Karen Willenberg

A portent is a sign or warning of events that are yet to come.  

I like the word “portent”, it has a mythic quality and evokes the idea that we might have some access to divine patterns in the chaos of current events. Somehow, it also offers a less depressing way of thinking about the world right now. My late mother kept all the wisdom about portents in our family and, from them, she would discern all sorts of things, from illness to financial trouble, pregnancies and conflicts. In many cultures, the world is still rich with signs and phenomena to be interpreted by those trained in such matters. Portents are mythological red flags, early warning signs, waving in our faces to alert us to trouble. If this sounds too much like superstition, consider that the foremost readers of portents in our day and age are the political and financial analysts who pick through the apparent randomness of the present to find patterns and give us clues about the future. The thing to know about portents is this - they are prophetic because they give us a glimpse into what the future might look like, but that future is not predetermined. A portent may prefigure future outcomes, but those outcomes are never fixed and inevitable. Those who know about these things tell us that portents shine a spotlight on what must be addressed in the present to avert future catastrophe, but they help us only if we can read the signs. In folk tales, wisdom comes not just from observing the portent, but from understanding its implications and interpreting its lessons without arrogance.

What if we used the mythology of portents to think about the “Gen Z protests” that are spreading across the African continent? For a start, we would have to interpret these events as portents, which means recognizing the scenes unfolding in Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Madagascar and Morocco, not as isolated incidents, but as a series of signs that are repeating and amplifying in the present to give us a glimpse of the future, one marked by widespread social unrest and instability. Without necessarily using the word, several commentators have already recognized these events as portents, because they have understood what these early signs of youth outrage means for a continent where 60% of the population is under 25. As protests grow in number and scale, more people are raising the alarm that these are only the foreshocks of what is yet to come, the early rumblings that precede a major seismic event.

Of course, it's never enough to just observe that these events are taking place and to recognize them as portents, we must also try to understand the nature of the danger being foretold, because this is the only way we can heed the warning presented by the portent.  On the question of the meaning of these portents, it really depends on who you ask. Approach a government minister in Nigeria or Kenya and they might tell you these are signs that the youth have been corrupted by Western values. Ask a protester and they might tell you these are signs that the time is up for ageing African leaders who are not equipped to govern in the modern world. Usually, this is presented as an epic battle between two generations over the future of the Continent.  Discussions mostly focus on the age differences between African leaders and their citizens, often presented as the biggest obstacle to any meaningful change. If this assessment is correct, then political transition from ageing to more youthful leaders becomes the only viable course of action. Is this the lesson to be taken from recent events? Have we understood the portents correctly? Any framing that makes age the only relevant consideration, overlooks the real possibility that new leadership (of whatever age), may not necessarily bring about improvements in the way government functions. The reality, admittedly less juicy,  is that good governance requires the continuous work of making improvements to transparency, accountability and public participation, regardless of who is in power.  There is a danger that, by focusing only on age, episodic political transition might be prioritized over the ongoing work that is needed to build effective institutions. 

Protesters are very alive to the challenges of restoring governance. Although much of the focus has been on legitimate grievances about deteriorating socio-economic conditions, rising cost of living, unemployment and corruption, the issue of governance is a consistent theme, captured most succintly by the Nigerians’ #EndBadGovernance.  We see that anger is being directed, not only at what is being decided by current leaders, but at how decisions are being made. A new generation, deeply disillusioned with governance failures are demanding the opportunity to contribute ideas, strategies and solutions to the problems facing their countries. It is regrettable that some have sought to dismiss demands for inclusive and participatory decision making as disrespectful of African values. The Continent has rich and ancient traditions of decision-making that are grounded in values of consensus building, inclusion, accountability and moral leadership. If anything, these young citizens are advocates of restoring values that have too long been neglected. The irony is that most of the countries rocked by protests has made some form of constitutional commitment to public participation in decision making as a core national value. Consultations are happening all the time, yet outcomes remain completely unresponsive to the demands of ordinary people. Having seen the hollowness of these commitments, young Africans have lost faith in formal participatory structures and now increasingly feel that “hostile activism” (which includes attacking people online, threatening or committing violence, intentionally spreading misinformation, or damaging public property) is their only option for effecting change.

