On Thursday, South Africa marked a national day of mourning for the victims of the devastating floods in the Eastern Cape. Flags flew at half-mast. Government officials wore black. Moments of silence were observed across institutions. But in the small villages and towns of the province, grief had no ceremonial start or end. It began when the floodwaters came—ripping through homes, uprooting trees, tearing families apart. For some, mourning started in the dark, at 2am, as they clung to the hope that a missing child or parent would be found alive. For others, it continues every time they must pass the muddy remnants of what used to be home.
More than 90 lives have been lost. Entire households swept away. Loved ones snatched by water before those around them could even scream. Children died. Elders died. Breadwinners died. Most of them were poor. Most lived in low-lying, informal settlements. Few of them had titles to the land they lived on. Fewer still will be named in the official statements that echo through government speeches. There will be no statues erected for them, no commemorative scholarships launched in their name. These were not people the nation knew until the disaster came. They were not celebrities, not acclaimed activists, not high-profile individuals . They were the invisible scaffolding of South Africa—the grandmothers holding together families, the teenagers helping younger siblings with homework, the men and women who relied on social development grants, pensioners who had used their hard-earned cash to build their homes and parents who relied on monthly stipend for their hard-working children in big cities.
It’s always the poorest who pay the steepest price in disaster. We don’t say it often enough.
We’ve been told repeatedly that the affected communities were warned about the dangers of building in flood-prone areas. That there were advisories. That it wasn’t safe. That some of this, if not all, could have been avoided. Perhaps. But it is not the whole story. A warning means little when there is nowhere else to go. A map of danger zones does not answer the deeper question: Where were they supposed to build instead? Where does a person go when every door of formal housing is closed to them, and the price of safe land is indexed by inequality?
And so the cycle continues: the poor are displaced and blamed. They are remembered only in catastrophe. We grieve them with rituals we don’t apply to their living conditions. In life, they are invisible. In death, they are headlines. And only briefly.
This brings us to the idea of collective mourning, of the so-called “national day of mourning.” What is it, really? A political gesture? A spiritual acknowledgment? A public ritual to ensure we feel like a community, even when we live such drastically different lives?
Is it meaningful, or is it performance?
I ask these questions not because I am unmoved, but because I am. Deeply. Moved by the image of a child holding in to a tree and a mother trying to hold onto two children and losing them both to a current she could not fight. Haunted by the stories of the survives , sound of a boy’s voice calling for help, and no one being able to reach him. These are not metaphors. These are the final moments of real South Africans. But when we say “let’s mourn as a nation,” who are we asking to mourn? And who are we mourning for?
To mourn is not just to cry. It is to acknowledge value. To say this life mattered. To remember. It is also to question. Mourning must be more than a minute of silence. It must include a noise of outrage. It must provoke discomfort. It must demand answers about housing, early warning systems, government readiness, and the moral architecture that allows some communities to be perpetually vulnerable.
It is not enough to bow our heads in solemnity while blaming the dead for being in harm’s way. It is not enough to wear black and move on. Mourning must also be political. Especially in a country like ours, where tragedy often visits the same postcodes, over and over again.
South Africa is no stranger to grief. Ours is a country familiar with public rituals of sorrow. From Marikana to Life Esidimeni, from the COVID-19 death toll to the recurrent floods, fires, and droughts. We know how to weep in public. But do we know how to honour? Do we know how to change systems so that we don’t mourn the same kinds of people in the same way, again and again?
The floods in the Eastern Cape have done more than destroy infrastructure. They have cracked open uncomfortable truths about land, poverty, governance, and dignity. We owe the victims more than platitudes. We owe them memory, and accountability. We owe them the kind of mourning that is felt not just in press statements, but in budgets, in housing plans, in early warning systems that reach the right ears, in a social contract that treats the poor as people, not casualties.
By the time this column reaches readers on Saturday, the flags will be flying high again. The official mourning will have passed. But the rebuilding is only beginning. The trauma is fresh. The graves are new. The children left behind are still crying. And the people who survived are wondering what their lives mean to the rest of us.
So I ask again, who do we mourn, and how?
If we are to live by design, not default, our mourning must not only look back at loss—it must look forward with resolve. Resolve to shift how we plan cities. Resolve to serve the marginalised before tragedy. Resolve to see value in every life, not just the ones that make the evening news. Resolve to remember, and not just react.
Because a life swept away by floodwaters is not a statistic. It is a call. A call to design a society where mourning is not a seasonal gesture, but a sustained commitment to justice, safety, and shared humanity.