By Rifqah Tifloen
Last week, I sat in a room at the Nelson Mandela Foundation with young activists for the Youth Hub from eight African countries — South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Botswana. Many had crossed borders to get there, uncertain and fearful while outside, anti-migrant marches were being planned to shut down the city. Inside, we were talking about solidarity in the same walls where Nelson Mandela once worked.
In the days afterwards I kept returning to the conversations we had at the hub. We talked about our solidarity practice, the cost of activism, AI, power, multiple genocides, infrastructures of care, mental health, belonging, religion, we disagreed about what solidarity requires and we talked about what young people are already doing that the sector may not recognise as activism. Around the same time, I read a Substack essay by Khadija Patel, where she argues that “the right to move is the most contested right of our time. It is being challenged everywhere, by walls and wire and hostile policy and organised violence”. And yet, we were still able to gather.
This was exactly the contradiction the Hub was operating inside of. A country built by people who once needed passes to move through their own land is now, in places, asking other Africans to produce the same kind of paperwork to prove they are allowed to exist here.
As part of the pre-work for the learning hub, youth activists were invited to bring an object, photograph, or item that represented where they come from and the struggle they are most engaged in, something more personal. It was an invitation to begin with ourselves.
I found myself reflecting on how often, in social justice work, there exists a separation from what we do and who we are, even though the two are deeply connected. For me, as a Muslim, the idea of tawḥīd—Oneness—shapes my practice. Our lives, our relationships, and our struggles are not separate from one another. It asks me to keep returning to the work of resisting division, both around me and within me.
The hub seemed to enact exactly this. A photograph of a first volunteer mission sixteen years earlier, with a uniform that cost more than the year’s stipend. A dissertation journal opened to a quote from Angela Davis on the discipline of imagining a different world. A disposable menstrual pad beside a reuseable one. A notepad carrying compressed grief. A Capulana cloth. A cowrie shell. A paintbrush. A jazz vinyl record. A cup of water.
None of these were presentations. None of these were organisational strategies. They were lives.
Although the struggles were different—menstrual dignity, polluted rivers, mental health, climate justice, education, belonging—the objects showed much more. They spoke about relationship. About memory. About care. About places and people that had made these young activists who they were before they ever joined an organisation.
At a time when movements such as March and March have amplified anti-migrant sentiment and Afrophobic narratives, what does it mean for organisations like ours—organisations that claim solidarity as both a value and a practice—to convene across borders? The timing of the Hub made these questions impossible to avoid.
What does it mean to invite African partners into South Africa at this particular moment? Is creating a shared space enough, or does the moment ask something more of us? How do we make our position against Afrophobia visible—not only in our statements, but in the way we host, accompany, advocate, and act? What responsibilities do we carry towards our fellow Africans who continue to experience violence, displacement, and exclusion in a country that has so often spoken the language of liberation?
Perhaps this is why beginning with ourselves mattered. Before we could ask what solidarity requires of organisations, we first had to remember what it asks of people.
These are not comfortable questions, nor are there easy answers. But perhaps they are precisely the questions that solidarity demands we sit with. If solidarity exists only within the walls of a convening, or in statements, does it endure? What might it look like for solidarity to become a sustained practice rather than an event—one that is willing to confront the realities of the present while imagining different possibilities for the future?
South Africa itself invites us into this tension. If the Freedom Charter still asks us to believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, then who is responsible for making that true — and are we willing to be counted among them?
