Walking the nation together: The men turning endurance into hope:
In a country often divided by inequality, unemployment and uncertainty, four men are attempting to reconnect South Africans through something profoundly simple: walking.
Mshengu Tshabalala, Moses Aphane, Jeremiah Mkhwanazi and Frankie Motsepe are currently undertaking a remarkable long-distance journey from Pretoria to Cape Town under the banner of the Abahambi Be Tshwane Foundation. Today, the group departed from Parys heading towards Kroonstad, continuing a mission that stretches far beyond physical endurance.
Their walk is not merely athletic. It is political in the deepest human sense. It speaks to visibility, solidarity and the need for collective responsibility in a society where many communities continue to feel abandoned by systems meant to protect them.
The Abahambi Be Tshwane Foundation was established as a Non Profit Company with a vision of mobilising communities and raising resources for vulnerable groups across South Africa. Their campaign seeks to raise millions for charity while fostering social cohesion and public participation.
What makes the initiative compelling is its symbolism. In an era dominated by digital activism and online outrage, these men have chosen the road itself as a site of engagement. Town by town, kilometre by kilometre, they are forcing conversations about care, dignity and nationhood into public space.
South Africa has a long history of protest marches, pilgrimages and journeys tied to liberation politics. The Abahambi Be Tshwane Foundation appears to draw from that legacy while reframing walking as an act of social rebuilding.
There is also something deeply radical about slowness in this moment. Walking through towns instead of flying over them allows encounters with people whose realities are often invisible within national discourse. Communities become more than statistics. They become faces, conversations and stories.
The journey from Parys to Kroonstad is another chapter in a route that will carry the walkers across provinces and landscapes before reaching Cape Town. Yet perhaps the greater destination is the restoration of civic empathy in a society increasingly fractured by economic pressure and political fatigue.Whether the initiative ultimately reaches its fundraising target may matter less than the conversations it has already begun. In a nation searching for new forms of leadership and solidarity, the image of ordinary citizens walking together for others still carries extraordinary power.
Inside the SABS gathering shaping Africa’s next generation of thinkers:
Yesterday, 05 May 2026, the South African Bureau of Standards in Pretoria became more than a venue for an awards announcement. It became a space where ideas, ambition and the future of Africa converged through the voices of young South Africans determined to shape the continent differently.
The occasion marked the announcement of the national winners of the 2025/2026 African Organisation for Standardisation Essay Competition, a continental initiative encouraging students to engage critically with issues of trade, standards and economic transformation across Africa.
While the subject matter focused on harmonised standards and technical barriers to trade, the event itself revealed something more profound about contemporary Africa. It exposed the growing importance of intellectual diversity in shaping the continent’s future. Students from institutions including AFDA, UNISA, the University of Venda, Stellenbosch University and Wits University stood side by side, representing disciplines ranging from economics and policy to storytelling and live performance.
Among the recognised finalists was AFDA student Culture Molatole, whose presence symbolised the expanding role of the creative sector within policy and developmental conversations. His participation challenged long standing assumptions that economics, trade and standards exist separately from culture and storytelling.
The event also reflected a broader continental reality. Africa’s future increasingly demands leaders capable of thinking beyond rigid disciplinary boundaries. In this context, the ARSO competition becomes more than an academic exercise. It becomes a rehearsal space for future African leadership.
The finalists included Gladys Matloga, Culture Molatole, Vhahangwele Belemu, Rendani Nkwamalau and Gugu Somtunzi, all of whom will now represent South Africa at the continental stage of the competition. Their ideas will enter wider African conversations around trade, development and integration.
SABS Acting CEO Blake Mosley Lefatola emphasised the importance of creating platforms that allow young Africans to influence how the continent develops and participates within global markets. The statement reflected the deeper significance of the gathering in Pretoria yesterday. It was not merely about celebrating winners, but about recognising the intellectual agency of young Africans.
The South African State Theatre also acknowledged the importance of the event, particularly the visibility of creatives within spaces often associated with technical and economic expertise. The growing relationship between the arts, innovation and development continues to reshape how Africa imagines progress.
What unfolded at SABS yesterday was ultimately a portrait of a continent in transition. Young Africans are no longer waiting to inherit the future. They are actively writing it.
