The Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture took place on June 12, 2025 at the Vaal University of Technology in Johannesburg. The occasion brought together students, elders, intellectuals and movement leaders to reflect on the towering legacy of Walter Sisulu—one of the most grounded and enduring figures of South Africa’s liberation struggle.

Among the speakers were members of the Sisulu family, university leaders, and invited dignitaries. But it was Allan Boesak, delivering the keynote address, who turned the gathering into something more than commemoration. He transformed it into a political moment. A gust. A gathering of winds.

Allan Boesak stepped up to the podium with a voice that surged from the belly of struggle. This was no ceremony. It was an awakening. His words moved through the hall like a sudden gust through dry grass, lifting the dust, rattling the comfort, opening the space for memory, truth and flame. This was the wind returning.

He began with the image of Walter Sisulu in the dock in 1960, charged with treason. Across town, Harold Macmillan addressed the white Parliament with his crafted speech about the winds of change. Boesak refused the mythology. Macmillan came to preserve empire, not dismantle it. His words carried a breeze designed to soothe, to soften, to redirect the storm into bureaucratic containment. That breeze moved through boardrooms and capitals. It promised adjustment. It carried control.

Sisulu, Boesak reminded us, stood in a different wind. A wind rising from below. A wind that carried the anger of the Defiance Campaign, the vision of the Freedom Charter, the footsteps of the Women’s March, the cries that would soon echo from Sharpeville. What Boesak named the headwinds of freedom. Winds born in the lungs of those who had nothing but their voices. Winds that carry the sound of boots in the street and fists in the air. Winds that refuse management.

Boesak reached across geographies and generations. From the salt march in India to the Mau Mau in Kenya. From the rebellion of 1857 to the mines of Malaysia. From Dona Kimpa Vita’s spiritual defiance to Lumumba’s last breath. From Sankara’s righteous fire to Biko’s unbroken mind. These winds have never settled. They have circled the globe. They have returned in every uprising. Each time a people have refused submission, the wind has blown again.

He named the systems that still stalk the continent. The financial nooses, the surveillance machines, the invisible wars. He named the deep-state architecture of empire. The Military Industrial Financial Media Intelligence Congressional bloc that shapes the conditions of life and death in the Global South. He reminded us that Nkrumah saw it. That Cabral died naming it. That Lumumba was eliminated for refusing to serve it. Each time the wind rose, the response came quickly. A coup. A bullet. A new puppet with a Western smile.

Boesak then turned to South Africa. The wind that once roared through its landscape of African agency has thinned. The ANC walked willingly into the arms of capital. BEE became a disguise. Transformation became a slogan for looting. Wealth remains in the hands of a few, while the many are fed policies and platitudes. Sasol was sold. Profits left the country. The mines still bleed the land. The poor are told to wait while ministers grow fat. The language of liberation is spoken in the accent of empire.

And yet, the air is shifting again.

He pointed to the Sahel. To Burkina Faso. Mali. Niger. A new gust is rising. Young leaders are speaking with clarity. They are closing foreign bases. They are reclaiming resources. They are building from the ground. This is not a breeze of hope drifting through think tanks. This is a wind returning to form. Unapologetic. Rooted. Dangerous to those who benefit from stillness.

He did not present these shifts as spectacle. He presented them as signal. The continent is stirring. The weather is changing. The people are remembering. And the question that hangs over us all is whether South Africa will rise into this wind or retreat into the arms of its former masters.

After Boesak spoke, I sat in the weight of his words. They moved through the chest like thunder waiting to break. They did not dissipate. They gathered. His voice pulled something ancient from the room. A memory older than liberation slogans. A wind older than this republic.

This is a clarion call. A call to Black Consciousness. A call to African resurgence. A call at a time when the West has fixed its gaze once again on the land, the minerals, the water, the flesh. A time when the GNU prepares the ground for another erasure. A time when everything rooted in African knowing, feeling and being stands on the edge of annihilation. Before it is disappeared. Absorbed into the white hunger that does not sleep.

The occasion was meant to honour Walter Sisulu. Boesak brought more than honour. He brought embodiment. He returned Sisulu to the frontlines. He reminded us that we are not post-struggle. We are still inside it. That the storm has not passed. It waits at the gate. It builds in the silence. It circles through the youth. It gathers behind the mountains.

We are the country we create. The wind is rising. The question now is whether we face it or let it pass us by.

* Gillian Schutte is a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

IOL Opinion

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