Johannesburg is scrambled upon as a preferred laboratory for testing all sorts of devilish experiments.

Perhaps we must consider how we tackle South African public discourse and liberate it from being Johannesburg-centric. Regrettably, for now, Johannesburg occupies a New York state of mind. If one makes it here, it is believed one will make it anywhere. Frank Sinatra sang it. Shirley Bassey sang it. Lou Rawls sang it. Repeated with rhythmic melody, we believed it.

I must admit, we in Johannesburg are merely lucky, not wiser than those born outside it. This explains the attraction to Johannesburg and the weight of Soweto. June 16, 1976, started here. NGOs, CSOs, Foundations, Afriforum, Solidarity, FF+ – all plant headquarters in proximity of Johannesburg. Even Orania is not a proposition to appeal to the axis of United States Donald Trump’s unpretentious white power of Dutch descent – Afriforum/Solidarity/Freedom Front+.

Neither is its English-speaking big money preferred DA believing equality would be the very dawn of white oppression.

Miriam Makeba was not wrong in naming a song “Gauteng”. This is the centre for the battle of the hearts and minds at its fiercest.

Makeba’s song is a treatise. Gold and diamonds brought wealth, but stripped families of husbands, fathers, dignity, and livelihoods. Black families got by anyway, under overwhelming odds replicated against black life countrywide.

Johannesburg ranks above Cape Town, Durban, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Gqeberha, Kimberley and Pietermaritzburg. This is because Johannesburg hosts banks, auditors, law firms, medical aids, insurance, and former mining houses. Wits was initiated by mining companies. The SABC and all media power sit here. Outside elected power, the media is the next center of influence.

Do not assume this assortment of power is good, bright, beautiful. Behind every success, many tears fell. The darker side of Johannesburg lies deep in every mining town Hugh Masekela sang about in Songs of Migration.

Toni Morrison could not have been more seminal: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and you spend twenty years proving you do. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

Closer home, one word thrown with the intent to label for criminalisation illustrates the playbook of distraction. The aggrieved SA community is intermittently called xenophobic. Every response to migration frustration is tempered: “South Africa is not xenophobic.”

For its part, civil society movement March and March has posted a key message that SA’s government power talk should reckon with for sense to prevail: “We are not xenophobic, we’re demanding order.”

South Africa is acclaimed for green-lighting same-sex marriage as proof ‘we are not homophobic’. And by singular executive order of US President Donald Trump, there are two genders in the universe.

Not a whimper begged to differ. No watchdog barked near the roaring lion. Power, it seems, had spoken. And so did all else consent. After Trump vacates office, will the genders be more than two as it is in US? The truth, it appears, is when the powerful say it is. Is it so?

Black people must ditch Black Consciousness to prove they are not racist. These are lessons galore for SA waking up to the epistemic injustice of distraction that Tony Morrison highlighted.

Not a word has been heard from President Cyril Ramaphosa on racist white interest groups, including some in his cabinet, running to Europe and the US to enlist Trump to tamper with SA’s public policy and legislative sovereignty.

Ramaphosa is not deaf to plead not having heard of a British citizen Phil Craig migrating to sunny South Africa to land in the Western Cape and openly campaigning for the province to break away from the rest of the country. In this epic emigration affliction, has this derogatory provocation of Craig’s escaped March and March’s attention?

What does Ramaphosa’s silence to Craig’s imperial buoyancy betoken? The audacity of whiteness never ceases to amaze to cock the snook up the nose of compliant black powerlessness. Nothing better illustrates its condescending arrogance than this. Were a black person to dare doing the same in Europe or the United States is beyond imagination.

When Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe centered Africans – “Africa for Africans” – he was criminalised as wanting to throw white people into the sea. This is said by the same whites fleeing independence movements down south, when effectively there is nowhere else to run to, with SA at its own road to independence. The sea is what is left to run into from SA’s independence.

The distraction still lingers.

Carter G. Woodson leaves nothing to chance on this battle of the mind: “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept inferior status, for he will seek it himself.”

Marley nails it to Woodson like a preacher nails a scripture to a door. If you thought Bob Marley was caught in reverie when he told us “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery”, Woodson leaves nothing to chance: “Control the mind, and the body will follow. Make a man an outcast in his thinking, and he will find the back door himself. If there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.

“History shows it does not matter who is in power. Those who have not learned to do for themselves and depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning.”

History does not repeat itself. It is the unthinking, unresponsive intransigent power without empathy repeating bad behaviour and confusing stability with repression to feed the illusion that stability equals to peace.

The trinity in the air over Johannesburg should not be difficult to decipher. Marley gives it rhythm. Woodson gives it weight. The ballot gives it location.

The veteran journalists must see Johannesburg from a different angle – where its legendary headspace must recapture the promise of liberation. Whether Johannesburg knows it or not, it embodies Gauteng’s power, authority and influence in trendsetting.

Half of Johannesburg’s battles will be won if the city errs on the side of the liberation promise rather than against it.

This refresher walk down Johannesburg’s memory lane must kickstart raising public discourse: the country is in arrears with the liberation promise.

Here in Johannesburg, oppression and liberation come face to face. Whose democracy is this where white people continue to think, plan and prosper, while black people prominently matter to sing, dance, protest and die? Why is the dying marked black and the living after death presents itself white, even in this democracy like it was before?

Johannesburg is an idiom of black experience. A microcosm of how black people live, work, dream, sleep and wake up looking for eyes capable of speaking words that weep to unending black pain.

This agenda is not Johannesburg-centric but of national significance. It must concern any conscious mind with memory intact that remembers why there was a struggle for national liberation in the first place.

Johannesburg, will you err on the side of liberation this time? Local government elections are on 04 November 2026. The ballot is coming. The laboratory is open. The experiment is you. Emancipate your mind first. Then mark your X.

Oupa Ngwenya is a Corporate Strategist, Writer, and Freelance Journalist