‘We Must Dare To Invent The Future’

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future- Thomas Sankara, 1985

Sankara was not calling for irresponsibility. He was naming something even harder to reckon with, the discipline of refusing formulas that have already failed, and the courage to build from what has not yet been tried. Every generation inherits a set of instructions about how the world works. The question is how do we forge ahead when what we have inherited no longer serves us?

For better or worse, what leaders as different as Thomas Sankara, Ibrahim Traoré, Donald Trump and the students of Serbia tell us about politics, systems and the pursuit of liberation is that it can all be re-imagined, that imagination, and the world-building of alternative practice, is often the only pathway to meaningful change.

It is also the most dangerous faculty we carry. Imagination has no moral compass of its own. It can be bent toward liberation or toward domination with equal capacity, which is precisely why the question of who imagines, with whom, and to what end has become the central political question of our time.

Sankara had begun that world-building with the people of Burkina Faso. A society that would prioritise the whole over the enrichment of the few, that envisioned prosperity for his people on their own terms, and not inside the confines of imperial power and influence.

Ibrahim Traoré is among the first modern African leaders to make consequential efforts to inculcate Sankara's vision in the modus operandi of the state, its foreign policy and Burkinabé culture. Those efforts have also been defined by the repression of freedom of speech, of democratic institutions and of international accountability. The contradiction is not incidental to the argument, it is the argument. That reclaimed imagination without the means of dissent is only a different kind of enclosure.

The second Trump administration, characterised by impunity and by policies and laws however discriminatory, unlawful or flagrant, has ushered in a new portal. It has expanded all of our imaginations, demonstrating that however good or bad, anything can be conjured up. That is not a reason to look away. It is proof of the idea itself and of what happens when it is exercised with no account of the common good.

And then there is Serbia. On 1 November 2024, a concrete canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad collapsed and killed sixteen people. The protests that followed were led by students, and they did not dissipate. Two years later, on 25 October 2026, the Student List won an absolute majority with 53.7 per cent of the vote and 140 seats, ending Aleksandar Vučić's fourteen-year rule. A movement borne from a civic tragedy transformed the idea of what a liberation movement led by the people can be and showed how enduring systems can be upended.

If imagination can be turned to either purpose, then it is not enough to deliberate on it. It has to be cultivated, practised and held to account. It is within this context that the Nelson Mandela Foundation embraced a new strategic pillar, Futures of Democracy: a necessary and timely programme that asks difficult questions of democracy and of its outcomes for the African continent.

Why has democracy not delivered material benefit to the lives of people? What alternative systems have demonstrated sustained well-being for people and for our planet, and could be employed? How do we begin to build this new world together? And in what ways should we give expression to democracy beyond the ballot box?

These are not questions that can be settled in a strategy document. They are questions that require a different kind of container.

That container was the (Re)Imagining Africa's Democratic Futures: Southern Africa Imaginarium, held with ACT Ubumbano, Sivio Institute, ActionAid, TrustAfrica and My Vote Counts at the Nelson Mandela Foundation from 19 to 21 October 2026. It brought together thinkers, artists, academics and democratic practitioners from across the region (Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, DRC, Botswana and Eswatini) to create a container in which the questions about democracy and its yield could begin to be answered together.

The three days comprised three elements: grounding in the realities we find ourselves in, an exploration of alternatives in democratic practice, and imagination through art, food and dialogue. Concluding with the launch of Rethinking Activism in Africa: Voices and Visionaries for Social Justice and Human Rights, edited by Mark Heywood. The book comprises fourteen essays by African activists and scholars assessing the limits and potential of contemporary activism.

What surfaced in the discussions was the tension between our capacity to imagine futures within such stringent systemic limits; The new world must be anchored in community, in shared prosperity among ourselves and with the environment and in whichever future we inhabit, we must travel together in order to create and sustain it.

We are still grappling with what the Imaginarium produced and surfaced, and this work is ongoing. What is already clear is that it produced better questions and renewed solidarity with other practitioners in the region.

The Southern Africa Imaginarium was the first of a series of regional convenings that the Foundation and its consortium partners will host, working toward a continental gathering. Alongside them will run the slower work, research, consultation, documentation and synthesis, some of which will reveal itself as we walk this journey. This work is iterative and exploratory, and it invites us to welcome outcomes and streams of work that may yet emerge from it.

The work of grappling with democracy will be as difficult and as unrelenting as the systems in which it persists. But the work must be pursued nonetheless.