Last week, in a room in Johannesburg — small enough that someone joked we needed to turn up the aircon just to make space for honest thinking — activists, organisers, researchers, and advocates gathered for a conversation with no closing declarations, only questions worth carrying forward.
This was the Accountability Project’s strategy convening — a full day of sessions moving from the state of civil society in the GNU era to questions of corporate power, transparency, and the shrinking space for public accountability. We sat with the discomfort of asking what democratic engagement even means in 2026, on the eve of local government elections, in a country where more and more people are simply walking away from the formal democratic project.
Our conversation forms part of a longer journey: a series of conversations held across the country with community activists and affected communities, all trying to make sense of a political moment that keeps shifting beneath our feet.
At ground level, communities are increasingly fluent in local government mechanics. Independent candidates are emerging. Ward processes are being scrutinised. People understand where caucus decisions happen before the council floor. There is energy that belongs to no party and no NGO.
But that energy is emerging in a context of deep democratic fatigue. Voter participation continues to decline. A growing number of people, particularly young people, are organising outside of the structures that formal civil society recognises — not because they are apathetic, but because the formal structures have not earned their trust.
These conversations are not happening in isolation. Over this past weekend, events unfolding in Iran and the UAE have once again reminded us how fragile civic space can be — how quickly state power consolidates, how narratives are controlled, and how citizens are left negotiating fear, fatigue, and uncertainty. What’s happening beyond our borders isn’t someone else’s problem. It’s a mirror for the exact same questions we’re sitting with here – about democracy, accountability and who ultimately holds power.
The erosion is not only institutional, it is interior.
When communities in the Accountability Project’s research were asked what accountability means to them, they didn’t speak about oversight or legal mechanisms. They said: a duty of care. And when that duty is absent — when the promise isn’t kept, when the complaint is logged and nothing moves — people don’t just disengage from the mechanism. They disengage from the democratic project itself.
To make sense of what that interior erosion means — and what restoring it might require —I want to use an unconventional lens to get at something that political analysis alone keeps missing.
In the introduction to The Lemonade Reader[1], scholars Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis describe Beyoncé’s artistic practice as drawing on centuries of spiritual tradition, black aesthetic history, and the everyday textures of black womanhood to make something that is simultaneously personal, communal, and politically alive.
A few years ago, when I first engaged with this text in a reading group led by Prof Salma Lee-Shae Scharnick-Udemans during Covid, what struck me was the argument about agency. It challenged me to reconsider how narrowly we often define the political, and how urgently we need to expand our notions of political agency beyond protest alone.
Lindsey Stewart traces the debate between two ways of understanding what black cultural production is for: Richard Wright’s demand that it face outward — toward confrontation, struggle, resistance against the oppressor — and Zora Neale Hurston’s counterclaim on something more interior, more rooted, more concerned with the fullness of self that must exist before outward struggle can be sustained (Stewart, 2019).
Hurston’s strategy in writing about the folk figure High John de Conquer[2] appears first as “a whisper”, a will to hope. Before he walks the plantation, he lives inside people. He was one who “beat the unbeatable”, not through escape from brutality or open confrontation, but through wit, spirit, and an undiminishable interior life. What he gave enslaved people, Hurston tells us, was “an inside thing to live by”.
That thing was what gave people the capacity to endure conditions designed to extinguish their sense of self. Through this reference she points us to the politics of joy. Stewart argues that it is precisely this interior work — the cultivation of self-definition, the maintenance of joy and love and dignity as political categories — that both Wright and bell hooks miss when they critique Hurston and Beyoncé’s politics. What they mistake for an absence of politics is in fact a different kind of politics: one concerned with what Zandria Robinson calls “the alignment, the stillness, the readying, the quiet, before the twerk, the turn-up, the (social) movement” (Robinson 2016).
Might this “formation” also be a way of imagining community — of turning what looks like a personal test into a shared, collective struggle? If so, then mobilising toward an interior formation offers a generative account of agency.
The question, in my view, pressing against our convening last week is whether South African civil society has neglected its own formation work.
We have mastered the grammar of rights. We litigate. We draft submissions. We attend stakeholder consultations. The Constitutional Court jurisprudence is real and significant. But as someone observed sharply in the room: “winning on paper is not the same as winning in the world”.
What came through in the closing conversations was a call for a different kind of political imagination — one that does not simply defend existing democratic institutions or demand their destruction but asks harder questions about what democratic practice actually feels like from the inside.
In my own work — whether thinking about waqf [3] as liberation infrastructure, or about accountability as care, or faith as a material ethic rather than a private comfort — I keep returning to the same tension: compliance is not transformation. And proximity to power, however flattering, is not the same as holding it accountable.
And I wonder if the crisis of this moment is not simply electoral or institutional, but spiritual in the broadest most political sense?
Not some spiritual wash or retreat. Spiritual as formation.
We are in Ramadan‚ a period that is structurally about exactly this: the interior discipline that precedes and enables outward action. The cultivation of something inside that doesn’t collapse under pressure. The practice of returning, daily, to what you actually believe and why. Ramadan doesn’t produce transformation by announcing it. It produces it through the slow, unglamorous, often painful work of showing up to the practice even when you are tired, even when the results are invisible, even when the world outside is not cooperating.
If communities are already building knowledge at the edges of formal politics, already asking harder questions about who makes decisions and where, how does civil society meet that energy without instrumentalising it?
So, I don’t want to end with answers. I want to end with a question, inspired from the room, and that I think deserves to stay open.
What is the inside thing we are cultivating now, in our organisations, in our movements, in ourselves — that will determine what kind of democracy becomes possible next?
[1] Brooks, Kinitra D., and Kameelah L. Martin, eds. 2019. The Lemonade Reader: Beyoncé, Black Feminism and Spirituality. New York: Routledge.
[2] Hurston, Zora Neale. 1943. “High John de Conquer”. The American Mercury 57 (October): 450–458.
[3] A waqf is a permanent Islamic charitable endowment whose assets cannot be sold or transferred, with only the proceeds used to support social causes.
