Mmusi Maimane, a leader of the Build One South Africa party. (Photo via Creative Commons/Wikimedia)

THIRTY YEARS AGO, South Africa was at a critical crossroad. March toward a vibrant new democracy, the vision of then-recently released Nelson Mandela – or double down on the white oppression of apartheid. Justice prevailed. Today South Africa again faces a crossroad between an aging and corrupt autocracy or a renewal of the democracy so many fought for.

Massachusetts has a long connection with the freedom and justice movement in South Africa, and those ties will be renewed this week when a key leader of the current fight for democracy there arrives in Boston to draw attention to that cause. 

With Mandela long gone, the African National Congress he once led has become a corrupt kleptocracy, the source of economic ruin and despair. In May of this year, South Africans will go to the polls. Yet Cyril Rhamaphosa and the aging cabal that now leads the ANC may well be elected again and continue their role bringing South Africa to its knees, defying the promise and vision of Nelson Mandela when he was elected president in 1994.

But there’s hope. There is a new generation of leaders. 

Mmusi Maimane of the Build One South Africa party, or BOSA, has emerged as a leader of that new generation, offering inspiration and a new vision. He represents the future of South Africa, and arrives in Boston this week with the hope of rekindling American interest in promoting South Africa’s democracy.

Such a call should resonate for many in this country, especially in Massachusetts, which has long been connected to the freedom movement in South Africa. 

Decades ago, when I was a young state senator, Harvard students asked me to join a protest and spend a (painful) night sleeping on ground in the shanty in Harvard Yard. Thereafter, along with students, clergy, labor leaders and academics, I was arrested in Boston in a protest against apartheid. So many were drawn to the fight. 

We were the first state to divest pension funds from South Africa. Others followed. Mandela came to Boston in 1990 to rally the international community, visiting Roxbury and Madison Park High School. Over 250,000 Bostonians sang and danced with him on the Esplanade. 

We also imported some of the liberation ethos of the movement Mandela led. Margaret Marshall, who was born in South Africa and led an anti-apartheid student group there in the 1960s, went on to become chief justice of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and wrote the historic civil rights opinion that legalized same-sex marriage.  

Apartheid painfully reminded America of our own civil rights failings. Mandela inspired us. We joined him in the fight for democracy in South Africa then. We must do so again now. 

George Bachrach is a co-founder of the Civic Action Project and former Massachusetts state senator.