Negating the noise: South Africa’s week of witness

By Joe Taylor

South Africa has just hosted the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg, the first on African soil. Despite intense global scrutiny and shifting geopolitics, the summit went ahead and concluded with a joint leaders’ declaration. For a country wrestling with real, urgent challenges at home, it was heartening to see South Africa carry the host’s responsibilities with competence and calm, focused on the task at hand rather than the theatre around it.

There was certainly theatre. The world’s loudest microphone announced it would not attend and later amplified that absence with sharper rhetoric. Whether one interpreted this as a snub, strategy or spectacle, it could easily have derailed the week’s focus. It did not. Delegations met. Committees reported. Commitments were adopted. Grown-ups kept working while someone else chose not to be in the room.

Closer to home, another megaphone tried to seize the spotlight. A billboard went up along a Johannesburg route welcoming visitors to “the most race-regulated country in the world.” It was removed within hours by city authorities on by-law grounds, but not before it served its purpose: to provoke and polarise. Claims behind the slogan have been persuasively challenged as misleading. Again, it would have been easy to spend the week arguing about a slogan. While a few social media personalities certainly took to this tactic, most of the Nation got to work.

At the same time that all this noise was being raised, another group of courageous South Africans chose a different route. Across the country, thousands of people turned their profiles purple, wore black, withheld their labour and lay down in silence for fifteen minutes at noon on 21 November to mourn those lost to gender-based violence and femicide(GBVF), and to demand action. In that purposeful quiet, a truer national story was told: solidarity over spectacle, shared grief turning into shared resolve.

Public pressure matters. After initial hesitation among state bodies about whether the legal definition could be met, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared GBVF a national disaster. Declarations are not solutions, but they can unlock urgency, funding and accountability. This is a moment to press for measurable follow-through: survivor-centred services, specialised courts, effective policing, and prevention that changes the culture that enables violence.

There is no glossing over our problems in South Africa. We live with unemployment, inequality, corruption, load-shedding scars, and communities frayed by fear. Yet it is possible to hold two truths at once. We can be honest about what needs repair, and still be proud that, under intense global pressure, South Africa modelled mature leadership and gave the continent a stronger voice on a world stage. We can refuse to be baited by performative outrage, and instead pay attention to faithful, unflashy labour that serves the common good..

The Gospel of Christ invites this kind of attention. Jesus often passed by the noise to notice the person in need, the mustard seed, the small act that changes everything. In a week of loud absences and provocative billboards, the most faithful witness may have been those who lay down in silence, refusing to let violence have the last word. May we keep doing the work that matters, with less drama and more dignity. And may our leaders and communities alike prove worthy of the hope so many quietly carried into the streets.