by ALI RIDHA KHAN
Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.
There is a particular theater 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.
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