africa’s marginalised communities. A former student leader during the 1976 uprisings in Gugulethu and a former Robben Island political prisoner, he has remained deeply engaged in the struggle for economic and epistemic justice for South Africa’s native majority.