THE DAY THE STRUGGLE WENT CORPORATE

There was no drumroll. No grand announcement. No whisper even. But it happened — quietly, suddenly, and irrevocably. Somewhere between the last exile’s return and the first BEE deal signed, the South African liberation struggle changed outfits. It swapped khaki fatigues and wood-handled AKs for navy-blue suits, Montblanc pens, and private equity portfolios. That day, the struggle went corporate.

At first, it felt like victory.

For decades, the architects of the struggle fought not for title deeds and car allowances, but for dignity. For the right to exist, speak, learn, lead. In prison, in exile, and in the underground, they endured the unimaginable so that future generations could live unshackled. When the gates of Robben Island opened and negotiations began in earnest, the idea was simple: liberation should now mean transformation. It was time to take the reins of power. Politically, yes, but also economically.

By the late 1990s, the symbols of victory were shifting. Comrades who once huddled over Marxist pamphlets in Lusaka or Dar es Salaam were now being seen in Sandton skyscrapers and five-star conference centres. The rallying cry of “the people shall govern” evolved into strategic board appointments, BEE scorecards, and shareholder activism.

Some wore it well. Men and women who had served long, difficult years emerged from exile with vision and rigor, eager to reform institutions and steward a new kind of capitalism rooted in justice. But for many others, especially those groomed in struggle circles but disconnected from post-liberation policy, the new terrain was confusing and seductive.

Deals were structured not around need or equity, but around access. Who you knew. What struggle résumé you carried. The scars on your back became entry tickets to the tendering process.

The term “Struggle Credentials” found new life.  No longer just a badge of honour, but a currency.

It would be disingenuous to pretend this evolution was all betrayal. For many, it was a genuine shift in the theatre of struggle. If capital had been the tool of oppression, then surely mastering it, reclaiming it, was the next phase of emancipation.

But as years went by, the lines blurred.

Suddenly, the language of freedom became interchangeable with financial jargon. Development was measured not by clinics or clean water, but by returns on investment. Public intellectuals who once challenged state power now issued press releases defending profit margins. And corporate events began with liberation songs, rendered in mezzo-soprano as background entertainment between keynote addresses.

The tragic brilliance of the South African story is that it was so well-intentioned. We wanted to believe that wealth could be wielded ethically. That capitalism could be tamed and Africanised. That executive power could be used to empower, not just enrich. But markets have no memory. And soon, neither did we.

In the process of “being taken seriously,” the movement adopted the postures of the very structures it once vowed to dismantle. Respectability became strategy. The revolution wore a Rolex and arrived late to the AGM.

Meanwhile, those who raised questions about extractive economics, about moral drift, about the marginalisation of communities were quietly pushed aside. “Idealist.” “Out of touch.” “Still stuck in the past.”

The halls of influence became less diverse in voice, even if more diverse in colour. The real thinkers, agitators, and grassroots leaders, many of them women, many of them youth, were left at the periphery. A friend once whispered at a posh dinner in Rosebank, “The problem isn’t that we joined the table. It’s that we stopped building new ones.”

Not everyone succumbed. There were those who tried and are still trying to reimagine power. To hold space between justice and profit. Thinkers like Mamphele Ramphele who never shied from critiquing the dilution of the liberation dream. Or Neville Alexander, who warned early on about replacing one elite with another.

Thuli Madonsela, who demonstrated that integrity could exist inside high office without being swallowed by it. Duma Gqubule, whose economic commentary continues to call out the illusions of inclusion. And artists like Zoe Molelekwa, whose brilliance whispered possibilities beyond markets and metrics, his music a protest, a promise.

Many remain unsung. Men and women who chose less glamorous paths. Social Workers, township educators, rural healthcare practitioners, all of them doing the real lifting, while history’s spotlight remained fixed on board appointments and billionaires.

In recent years, a peculiar trend emerged. As once-famous names passed on, obituaries would often reveal their “covert” roles in the struggle. “Underground operative,” “MK combatant,” “intelligence courier.” Sometimes the claims rang true. Other times, we squinted.

The struggle, it seemed, had become a blank check, filled in after death. As if legacy now required proximity to danger, even if retrofitted. The myth of resistance, however, does not need embellishment. What it needs is truth. And humility.

Because the real resistance was, and still is, unglamorous. Unrewarded. The woman who fed exiles with her last meal. The teacher who snuck in Black Consciousness literature. The nurse who hid activists during curfew. The ones who never got invited to sit on a board and never asked to be.

If the first liberation was political, and the second economic (however flawed), then perhaps a third is emerging: a moral and intellectual reawakening.

One where liberation is not measured by wealth or status, but by how we care for the most vulnerable. Where blackness is not sold back to us through branding. Where struggle is not a springboard to entitlement, but a commitment to service.

This doesn’t mean we must abandon ambition or success. It means interrogating its purpose. Is this power for self, or for society? Does our privilege extend a hand, or build a gate?

The next phase may yet belong to those who refuse the binary of poverty or excess. Those who demand nuance. Those who build cooperatives instead of empires. Those who teach. Who listen. Who hold memory with integrity.

The day the struggle went corporate was not a betrayal. It was a choice. One of many we will continue to face. But as history marches forward, we must ask ourselves, honestly: what kind of legacy are we building?

Are we forging tools of liberation, or simply wielding the old ones with different hands?

Let us return, as we must, to the intellectual courage of Steve Biko, who insisted that freedom was not about integrating into the master’s house but imagining an entirely different dwelling. Let us remember the poets, like Mandla Langa, who said, “I have learned that people at the bottom use others’ bodies to climb to the top”

And above all, let us make the struggle meaningful again, not by mythologizing it, but by living it.