Earlier this month, I went with my 18-year-old daughter to see the South African singer Thandiswa Mazwai perform with her band at a music festival in Manhattan.
Many of my fellow South African expatriates were in the audience. As we took our seats, my daughter, Rosa, noticed concertgoers waving South African flags. You rarely see such displays outside political or sporting events, but many South Africans seem to be having a moment of self-assertion and patriotism now that our government has brought a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for its actions in Gaza, solidifying its place on the world stage in solidarity with Palestinians.
On the eve of the hearing, a friend messaged me from Cape Town: “It feels a little bit like Christmas Eve or something here. Or the night before a big final.” Because of the time difference, I watched a recorded version once I got to my office on Jan. 11, the first of two days of hearings. By then, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on Palestine, had already sent a message on X that “watching African women & men fighting to save humanity” from the “ruthless attacks supported/enabled by most of the West will remain one of the defining images of our time. This will make history whatever happens.”
As a Black South African who grew up during the nation’s liberation struggle and came of age watching the birth of South African democracy, Albanese’s words resonated for me. So does the case, regardless of the outcome on Friday, when the court issued a preliminary ruling that called on Israel to take steps to prevent genocide in Gaza but did not demand a cease-fire.
The South Africans in the court that day represented the country that many of us had imagined as we tried to think beyond apartheid to a new country. The lawyers’ last names — Hassim, Ngcukaitobi, Dugard, Du Plessis — evoked a number of the nation’s population groups: Indian South Africans, Xhosas, English-speaking whites and Afrikaners. On the bench (countries that are party to a dispute at the International Court of Justice may nominate a judge to hear the case) was Judge Dikgang Moseneke. As a teenager, he had been imprisoned on Robben Island, where he met and befriended Nelson Mandela, and after democracy came, he was elevated to South Africa’s Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest judicial body.
This group in The Hague, in its diversity, represented a country whose national identity is a product of collective struggle and a rejection of the ethnonationalist blood-and-soil politics that South Africa left behind when we defeated legal apartheid. That kind of politics seemed to many of us to define Israel’s policy toward Palestinians; for years, the country’s now-governing African National Congress has made common cause with the Palestinians. In the international court, these South Africans were at once fighting for, and helping us imagine, nationhood built on shared struggles and ideals rather than group identities.