Author: Sandile Memela*

The middle class is not one thing. It is not a single, neat block that thinks, votes, or acts the same way. It is split, uneven, and easily divided.

That matters, because some think that we keep using “middle class” as an insult and as an excuse. Or to allegedly stop people from speaking up. But we know that for many, having a bond, a car, and medical aid automatically makes you soft, silent, and self-serving.

Yes, it does when it should not.

The fact that you enjoy middle-class benefits does not disqualify you from being a genuine and committed activist. Comfort is not a crime. Privilege is not necessarily proof of betrayal.

History may judge you by your payslip, your suburb, or the car in your driveway. You can even fly first class if you wish.  But life will judge you by what you do, here and now, not by what you say and not by the privileges you happen to enjoy.

You can live in a complex with a security gate and still show up to march. You can have a medical aid and still fight for a public health system that works for everyone. You can send your kids to a decent school and still demand that every child gets one.

It is not a contradiction to be middle class and to be radical. In fact, some of the people who have shaken the foundations of unjust systems came from the very class those systems were built to protect. They chose to turn on the machine that fed them.

So why does it feel like a contradiction most of the time?

Because the middle class, as a tendency, leans conservative. They are reactionaries. And for a reason.

We know blacks do not own the economy. Thus you can lose your socalled midle class status within 100 days after losing a job.

Thus, when you have just enough to lose, you get careful. You have a mortgage. A job with benefits. A child in Grade 10. You have climbed one or two rungs and you do not want the ladder kicked away.

That makes people cling to the status quo. Preserving neo-colonialism of a special kind. Not always out of cruelty. Often out of fear. Self – preservation.

Fear of falling. Fear of instability. Fear that change will cost you what you worked for. Fear of being forced to go back to the townships.

That fear is selfish, yes. But it is also human. And if activists do not understand it, they will keep preaching to an empty room.

The real test is not whether you have middle-class comforts. Or that you have white neighbours. The test is what you do with them.

Do you use your access to open doors for others, or to pull them shut behind you? Do you use your education to question power, or to defend it? Do you speak when it is risky, or only when it is safe and on brand?

You can be comfortable and still be dangerous to an unjust system. But only if you are willing to risk the comfort.

That is the line. Not income. Not postcode. Action. What have you done in the face of injustice and inequality?

JACINTA NGOBESE-ZUMA AND MARCH AND MARCH: COMFORT THAT CHOSE CONSCIENCE

This is where the abstract becomes flesh.

Look at Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, leader of March and March. By every outward measure, she is middle class. She has the education, the network, the lifestyle that millions of South Africans do not have. She could have done what millions of others do: keep her head down, protect her lane, and turn a blind eye.

In an unjust and unequal society, that is the easiest option. Keep the privilege. Don’t make noise. Don’t be called names. Don’t lose contracts, friends, or invitations.

She didn’t.

Instead, she broke out of the so-called middle-class ranks and chose to stand with the underdog. As the face of March and March, she has put her name, her time, and her reputation on the line to speak truth to power about one of the most volatile issues in South Africa today: illegal immigration and the collapse of law, services, and jobs in poor communities.

This is not a popular position in boardrooms. Among whites who control the economy. It is not a safe position on Twitter. It costs you. But she did it anyway.

That is the point.

You cannot say “middle class people never do this.” Because here is one who did. She used the very access and voice that her class position gave her, not to protect the gate, but to ask why the gate is keeping the wrong people out while letting the country bleed.

March and March is not a charity march. It is a confrontation. It says: if the state will not enforce its own laws, if hospitals are collapsing, if schools are overrun, if jobs are disappearing, then citizens must march. And they must do it repeatedly until someone listens.

The backlash was immediate. She was called xenophobic, populist, divisive. People are quick to question: who funds her? That is what happens when you touch a live wire. But notice what she did not do: she did not retreat back into comfort. She did not issue a press statement and disappear. She kept marching.

That is what makes the middle-class-radical not a contradiction, but a choice.