It seems that, for the first time in living memory, God and the Devil are represented on Earth by two Americans. In fact, the acrimonious spat between Pope Leo XIV and US President Donald Trump has revived the age-old clash between the sacred and the secular, albeit in a new and at times crude way.
The two men could not be more different. Pope Leo XIV—the first American to hold the office—preaches peace, multilateralism, and the need to uphold international law, while Trump spouts racist, xenophobic, and misogynist rhetoric and advocates for war. The mild-mannered Pope insists on kindness, mercy, and justice, embodying spiritual power and espousing reconciliation. But the swaggering Trump, like a tyrannical Roman emperor, relies on violence, representing military power without moral legitimacy.
Trump’s actions speak for themselves. Despite his absurd claim to have ended ten wars, he is waging an illegal war against Iran and has used force unilaterally in several other countries, all while enabling Israel’s bloody campaign in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. At home, Trump has launched a draconian mass-deportation campaign against immigrants of color, often from places he calls “shithole countries.” As part of his illusory bid to revive a white Christian America, Trump has also fueled Islamophobia. Ironically, his government’s massive cuts to social programs have hit poor white Americans—an important part of his base—particularly hard.
Leo XIV, who was elected to the papacy in May 2025, initially avoided wading into US politics, despite being an obvious counterweight to Trump. But that began to change late last year, when the Pope urged US Catholic bishops to support immigrants and backed their statement criticizing the Trump administration’s draconian mass deportations. In January, the pontiff went further, calling for “the strengthening of supranational institutions, not their delegitimization”; stressing that the rule of law is “the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence”; and bemoaning the ascendance of a “diplomacy based on force.”
The unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran brought the issue to a head. In an apparent rebuke of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who portrayed the conflict as a Christian crusade, Pope Leo XIV declared that “[God] does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Soon after, he described threats to wipe out the Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable” and attacks on civilian infrastructure as “against international law,” while urging Americans to press their political leaders to choose peace over war. In posts on X, the pontiff said that a disciple of Christ is never on the side of those who “drop bombs” and condemned “the absurd and inhuman violence.”
Following these increasingly pointed criticisms, Trump attacked the Pope directly, accusing him of being “WEAK on Crime,” “catering to the Radical Left,” and thinking “it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” The pontiff, on an African tour, confidently retorted: “I have no fear, neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel.”
Pope Leo XIV, who worked and traveled for decades in Latin America and Africa, understands as well as anyone the global revulsion for Trump’s war and vile words. Crucially, after Trump lashed out at the pontiff, a similar sense of distaste is spreading among conservative Christians in the US. Trump’s decision to post a blasphemous image depicting himself as a Christ-like figure healing the sick did not help matters. It was a step too far even for his white evangelical base, many of whom view him as an anointed leader sent by God to save America from what they see as the evils of liberalism and multiculturalism.
A high-profile spat with the leader of the Catholic Church has only served to underscore the chasm between Trump’s policies and Christ’s teachings, from the importance of loving one’s neighbor and welcoming the stranger to the idea that the meek will inherit the earth. Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich are a far cry from Jesus’s embrace of the poor.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the domain of war and peace. Pope Leo XIV’s patron saint is the North African-born Saint Augustine, often credited with originating just-war theory. The theory advocates force as a last resort for achieving peace, in which case conflict must be conducted by a properly constituted authority that follows the principle of proportionality and does not target civilians—by which measure, Trump’s war on Iran is hardly just. The United Nations’ founders had sought to embed this Christian concept in the UN Charter. But Trump sees no need for international law; the only constraint on his power, he insists, is his “own morality.”
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once reportedly quipped: “But how many divisions does the Roman Pope have?” But such dismissiveness reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of spiritual authority. Trump has made a similar mistake by attacking a popular pontiff (Pope Leo XIV has an 84% favorability rating among American Catholics). It seems likely that he underestimated the “soft power” of the world’s preeminent religious leader at his peril.
A 2013 survey found that one in four Americans believed that US President Barack Obama may be the anti-Christ. Such conspiratorial delusions, partly stemming from Trump’s vile accusation that Obama was not born in the US, have helped bring to power a doomsday prophet who is systematically leading the world into war and economic ruin. Pope Leo XIV is right not to render unto this vacuous, violent, and vulgar Caesar the things that have never been Caesar’s. – Project Syndicate
Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship
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