There is a particular theatre to South African political life: we know how to gather, how to convene, how to fill auditoriums when history arrives clothed in urgency. We clap when we should clap. We nod with seriousness. We ask familiar questions with grave voices. And then we go home feeling as though participation is enough. Our gestures are precise, our cadences rehearsed. We have mastered the choreography of conscience.

On Sunday, October 26, as Francesca Albanese spoke, something in the room felt deeply familiar—a choreography of solidarity, ritualistic and almost liturgical. Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, had just delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg before coming to Cape Town’s Groote Kerk, where around 1,000 people packed the pews and overflowed onto the streets outside to listen. She praised South Africa’s decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice but called on the country—and on individuals—to go further: to end trade with Israel, to suspend all military and diplomatic ties, to stop consuming products from companies complicit in occupation. “Are you still drinking Coke?” she asked the audience. “Stop drinking Coca-Cola first and then blame the government.”

The applause was thunderous. It had the atmosphere of a revival meeting—righteous, moved, rehearsed. People repeated what we already know: that BDS matters, that sanctions work, that we must “raise awareness.” The question that always arrives, as predictably as applause, was asked again: What can we do? There was earnestness in the room, yes, and a beating heart. But there was also performance—an economy of optics that governs public conscience like a currency traded at a premium.

South Africans have built an identity on moral memory. We invoke ’94 like scripture, rehearsing the vocabulary of liberation as if reciting a catechism. We remember Sharpeville and Soweto with disciplined reverence. Yet too often, the memory becomes a mask. It is easy to say “Not in our name” when the world already expects it. It is far harder to move from memory to material action, to recognize that being anti-apartheid in 2025 is not radical but merely the minimum entry requirement for dignity. We mistake repetition for conviction. We confuse moral nostalgia with moral duty.

Sitting in that room, listening to Albanese, I realized the questions rarely change, not because we lack information, but because we cling to the comfort of asking them. We have turned inquiry itself into ritual. To ask What can we do? is safer than doing; it preserves our innocence, our distance, our sense of virtue. This is the seduction of optics—solidarity as ritual, not responsibility.

South Africa often positions itself as moral witness. But witness without consequence is not solidarity; it is spectatorship. We condemn the occupation, we denounce genocide, we mourn Gaza, but we also consume it. We share images like devotional icons, circulate grief like currency, and flood timelines with vocabulary that soothes us into believing we have acted. In this economy of optics, participation substitutes for commitment, and grief becomes theatre.

And then, of course, there is the United Nations—the grand stage of international morality. We must name the farce plainly: a structure that watches genocide and calls it procedure; a bureaucracy where veto power, that relic of imperial spoils, is treated as natural law; a club that preserves the colonial architecture of power and congratulates itself for its longevity. The UN is not broken—it functions exactly as designed. It observes, reports, debates, and issues statements like confetti while states bulldoze lives. It invites the arsonist to comment on fire safety. We pretend this is internationalism; in truth, it is administrative coloniality—a system built not to restrain power but to sanctify it.

Francesca Albanese spoke with clarity and courage, but the room—we, the audience—must interrogate ourselves. We have turned exceptional dissenters into icons, polished them with reverence until the sheen itself becomes a distraction. I wanted to ask her, “How do you navigate the idolatry and hero-worship, especially from liberal, often white audiences who convert moral courage into spectacle? Does this adulation depoliticize the struggle you represent?” We sanctify figures like her because sanctification feels like action. But icons can domesticate struggle. Hero worship is soft politics: it validates emotion without demanding confrontation.

The questions that haunt us remain unasked, perhaps because we already know their answers. How does the UN claim legitimacy when veto power replicates global settler logic? How does one speak truth within an institution structured to mute it? And what does it mean, for those of us in South Africa, to inhabit a nation that once defied empire but now mistakes its moral reputation for ongoing resistance?

When Albanese framed Palestine not simply through the lens of occupation but through the language of colonial erasure, she did what the UN refuses to do: name power as power. That vocabulary matters. It pierces the myth of neutrality that international law hides behind. Words can be weapons, but they can also be shields, and for too long, law has chosen the latter.

So what remains for us here in South Africa, a country that holds liberation memory like inherited scripture? Memory is not enough. Sympathy is not enough. Watching is not enough. There is no virtue in being historically adjacent to struggle if we only perform its remembrance. To “stand with Palestine” cannot mean simply attending the talk, posting the quote, or wearing the keffiyeh at the right conference. Liberation is not a brand identity. It requires cost. It requires risk. It requires material consequence, not just moral posturing.

The real question, then, is not “what can we do?”, but “what are we afraid to do?” Whose comfort are we protecting when we ask safe questions? Whose illusions do we preserve through politeness? Solidarity is not an optic; it is a disruption. It is noisy, uncomfortable, often isolating. It pulls reputation apart rather than polishing it.

South Africa remembers apartheid so that we might not repeat it, and yet we reproduce its most dangerous habit: believing that moral clarity is the same as moral action. We are too fluent in the language of outrage, too comfortable in the posture of virtue. History will not absolve spectatorship, even when spectators cheer for the right side. Liberation requires more than applause. It demands consequence. And the theatre of solidarity must finally give way to the labor of it. Otherwise, we are simply watching.