SOUTH AFRICA: A MELTING POT WITH NO MELTING

To understand why her choice matters, you have to understand the country she is marching in.

South Africa is complex and chaotic. Thirty years into democracy, we are still a society trying to redefine its vision and values around economic justice and equality.

We are a melting pot that has not melted. We have 12 official languages, 9 provinces, two economies, and a border that everyone crosses. We have a Constitution that promises dignity for all, and a lived reality where dignity is rationed by postcode.

And here is the hard truth that no one wants to say in polite company: there is enough for both black and white in this country. Enough land, enough minerals, enough skills, enough money in circulation.

The problem is not scarcity. The problem is distribution and governance. It is selfishness and greed.

For too long, the benefits have gone to a white minority and to a selected black cohort that has learned to speak the language of BEE and  transformation while turning its back on the suffering black majority. Tenders, BEE deals, board seats, TV appearances. The ladder was pulled up.

In that vacuum, poor South Africans in townships and informal settlements have watched services collapse. Clinics with no medicine. Schools with 60 children per class. Grants that do not stretch.

And at the same time, they see undocumented people accessing the same broken system, often with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

That is not about hate. That is about survival. And it is dishonest to pretend otherwise.

This is the terrain March and March entered. Not with slogans, but with feet on the ground.

WHY THE MIDDLE CLASS RECOIL

Most middle-class South Africans, especially middle-class types, will read about Jacinta and feel two things at once: admiration and discomfort.

Admiration, because someone said what they whisper at the braai. Discomfort, because she said it out loud, with a banner, and on camera.

That discomfort reveals the middle-class default: stability over justice.

If you have a job in HR, finance, or government, you have been trained not to “make it political.” If you have a business, you have been trained not to offend clients. If you have children, you have been trained not to risk what you have built.

So you post, you sigh, you vote, and you go back to protecting what is yours.

There is nothing evil about that. But it is not leadership. And it is not change.

Jacinta’s choice exposes that default. She is saying: you can have the house and still have a spine. You can have the medical aid and still fight for the clinic. You can have the private school and still demand that public schools work.

That is radical, not because it is extreme, but because it refuses the unspoken deal: “I will be quiet if you let me keep my comforts.”

THE MERIT AND THE LIMIT OF THIS KIND OF ACTIVISM

Is March and March the final answer to South Africa’s problems? No.

No march is. But its merit is in breaking the silence. In forcing a conversation that the political class and the comfortable class would rather avoid.

Its merit is in showing that you do not have to be poor to care about poverty. You do not have to be unemployed to care about jobs. You do not have to be in a queue at Home Affairs to care about borders.

The limit, like with all activism, is what comes after the march. Marching must become organizing. Anger must become policy proposals. Noise must become pressure that turns into law enforcement, into service delivery, into accountability.

But you cannot get to that second step if you never take the first. And the first step is someone with something to lose saying: “This is wrong, and I will stand up.”

THE QUESTION FOR ALL OF US

So let us return to the beginning.

You are not a sellout fraud because you have benefits. You are a fraud if you have benefits and you use all your energy to protect them while your neighbor’s child drinks brown water.

South Africa does not need more middle-class sellouts who are afraid. It needs more middle-class people who are brave.

Brave enough to say that inequality is not just about race. It is also about class betrayal within race.

Brave enough to say that “transformation” means nothing if the black majority is still at the bottom.

Brave enough to say that law matters, borders matter, and that compassion without order is just chaos.

Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma could have stayed silent. Millions did. She chose not to.

The question is simple, and it is the same for all of us, rich, poor, or in between:

What did you do when you had something to lose?

Because history will not ask what car you drove. It will ask whose side you were on when the country was deciding what kind of country it wanted to be.

And on that day, the middle class will have to choose: the comfort of the status quo, or the discomfort of justice.

Defaults can be overridden. Jacinta did.

 

Sandile Memela is a columnist, writer, and cultural critic