The Liam Question

IThe Mirror

Liam Jacobs's return to the Democratic Alliance is not merely the story of a young politician changing parties. It is a mirror held before a wounded people. It is a question placed before Coloured political leadership, before Indigenous-descended communities, before the DA, before the PA, and before South Africa itself.

The Liam Question is not: why did one young leader leave the Patriotic Alliance and return to the DA?

The deeper question is this: What happens to a people when their political leaders are trained to seek proximity to power before they are trained to carry memory, dignity, discipline, ancestral accountability, and nation-building responsibility?

Jacobs's return has been framed by the DA as a story of political correction, maturity, and homecoming. Geordin Hill-Lewis welcomed him back as part of a “big, growing and inclusive political home,” while Jacobs himself apologised for what he called his “disgraceful” departure from the DA and now says he returns as an ordinary activist rather than a public representative.

But beneath the party statements lies a much larger wound. And the wound is not Liam's. The wound is the unresolved Coloured political condition in South Africa.

For generations, so-called Coloured people have been treated as a buffer people, a labouring people, a voting bloc, a demographic problem, a gangland headline, a Cape Flats tragedy, a Western Cape electoral prize, and sometimes a convenient symbol of “diversity.” But we have rarely been treated as a people with memory, origin, cosmology, political philosophy, historical trauma, and nation-building capacity.

That is the real crisis. And that crisis did not begin with Liam Jacobs. It began when the colonial state looked at the descendants of the /Xam, the Khoekhoe, the enslaved, and the displaced, and decided that rather than recognising a people, it would manufacture a category. As Jacob Cloete has documented in his recent scholarship, the systematic racialisation and stripping of indigenousness from Khoekhoe and San identities began in the sixteenth-century Valladolid Debate, accelerated through the 1809 Hottentot Proclamation, and was perfected under apartheid. The category “Coloured” was not a description. It was an erasure event, administered across centuries (Cloete, 2025).

IIWhen Coloured Pain Becomes Political Currency

The Patriotic Alliance has understood one thing very well: many Coloured communities are angry. They are angry because they feel abandoned by the ANC, mistrusted by the DA, mocked by national discourse, and reduced to stereotypes of gangsterism, drugs, colouredness, and political unreliability.

This anger is not fake. It is historically produced.

It comes from apartheid's creation of the “Coloured” category as a political wound. It comes from forced removals. It comes from the destruction of Indigenous San and Khoekhoe identities. It comes from being told we are “not Black enough,” “not African enough,” “not Indigenous enough,” and yet never fully accepted into whiteness either. Mohamed Adhikari's foundational study demonstrated that this double rejection produced what he called the “exclusionary marginalisation” of Coloured South Africans — not simply excluded from whiteness, but actively denied a secure place in Blackness (Adhikari, 2005). Zoë Wicomb went further: she argued that shame itself became a structuring force in Coloured identity, a wound that could never quite be spoken because it was layered with the silences of slavery, mixture, and sexual violence (Wicomb, 1998).

But righteous pain can be used in two ways. It can become consciousness, or it can become political merchandise.

This is where the PA's political project must be examined honestly. The PA has built its recent ascent on the emotional mobilisation of precisely this pain. In January 2026, the PA swept both Ward 17 and Ward 27 in George from the DA, taking close to sixty per cent of the vote in one and more than fifty per cent in the other. In Johannesburg, the PA won Ward 29 from the ANC in October 2025. The PA's by-election momentum has been described as “meteoric,” and analysts estimate that as many as one hundred councils could produce no outright winner in the 2026 local government elections, making small, disciplined parties like the PA potential kingmakers.

But momentum built on anger alone does not constitute liberation. Scholars studying populism across the African continent have identified a consistent pattern: charismatic leaders who exploit public disappointment with the status quo, challenge established institutions through emotional rather than rational rhetoric, and achieve political goals by tapping into what Nietzsche called ressentiment — the slow burn of accumulated humiliation turned outward (Yogo, 2024; Nyitioseh, 2024). Susan Booysen, analysing McKenzie's strategy for the Daily Maverick, concluded that his populist rhetoric finds deep resonance with South African voters not because it offers solutions, but because it voices sentiments that the mainstream refuses to acknowledge.