By 2030, Africa’s youth population is projected to reach 940 million, making up 42% of the global youth population. By 2050, one in every three young people globally will be African. We hear these stats all the time and are very quick to celebrate this demographic dividend, but slower to engage with its implications. The Ghanaian economist George Ayittey described Africa’s future as a struggle between hippos and cheetahs. For Ayittey, the cheetahs are the fast-moving, new generation who will rebuild Africa, but he recognized that the cheetah’s would first have to contend with the hippos, the generation of leaders who favour control over consultation and obedience over engagement.  At the moment, we live on a continent lead by hippos, but the hippos find themselves surrounded by ever growing numbers of cheetahs, who are thinking, acting and solving problems in ways unfamiliar to them. 

We have tended to focus on differences in the median ages of hippo leaders and cheetah citizens, presenting this as an intractable generational divide, with the chasm between the two generations being simply uncrossable. But does this focus on age not leave us all poorer? At the end of the day, whether you’re a hippo or cheetah is really a question of mindset, not birth date. The primary characteristic of the hippo mindset is complacency. Ayitteh was most frustrated with hippos who seem quite content to wallow in bad decision making and poor outcomes. What he admired most about cheetahs is their refusal to accept the status quo and their willingness to drive change.  Approaching this divide based on values rather than age, opens up more opportunities for building alliances with those of us who may look like hippos, but think like cheetahs. Every successful movement needs allies to achieve their goals and this is particularly true for the monumental task of fixing governance and restoring neglected values of participation, consultation and consensus building to public decision making. Seen in this light, simply declaring an unbroachable stalemate between generations could become a type of arrogance that might too easily afflict both sides. There is some humility to be practiced by actively looking for those relationships and those spaces where values are aligned and improvements in transparency, responsiveness and public participation can start to be implemented. 

I think we may be getting closer now to discerning a lesson in recent portentous events.  There are many stories in which leaders and heroes choose to ignore portents and every time, it is arrogance that proves their undoing.  The king fails to heed the portents sent to warn him and ends up losing his throne, because of his own arrogant pride and a blindness to his personal limitations. The portent is then a test of humility, that illusive quality we used to value in leaders, but which is so rarely celebrated in our self-aggrandising world. We don’t talk about humility much any more, but it was once considered the foundation of all other virtues and perhaps there is a lesson for all us to cultivate humility by acknowledging that our individual perspectives are always limited, recognising that there is value in the contributions of others, and finding a way to prioritize collective needs above personal ego. 

#TeamCheetah

It was not so long ago that the vast majority of South Africans were completely excluded from political decision making – we could not vote or participate in decisions that impacted our lives.  Because of this history, the ability to participate, not only in elections, but also in decision making is particularly valuable and important in this country. Public participation is a cornerstone of our democratic project and looking around, it certainly appears that there are no shortages of opportunities for the public to participate in consultation processes.

On any given day, you’ll find hearings, working groups, commissions, task forces and advisory bodies in every sector busily engaging the public on critical decisions. If recent media reports about the budgets for certain processes are to be believed, we devote considerable time and money to these activities. Exactly how much is spent on public consultations each year is not disclosed, but judging by the level of activity, the investment is significant. With so much consultation going on, we would expect to be reaping all the benefits associated with participatory decision making,  in particular the strengthening of public trust in institutional decision making. Instead, we encounter the opposite. Despite all the resources being devoted to public consultation, the level of public trust in institutions is in steady and steep decline. Surveys report that dissatisfaction with government is growing and leading to increased risks of major social instability.  Alongside declining trust, we find rising support for “hostile activism”, a term used to describe aggressive forms of engagement that include attacking people online, threatening or committing violence, intentionally spreading misinformation, or damaging public property. The Edelman 2025 Trust Barometer report that 4 out of 10 South Africans now support the use of hostile activism to drive change should be of deep concern to all of us.

It seems young people are particularly affected. In survey data, South African youth report feeling marginalised and excluded from formal decision making, particularly on the big issues that affect them. With roughly 21 million young people in the country, this is our largest demographic block and commentators have long been raising alarms about their progressive disengagement from formal processes,  as evidenced by behaviours like declining participation in elections (many will know that the turnout of young voters in the 2024 election was the lowest since South Africa’s democratic transition).  We should not be too quick to write this off as apathy, anyone paying close attention to the recent wave of Gen Z protests that have been rocking the globe will know that young people have not disengaged, they have moved to alternative, digital spaces to discuss, debate and organise on civic issues. In these spaces, they are very active - joining online communities, engaging with topical issues, collaborating with other creators and organising protest action. Their platforms of choice are social media, but this shift has its own dangers. The use of algorithmic rankings, coupled with the lack of moderation and widespread misinformation on these platforms, poses a real risk that young people will be further marginalised by socially divisive content.

