Easter always invites philosophical reflection, with much time taken up arguing over how to reform a broken system, as though it were only a question of tinkering. But what if the actual question is how we lost something so basic, and why we are unable to imagine recovering it?
There is a powerful argument, related to anthropology, that all early societies were based on simple freedoms — the freedom to move, the freedom to refuse and the freedom to remake social life itself. These were not conceptual rights but lived possibilities. If a hierarchy grew unbearable, you could walk away. If authority had exceeded its bounds, you could ignore it. If both failed, you would start over.
Modern freedom looks quite different. In our inherited Roman law freedom is what’s left after force and law have claimed their dues. It is not the opposite of domination, but a remainder inside it. The household is a template with care and coercion folded into one another and authority justified as protection.
Other civilisations arranged this differently. Among the Wendat, or Huron, an indigenous group with origins in the Great Lakes region, for example, care belonged within the social world and violence outside it. The two were not confused. We, instead, have regularised their blending so power is today best manifested in terms of care and domination under necessity.
That confusion has consequences. Refusal becomes expensive once it is no longer easy to leave, and the broader ability to remake social life goes with the erosion of necessary refusal. What is left behind is the politics of managed constraint. We squabble about redistribution, representation and reform, but always in an ever-shrinking frame. The horizon changes, but the cage is intact.
We have built over the past 100 years a society constructed in enforced immobility, with the criminalisation of refusal and registration regulating where you could live or work or belong
Re-reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, this horizon is pushed out even further, with an unsettling proposition that inequality and domination were not predetermined effects of complexity but choices over time that became fixed. There were seasonal hierarchies, but they were reversible; authority was to a great extent situational and not permanent.
Perhaps the real rupture came when mobility was narrowed, through settlement, property, borders and, consequently, the practical capacity to leave. Power no longer needed to persuade once people were unable to walk away. Domination took root, naturalised itself and learned the language of order and care.
The real question, then, is not when hierarchy first appeared, but when it ceased to be negotiable. When did we stop treating social arrangements as provisional, and start experiencing them as fixed and backed, ultimately, by violence? How did that realignment reorganise the most private realms of existence, so dependency and domination blurred into each other, and the imagining of options diminished in silence?
South Africa knows this cycle painfully well. We have built over the past 100 years a society constructed in enforced immobility, with the criminalisation of refusal and registration regulating where you could live or work or belong. We broke the legal architecture of that system, but its deeper logic endures in our spatial gulfs, our politics of clientelism and our queasy bargain between safety and self-rule.
That’s why our debates often seem stalled. We’re trying to humanise a structure whose foundational premise we rarely interrogate; that power needs to organise love, and that constraint is the cost of community. Until we reckon with that premise, we will mistake movement within the system for freedom itself.
Perhaps the more difficult, more disturbing question isn’t how we build a better cage but how we accepted cages in the first place, and what it would entail to reclaim those simple, perilous freedoms we once considered givens.
• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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