Jacobs's own critique of the PA touches this nerve. He has accused the PA of operating through personality, social media discipline, and patronage rather than deep democratic structures. He has called it “a buddy-buddy system” that mirrors the ANC's worst tendencies. He has described McKenzie as leading a party with “no governance structures” that is “xenophobic and violent.” These are his political claims, and they must be read critically because he is now speaking as a returning DA member. But the claims align with independent evidence: McKenzie's resurfaced use of racial slurs on social media, his authoritarian cancellation of artist Gabrielle Goliath's participation in the 2026 Venice Biennale under shifting and contradictory justifications, and his instruction to departmental officials to fire foreign nationals in a 2025 meeting — an order that civil society groups including the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation condemned as xenophobic and unconstitutional.

When Coloured pain is mobilised without deep ethical leadership, it becomes a ladder for politicians, not a liberation path for the people.

IIIGovernance Without Soul: The DA's Own Crisis

But the DA must not celebrate too quickly. And it must be honest about what this “homecoming” actually is.

News24 reported that Jacobs's return was not spontaneous. Hill-Lewis personally made the case for Jacobs's comeback as a consultant during an online meeting on Sunday evening, 1 June 2026, and the decision was ratified by the DA's federal executive on Monday morning. The DA, News24 reported, is “banking on Jacobs to lure the coloured vote and to curb the rising losses in by-elections in the Western Cape, where the PA has seen a meteoric rise.”

This is not a homecoming. This is a deployment. And deploying a young Coloured politician as a vote-retrieval instrument is precisely the kind of politics this article challenges.

The DA has often been strong on administration, governance language, legal process, and anti-corruption messaging. Under DA governance, the Western Cape records measurably better employment growth, infrastructure maintenance, and municipal functionality than most other provinces. These are not small achievements. They matter to millions of residents.

But for many Coloured, Black, and Indigenous-descended communities, the DA still struggles to speak to historical pain with spiritual intelligence, cultural humility, and transformative imagination. Reuters has reported that Hill-Lewis has spoken about addressing the DA's “trust deficit” with Black voters. That trust deficit is not only about Black African voters. It also exists among many Coloured communities who vote DA, but do not always feel seen by the DA.

This is the paradox that the political scientist Henning Melber has identified across southern African democracies: the gap between administrative performance and democratic belonging. A government can deliver services while leaving entire communities unnamed. A road can be tarred while a people remain historically erased. A city can be clean while the memory of forced removal, Indigenous dispossession, and cultural humiliation remains unhealed. A municipality can function while the wound of society festers beneath the surface of governance.

This is where the DA's weakness lies. It sometimes governs the surface of society without sufficiently entering the wound of society. And until it learns that governance is not only about delivery but about recognition — not only about roads but about memory — it will continue to produce Coloured voters who support the DA with their hands while their hearts remain unclaimed.

IVThe Performer, the Broker, and the Custodian: A Typology of Coloured Political Leadership

The Liam Question forces us to ask: what kind of Coloured political leader is South Africa producing?

Too many are trained into one of three roles.

The Performer is loud, dramatic, media-ready, emotionally charged. The performer turns community pain into political theatre. The performer's currency is visibility, outrage, the viral clip, the late-night Facebook Live. The performer may genuinely feel the anger of the community, but the anger is staged for spectacle rather than harnessed for structural change. The performer leaves the people feeling heard but unchanged.

The Broker negotiates proximity to power. The broker moves between parties, posts, contracts, boards, offices, campaign lists, mayoral ambitions, and parliamentary seats. The broker's currency is access. The broker reads the political weather and repositions accordingly. The broker may secure individual advancement but rarely builds institutions that survive the next election cycle. James MacGregor Burns, in his foundational study of leadership, called this transactional leadership: the exchange of one thing for another, favour for vote, loyalty for position, silence for inclusion (Burns, 1978). Transactional leadership can manage systems. It cannot transform peoples.