The question is this, if we are spending huge amounts of time and money on consultations, supposedly for the purpose of engaging the public on the issues that impact their lives, then why are outcomes so poor and hostility so high? I’m not the first to ask this question and there is some consensus emerging. The explanation put forward most frequently is that public participation has become purely performative, an elaborate show staged for the public to create the illusion that they are part of a decision making process. All the many gatherings that are being convened to engage the public are either talk-shops with no authority or box ticking exercises to comply with legal requirements. This is view is expressed by many different commentators, most of whom conclude that protest action has become so violent and destructive, because South Africans feel they have no other options, having lost all faith in the prospect that constructive engagement and participation might actually effect change. It is a damning indictment of our attempts at participatory decision making,  but can we dismiss this assessment outright? It certainly goes some way to explaining how high levels of formal consultation have somehow delivered radically declining levels of participation and increased reliance on hostile action.  

We have become a cynical lot and not without reason, but we should guard against the danger that our cynicism provides an excuse for not trying to change what is so clearly broken. We need to rescue public participation, for a multitude of historical and constitutional reasons, but right now, simply to restore some trust in the viability of constructive engagement. An attempt at doing just this is currently underway on a national level, but I’m more interested in the small wins. For instance, where can we find or create spaces in the current governance practices of our institutions to enable meaningful participation by the public? Our approach to public participation has remained largely unchanged for decades and this is an area where innovation is long overdue. As one example, consider our ongoing fixation with in-person discussion. We can all appreciate that this is an incredibly rich format, but cost and time constraints mean that there is always a limit on who can participate. In most processes, organisers try to curate participants to ensure that diverse constituencies are represented, but inevitably in-person meetings favour big business, organisation leadership and subject-matter experts. The end result is that ordinary citizens are unable to participate, remain excluded from decision making and the cycle of distrust perpetuates. 

Why are we not piloting any of the incredible software tools that allow civic engagement to happen online? As of 2025, approximately 50.8 million people in South Africa have internet access, representing 78.9% of the population. Online deliberation is not a remote fantasy, but offers a viable way to deepen engagement.  There are tools available right now ( many on an open-source basis) that have been specifically designed for public participation. These are not polls or focus groups for measuring public opinion, but digital platforms that enable large scale engagement, in real time, on specific proposals. The magic of these tools is that they combine public input with statistical analysis to show where there is consensus or division on particular issues and support a constructive engagement on finding solutions.  These tools are also not untested, having already been used by countries like Taiwan, Canada, UK and Brazil to enable consensus building on a national scale. This is just one example of innovation in the public participation space that could really start to move the dial.

It is hardly headline grabbing, but restoring good governance will mean working on continuous improvements to transparency, accountability and public participation, regardless of who is in power.  The risk is that by constantly waiting for big bang changes to be initiated from the top, we neglect initiatives that could enable change from the bottom. Let’s start collecting small wins by supporting innovative projects and pilots that will begin to drive much-needed  transformation in the area of public participation.

I have heard democracy’s origin story told and retold many times. Most of us know the broad outlines, democracy was invented by the Greeks in the 5^th century BCE. In that period, political power in the city state of Athens was concentrated in the hands of an aristocratic elite. Their exercise of power was abusive and they maintained their privileges at the expense of ordinary Athenians, leading to widespread social unrest. As the society became increasingly unstable, the ruling class was forced to find solutions, eventually introducing a series of reforms which gave ordinary people a voice in decision making. The Greeks coined the word “democracy” to describe this new system where the demos or people would rule.  The system disappears after the Roman invasion of Greece, but emerges again in England centuries later, advances to the US, across Europe and eventually spreads to the rest of the world over the last 200 years. Here’s the issue, in all the versions of this story that I hear repeated by experts,  there is never any mention of Africa or of Africa’s contributions to democracy.

