Green Shoots: Hitting the wall – it’s as devastating as it sounds

I’ve completed 10 Comrades Marathons, and quite a few standard marathons. There’s a moment during the race that you hit the wall. This moment comes at different points for different runners. The first time I encountered it was at around 50km into the race, and it is devastating. Nothing prepares you for it. Your months of training, dietary discipline, early morning conditioning runs in the cold and dark mean nothing when you hit the wall. You reach a stage of tiredness that feels like a threat to your very existence. All you want to do is give up and take a nap on the side of the road.

Your joy disappears, and you feel loneliness and self pity in your very marrow. You meet desolation. The antidote is to keep moving. You must resist the urge to stop and rest, and keep going forward, even if it is a mere shuffling of your feet. You must just keep moving, no matter that everyone is passing your snail pace. I have never timed how long it takes to emerge on the other side, but you find an energy reserve somewhere deep inside you, and despair is banished.

I think of the runner’s wall when I reflect on the state of our country right now. I look back at our history and try to imagine those moments of hopelessness that black people would never be free from colonial and apartheid oppression. Can you imagine what it was like to look at the seeming invincibility of the white apartheid regime when the National Party took power in 1948? I don’t know of any major resistance moment at that time that would temper the despair of the people.

Protests seemed doomed to failure, and the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 would have deepened the exhaustion of resisting an all-powerful regime that would have you give up. The taking up of the armed struggle might have heralded some hope that freedom may come from the barrel of a gun. And then the Rivonia trial and convictions, and the arrest of Robert Sobukwe, a man seriously feared by the regime and whose message could have moved people beyond the wall, all happened. Still our people shuffled forward, refusing to lie down but probably beyond exhaustion as they kept going.

|The young people of 1976 showed signs of hope, but the brutal repression of the apartheid system forced so many into exile, and again the shuffling had to resume. The early eighties saw Wilson Rowntree workers on strike, and then the United Democratic Front formed in 1983 – August is the anniversary of that moment. We had passed the wall, and would scale the last challenge that is Polly Shorts, a steep two km climb just before the end of Comrades in Pietermaritzburg.

We celebrated Freedom Day in 1994. But we were not done. We started a new race then, and I feel like we’ve hit the wall again. How do we even live with the levels of youth and general unemployment as they are? Corruption and widespread decay in public service sap the very core of our people’s energy. Violent crime in our country makes us comparable to war zones – black men are most likely to be murder victims, and women are at risk of death at the hands of their intimate partners and people they know.

What children must endure is beyond mentioning. We have hit the wall. Where do we find that elusive source of life, energy, agency that allows us to finish 90km races? It is not easily apparent. You may not recognise it when it appears because despair and hopelessness are so overwhelming. Believe me, it’s there! I have found it when the wall would have me give up, and we can find it as a community in the small acts of resistance, and the big ones. We have a press that, while mischievous at times, continues to expose the hubris of the corrupt. Our human rights framework and the institutions that protect it are still functional, even if they take a long time to getresults.

Critically, our people won’t forget. Babita Deokaran is remembered this week for her courage in refusing to succumb to the temptation and pressure to stop, to not care, to give up. She, and so many others like her, will not be forgotten, for it is their resistance that provides the source of inspiration that will carry us beyond the wall, even when we feel like giving up.