The Custodian is the rarest kind. The custodian translates community suffering into policy, governance, ethics, memory, and institutional change. The custodian's currency is trust, built slowly and sustained through demonstrated accountability. Burns called the higher form transforming leadership: leadership that engages with people in such a way that “leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality” (Burns, 1978, p. 20). Ronald Heifetz at Harvard's Kennedy School developed this further as adaptive leadership — leadership that does not merely solve technical problems but mobilises people to confront the values, beliefs, and habits that must change for genuine progress (Heifetz, 1994). From a /Xam and wider San and Khoekhoe perspective, the custodian operates under an even deeper mandate. A leader must ask: What am I carrying? Who am I accountable to? What wounds am I healing? What future am I making possible? Leadership is not ambition. Leadership is custodianship — the disciplined carrying of people, land, memory, ancestors, children, and future consequences.

This is the missing question in much of Coloured politics. We ask: which party? We ask: which leader? We ask: which coalition? But we do not ask enough: What is the moral architecture of our political becoming?

Jacobs's journey so far suggests a young person caught between all three roles. He performed dramatically on Facebook Live when he left the DA. He brokered his way into the PA, became president of its youth wing, and was named its Cape Town mayoral candidate. He is now being brokered back into the DA as an electoral instrument. The question that will define his leadership is whether he will move beyond performance and brokerage into custodianship. That transition cannot be announced. It must be demonstrated, year by year, community by community, institution by institution.

VThe Indigenous Undercurrent Beneath the Coloured Crisis

The word “Coloured” is not a people-name in the deepest sense. It is an administrative wound. It gathered slaves, Indigenous peoples, mixed descendants, displaced communities, labouring families, mission-station people, farm workers, urban survivors, and Cape families into one racial category designed for control. The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) documented in its 2025 report that the Indigenous San and Khoekhoe peoples of South Africa “were previously known as ‘coloured’” and are now “exercising their right to self-identification and identify themselves as San and Khoekhoe or Khoe-San.” The report further confirms that South Africa has voted in favour of adopting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but has yet to ratify ILO Convention No. 169. The democratic space for self-identification exists. The political will to honour it remains incomplete.

But beneath the imposed category lie many interrupted lineages. San. Khoekhoe. Slave. African. Asian. European. Mission. Farm. Port. Mountain. River. District Six. Genadendal. Mamre. Bethelsdorp. Elsies River. Bonteheuwel. Mitchells Plain. Lavender Hill. Atlantis. Grabouw. Elandskloof. Knoflokskraal.

The Coloured crisis is therefore not merely a political crisis. It is a crisis of naming, memory, and belonging. Biko warned that the most powerful weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed (Biko, 1978). Fanon showed how colonised people can internalise the categories of their domination and then fight for recognition inside the very architecture that wounded them (Fanon, 1963, 1967). Mamdani reminded us that colonial power often governed through the production of political identities — “citizen” and “subject,” “tribal” and “national” — that outlived formal colonialism and continued to structure post-colonial states (Mamdani, 1996). Wicomb showed how the silence around Cape slave history and sexual violence produced a shame that attached itself to Coloured identity as a kind of historical adhesion — not spoken, not confronted, not healed (Wicomb, 1998).

Recent scholarship has deepened these insights. Research published in Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research found that approximately thirty-four per cent of those surveyed who had been classified as “Coloured” now opt for an Indigenous identity label of Khoe, San, or Khoisan — a movement described as “Khoisan revivalism,” tied to both state-side and global reclamation movements for Indigenous peoples. This is not nostalgia. It is a political and spiritual act of refusing to remain unnamed.

This is exactly why Coloured politics becomes unstable. A people whose name was imposed from outside may seek political certainty through parties, personalities, and promises. But no party can substitute for restored memory. Without memory, we become available to whoever speaks loudly enough. Without ancestral grounding, we mistake visibility for liberation. Without institutions of our own, we become voting blocs inside other people's strategies.

VIWhat Jacobs Reveals: Danger and Possibility

Liam Jacobs reveals both danger and possibility.

The danger is political volatility: the young leader moving between parties, becoming a symbol in other people's battles, and then needing to explain the meaning of his own journey. The danger is also systemic: a political ecosystem in which a twenty-five-year-old is given a parliamentary seat, a youth presidency, a mayoral candidacy, and then used as a campaign retrieval asset — all within eighteen months — is an ecosystem that consumes its young rather than developing them.

