By Dr Jane Mufamadi
As South Africa marks 31 years of democracy, we find ourselves standing on sacred yet complicated ground. We are a nation that proudly celebrates its liberation while simultaneously navigating the jagged edges of its unfulfilled promises.
The dawn of freedom in 1994 was a seismic shift — a powerful moment of political emancipation. Yet today, a sobering question lingers in the hearts and minds of many: Has our freedom been fulfilled — or is it still deferred?
At Freedom Park, a national heritage site built to honour the men and women who fought for justice, we preserve memory not just for reflection but for action. The Wall of Names, engraved with over 85,000 names of heroes and heroines who made the ultimate sacrifice for our liberation, stands as a testament to resilience and the price of freedom.
But those names also demand that we ask difficult questions: What would these martyrs say if they could see South Africa today? Would they believe the cause they died for has been fully realised? The truth is, while our political landscape has shifted profoundly, many of the socio-economic foundations of inequality remain firmly intact.
Political liberation was a necessary first step — monumental, hard-won and sacred. But it was never the full destination. Freedom is not just the right to vote. It is the right to live with dignity. It is access to quality education, healthcare, land, jobs, cultural belonging and safety. And for millions of South Africans, particularly the poor, women, the youth and rural communities, these remain aspirations rather than lived realities.
Freedom deferred is not just a rhetorical question — it is a lived experience. It echoes in the silence of classrooms with no teachers, in clinics with no medicine, in homes with no running water and in young people carrying degrees but no job prospects. It exists in the haunting familiarity of informal settlements that mirror the spatial legacies of apartheid, and in the economic structures that continue to privilege a few at the expense of many.
The promise of liberation was more than the removal of apartheid; it was the vision of a society that heals, restores and uplifts. This is not to suggest that nothing has changed.
The last three decades have seen significant progress in areas such as housing delivery, social grants, infrastructure, access to education and gender representation. We honour these gains. But transformation is not measured only by policy and numbers — it is measured by the quality of people’s lives. It is felt, not just seen. And for far too many, the day-to-day experience of freedom feels postponed.
As custodians of national memory, Freedom Park believes that commemorating our liberation is not about nostalgia — it’s about accountability. Heritage is not a luxury. It is a lens through which we measure progress, a compass guiding us forward. And our historic monuments, like Freedom Park, must evolve from being passive repositories of memory to active sites of dialogue, healing and mobilisation.
The concept of “unfinished liberation” is not a failure of democracy. It is a call to deepen it. We must interrogate the systems, structures and choices that have limited the full flowering of our freedom. We must ask: How do we create a society where history is not only remembered but also corrected? Where justice is not symbolic but systemic? Where the children of former domestic workers and farm labourers are no longer locked out of opportunity?
To do this, we must draw on the wisdom of indigenous knowledge systems, community voices and grassroots leadership. The future of freedom cannot be shaped in boardrooms alone — it must be built with and by those who continue to live on the frontlines of inequality. Let us remember that the struggle for liberation was never just about removing a regime — it was about reclaiming humanity, restoring dignity, and affirming the worth of every life.
As we celebrate Freedom Month, we must hold both pride and pain in the same breath. Pride for how far we’ve come; pain for how far we still must go. We owe it to those whose names are engraved on the Wall of Names — and to those whose names we may never know — to continue the work they began. We owe it to ourselves, our children and the future to demand more, dream bigger and act boldly. Because true freedom is not a destination marked by a single date on a calendar. It is a daily commitment. It is the courage to tell the truth about our past and the will to shape a different future. Until every South African can live with dignity, safety, opportunity, and voice — our liberation remains unfinished.
Dr Jane Mufamadi is the CEO of the Freedom Park Heritage Site and Museum in Pretoria.
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