Given SHINGANGE
It wasn’t a planned conversation. We had both arrived at the office early, ahead of a morning meeting, and BN was sitting in his office with a coffee when I stopped at his door. I had mine too. We started talking — the way you do when the day hasn’t fully started yet and there’s no agenda pulling you somewhere else.
He had read my last piece, Twenty Years of Knowing Better, and he wanted to push back. He said he understood the argument, that the black middle class had made a quiet but consequential choice over the past two decades: private schools, private security, private healthcare. A deliberate withdrawal from public institutions, taking with it the skills, the voice, and the pressure those institutions desperately need. He got all of that. And then he asked the question that stuck: “So what are we supposed to do now?”
I didn’t have a quick answer. The silence stretched a bit.
And then he started talking. He told me about families he supports from where he comes from. About the school he helps, the kids he’s invested in, the quiet practical support he gives to people in his community. He wasn’t boasting. He was, without realising it, answering his own question. He’d already started. He just hadn’t connected what he was doing to anything larger than itself.
I left that conversation thinking about my own position in this argument. Because I am not exempt from it. I wrote that piece about withdrawal, and I mean every word of it — but I also avoid going back to the township. Not out of embarrassment or indifference. Partly out of something more immediate: the crime. The sense that returning, even briefly, carries a risk that I have now built a life around avoiding. And I suspect I am not alone in that. Many of the people I am writing about have the same calculation running quietly in the background, it is not always ideology keeping them away. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it is exhaustion. Sometimes it is both.
But I think we need to sit with that honestly, rather than use it as a permanent excuse. Because the distance is real, and the risk is real, but so is the need.
Then there are the professional women who got together and decided that young girls shouldn’t miss school because they can’t afford sanitary pads. No foundation, no strategy document, no launch event. Just: we saw something broken that we could fix, and we fixed it. Month after month.
These are not rare exceptions. They are evidence of something much larger that is already quietly happening, largely unseen, largely unconnected.
But before we celebrate, we need to name something uncomfortable.
There is a particular story that a significant portion of the black middle class tells itself. It goes something like this: I grew up in a township or a rural area. I worked hard. I studied. I sacrificed. And now I can afford private healthcare, private schooling, a home in a secure estate. That is the measure of how far I have come. The implication — sometimes spoken, often just felt — is that those who remain behind simply haven’t worked hard enough. That the distance between where they are now and where they came from is a distance they earned, and therefore one they are entitled to maintain.
I have a serious problem with this view.
Not because the hard work wasn’t real, it was. But because it mistakes a private escape from a broken system for a solution to that system. It confuses personal achievement with collective progress. And it quietly erases the reality that many people in those townships and rural areas are working just as hard, under far more constrained conditions, without the same access to opportunity that made the middle class exit possible.
The skills that got you out are not separate from where you came from. They are, in many cases, the exact skills that are missing in the institutions those communities depend on. The accountant who now works in Sandton grew up in a community where school governing bodies don’t understand their own budgets. The human resources professional in a corporate tower comes from a place where clinic committees have no idea how to hold facility managers accountable. The engineer in the northern suburbs was once a child in an area where school infrastructure has been deteriorating for decades. The knowledge gap between where they are and where they came from is not a reason to stay away. It is precisely the reason to go back, even temporarily, even partially.
And here is the thing: you don’t have to move back. You don’t have to give up what you’ve built. The visit to the township for a funeral, a family gathering, a holiday weekend — that already happens. The question is whether you leave anything behind when you go. Whether you stop in at the school and offer what you know. Whether you spend an afternoon helping a struggling family navigate a government process you understand and they don’t. Whether you use your standing, in your profession, in your network, in your community, to name what isn’t working and demand better.
So what does deliberate re-engagement actually look like?
For the individual, it starts with honesty about what you have. Not money necessarily — skills. An accountant can help a school governing body understand its budget and its rights. A human resources professional can help a community organisation manage its people properly. A health professional can spend time at a public clinic and then use their standing to raise what they find publicly. A teacher or academic can offer tutoring or mentoring to young people in their home community. These are not acts of charity. They are professional skills applied in a different room, a room that desperately needs them.
For those who want to act collectively, the model is simple: find two or three people with complementary skills, identify one specific problem in one specific place, and address it consistently. Not once. Consistently. The coordination problem is real, most people don’t know where to plug in. But that itself is a problem someone with organisational skills could solve, by building the connection between willing professionals and institutions that need them.
For employers and professional associations, the opportunity is to stop treating social investment as a separate activity from core competency. A financial services firm whose staff run financial literacy sessions in township schools is doing something aligned and useful. An engineering firm that deploys its people to assess and fix school infrastructure is contributing something that cannot be bought with a donation. Skills-based engagement, not cheque-writing is where the real leverage is.
What BN and the sanitary pad collective are doing matters. But it works best when it is understood not as filling gaps the state has abandoned, but as a form of presence that generates pressure for those gaps to be closed permanently. The quiet ones deserve their recognition. And then they deserve to be asked the harder question: what would it look like to stop doing this quietly, and start doing it deliberately?
The black middle class does not need to choose between the life they have built and the communities they came from. But they do need to stop treating that distance as proof of arrival. The measure of how far you have come is not how completely you have left. It is what you carry back with you, and what you are willing to do with it.
Given SHINGANGE 