But the possibility is also real. Jacobs has apologised, admitted error, and placed himself back at activist level. He has said he was misled and that he should never have left the DA. If this is sincere — and only time will reveal whether it is — it is not weakness. In Indigenous terms, a mistake does not end a person. But a mistake must become teaching. The person must return to the circle differently.

That is what Jacobs must now prove.

Not through speeches. Not through attacks on the PA. Not through being used as a DA trophy. But through disciplined service. If he wants to become more than a political headline, he must now sit with communities. He must listen to the elderly. He must understand why Coloured youth are angry — not angry in the way that produces Facebook clips, but angry in the way that Fanon described: the slow, corrosive anger of people whose entire world has been structured by someone else's categories. He must study the history of Indigenous erasure. He must learn the wounds of the Cape Flats — not as a campaign backdrop, but as a human landscape that demands patient, unglamorous, institutional commitment.

The DA should not simply parade him. The PA should not simply mock him. The public should not simply cancel him. The deeper demand is that he must mature into a leader who understands that Coloured politics is not a career ladder. It is a historical responsibility.

VIIThe New Standard

The truth of political leadership is this: the people are not there to decorate the leader's ambition. The leader is there to carry the people's becoming.

South Africa does not need more Coloured politicians who simply join parties. South Africa needs Coloured leaders who understand the profound historical position of their communities in nation-building. We are not marginal to South Africa. We are central to its unfinished truth.

The descendants of San, Khoekhoe, enslaved peoples, displaced families, and mission communities carry a key to South Africa's future precisely because we expose the failure of simple racial categories. We show that the nation cannot be built through Black-and-white binaries alone. We carry the wound of mixture, the memory of dispossession, the pain of misnaming, and the possibility of relational nationhood.

That is our contribution. We can help South Africa move beyond revenge without denying justice. We can help South Africa move beyond racial denial without becoming trapped in racial essentialism. We can help South Africa remember land, water, ancestry, labour, migration, pain, and belonging as one story.

But only if our leaders stop selling our pain cheaply.

From an Earl-Djehuti perspective, the standard for Coloured political leadership must change. A Coloured leader must know history. A Coloured leader must understand the violence of the category “Coloured.” A Coloured leader must honour San, Khoekhoe, slave, and African lineages without reducing them to campaign language. A Coloured leader must reject gangster romanticism, tender opportunism, racial resentment, and party puppetry. A Coloured leader must be able to govern, not merely perform. A Coloured leader must be able to build institutions, not only follow personalities. A Coloured leader must understand that the future of our children cannot be traded for a seat, a title, a livestream, or a mayoral promise.

And above all, a Coloured leader must become trustworthy. Trust is the missing currency of South African politics. The Liam Jacobs moment is therefore not only about whether the DA can trust him again. It is about whether Coloured communities can trust any leader who speaks in their name.

VIIIThe Liam Question Belongs to All of Us

The Liam Question is bigger than Liam.

It asks whether young Coloured leaders will become instruments of party strategy or custodians of community destiny. It asks whether the DA can move beyond efficient governance into historical healing. It asks whether the PA can move beyond emotional mobilisation into accountable institutional leadership. It asks whether Coloured voters will remain a prize to be captured or become a conscious people capable of shaping South Africa's next democratic chapter.

And it asks whether South Africa is ready to admit that the so-called Coloured people are not a leftover category.

We are not an afterthought.

We are a wounded archive of the nation. We are an unfinished bridge. We are the children of rivers, ports, farms, missions, mountains, removals, kitchens, prisons, churches, mosques, shebeens, schools, gangs, choirs, sports fields, and ancestral fires.

We are not merely voters. We are a people still becoming.

And here is the truth that every political party, every aspiring leader, and every campaign strategist must reckon with: you cannot govern a people you have not yet been willing to name. You cannot lead a community whose wound you have not yet been willing to enter. You cannot represent a nation whose memory you have not yet been willing to carry.

The Liam Jacobs return is not a homecoming. It is a warning. It is evidence that South African politics still treats Coloured communities as an electoral resource rather than a historical people. And it is a call — not to a party, but to a generation — to build the kind of leadership that is worthy of the ancestors who survived the erasure.

The question is not which party wins the Coloured vote. The question is whether any party is prepared to meet a people who are finally learning to remember what they were taught to forget.

Camagu.