The courage of those in China and Iran who are tired of being deprived of basic freedoms and agency, and who are risking imprisonment or worse rather than remaining silent, is inspirational. 

They force one to reassess the term ‘culture war’. Too often now associated with the crass media-baiting between woke and conservative camps, what is happening in Iran, China and Russia are culture wars; they are wars over what it means to be a woman, a citizen, a person.

As the cultural historian Simon Schama has argued, though a poem may not be able to stop a tank, the converse is also true. A culture war is a war over understandings of ourselves. 

This reality makes culture far more than an ephemeral “nice-to-have”. It places culture right where it should be – at the core of our notions of existence, of freedom, of our right to exist. 

Martin Luther King Jr declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. Sadly, all too often, it snaps. Four days after he spoke those words in 1968 at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, he was murdered in Memphis.

The Cold War, a series of hot wars and awkward détentes that was the formative experience of the baby boomer generation, was fought in the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam and in Angola’s Cuito Cuanavale, but it was equally a series of cultural conflicts over identity. 

Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were exponentially more corrosive to the adamantine rock face of Soviet authoritarianism than any rockets or missile. 

The rock anthem Wind of Change, rumoured to be the product of CIA soft power, was a constant theme of the upswelling of revolts that engulfed Russia and Eastern Europe in that long summer of 1989, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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It is becoming starkly apparent that those battles, which were supposedly won in 1989 in the often vaunted victory of freedom over tyranny, need to be refought. In fact, it is now clear that declaring it a victory was an absolute example of Western self-delusion. 

Nothing was won – rather, a singular interpretation was momentarily imposed on history. Those in Tehran, in Shanghai, in Kherson are paying the price for this appalling fallacy.

And as Songezo Zibi so eloquently writes in Daily Maverick, SA is not a bystander.

As the country was in the latter half of the 20th century, it is once again a key battleground. It is not good enough to expect solutions to come from within the political system, to be embryonic of the ANC. The structures are too rotten; they are incapable of reforming and ensuring the necessary renewal.

That can only come through collapse and rebirth. This reality drives those on the front line in Iran, China and Ukraine.

Through a series of false dawns, South Africans have deluded themselves that progress was possible within existing political and socioeconomic constructs. The events of the past few months have made it abundantly clear as to the extent of that misconception. 

Somewhere between Eskom and wads of cash being concealed in a sofa, it became obvious just how far South Africa – as a society, an economy, a body politic – has deteriorated.

South Africans need to heed the example of those on other front lines. 

Anger, and a realisation of the extent of the struggles that lie ahead, are critical if the country promised to South Africans in 1994 is ever to be attained. 

The role of culture will be fundamental. 

Just as the melodies of Hugh Masekela, the words of Nadine Gordimer and the art of Gerard Sekoto were more instrumental to the collapse of apartheid than any armed struggle, now there is an existential role to be played by South African creators to ensure their own culture war will be fought and won. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.