What is repeated constantly is the single-lineage story about democracy’s trajectory from Athens to the rest of the world, a story so dominant, that you would be forgiven if, like me, you're not aware that this story is increasingly regarded as false. A competing argument made by several historians is that Africa, and not Athens should be recognized as the birthplace of democracy. Their theories about the African origins of democracy start with good questions, like where did the Greeks get the idea of democracy from? What would have inspired the crazy idea that ordinary people should participate in important decisions when nothing in Athenian society at the time even hinted at this?  These scholars consider, not unreasonably, that ideas for democracy must have come from somewhere else. In their search for possible sources, they turn to a society which was older and more advanced than the Greeks, a society with a three thousand year head start that would already have gone through different types of political organization and devised different systems of governance. They look to Africa and more specifically, to ancient Egypt which had attained a level of stability that the Greeks would have envied and which had structures to incorporate the input of ordinary people in their design of public policy.  The argument goes like this - we know from historical texts  that the Egyptians were greatly admired by the Greeks, we also know that Greek scholars would regularly travel to Egypt to study their laws and customs, so it is not unreasonable to propose Egypt as the source of Greek democratic reforms. For the advocates of this argument, Africa should rightfully be recognized as the birthplace of democracy, not Greece. 

This argument has been widely criticised, the main counter-arguments being that it presents an overly romanticized version of ancient Egypt ( which institutionally, operated as a theocratic monarchy under the rule of the pharaohs), that there are no historical records to prove Egypt as the source of Athenian ideas about democracy and finally, that it is not grounded in historical analysis, but looks more like misguided political project  unsupported by any proof. We can’t deal with all these counter-arguments here, except to acknowledge that there is no scholarly consensus that Africa invented democracy. However, what even the fiercest critics will concede is that Africa had practices of participatory decision making that pre-dated the Greeks by thousands of years and that these practices are a likely source of inspiration for Athenian thinking about their own democratic reforms - Africa may not have invented democracy, but democracy’s roots are undeniably African.  Travelling to ancient Egypt, the Greeks would have seen a highly efficient and organised administrative system in action. They would have observed the operation of  local councils or courts in which ordinary people could discuss and resolve issues collectively. They would have learned about the Egyptian concept of ma’at, which formed the foundation of their approaches to governance and embedded ideals of truth, justice and fairness into the exercise of power.  That these encounters with alternative approaches to governance provided inspiration for Greek thinking about their own governance challenges appears not to be in question.

When it comes to practices of participatory governance, the contributions of pre-colonial Africa do not end with the Egyptians. There are rich seams running all across the Continent that provide abundant resources for thinking about how societies can make decisions. The  Oromo nation in Ethiopia developed a system known as Gadaa, which provided for rotational leadership and collective decision making. The Igbo nation in Nigeria held assemblies for collective decision making through open discussion. The Ashanti nation in Ghana operated a complex council system and held open forums for discussions on communal issues. The Tswana nation created the kgotla or public assembly for the open date of community issues. The Sotho nation in Lesotho and South Africa relied on public gatherings called lekgotla to build consensus in decision making. The Zulu and Xhosa nations in South Africa relied on public assemblies called inkundla or imbizo for consensus building. The San in the Kalahari region practiced consensus-based governance which took the form of community councils. I know I’m not doing justice to these systems by listing them, but I hope the list starts to convey the scale and the depth of African solutions to the challenges of participatory decision making. Recognition of these ancient practices is growing and leading to new stories about democracy’s roots. The single-lineage origin story is seductively simple, but is now widely regarded as incomplete. While it is appealing to credit the invention of democracy to a particular group of people, in a particular place and time, scholars are recognising that forms of democratic practice appeared in different cultures at different times. This approach takes seriously the profusion of councils, assemblies and public decision making bodies that were operating in the ancient world and demands a rethinking about democracy's origin story, not as a Western invention that was later exported to different countries, but as a dynamic process of invention and reinvention taking place around the world as  human beings in different settings sought to create and implement solutions for dealing with the age old problems that we are still facing today - how to limit the exercise of power by the few at the expense of the many and how to expand participation in decision making. 

Learning about the uniquely African approaches to democratic governance is more important now than ever. We find ourselves faced with exercises of power that are failing to serve people effectively. In too many places, decision making by leaders has become corrupt, unjust and destructive to the interests of ordinary people.  We can draw on these ancient practices to inform a critical view of what we see happening around us today, not based on external sources but reinforced by the ideals of consultation, accountability and communal consent that were once at the heart of African governance systems. More importantly, as the world searches for ways to revitalize flagging democratic energies, the practices implemented by these great civilisations offer a tremendous resource for new thinking. It is our turn to engage with the age old problems of how to limit power and increase participation in decision making. My hope is that a closer study of African exemplars will provide the world with much needed inspiration for the next wave of democratic innovation.