Taking on something bigger than yourself is no small thing. I should know—because on 22 June 2025, the Azanian Social Justice Initiative started as nothing more than a spark. And even now, over a year later, it’s still taking shape. That’s not just a technicality; it really matters.
People love to glamorize starting something new, a movement, a group, an organization. From outside, it looks like the hard part is having the original idea: spotting what’s wrong, dreaming up an alternative, and giving it a name. But honestly? The idea comes easy. It’s everything after the “Aha!” moment that’ll test who you are. Turning an idea into something concrete; that’s the real struggle. How do you shape a group, and then shape it into an institution? How do you make something that won’t fall apart when the founder steps away? I’ve run up against those questions ever since I started this thing. ASJI was never meant to just float around and fill up space. From the beginning, the plan was way bigger: to actually shift how people in Azania think, organize, and dream. That’s an enormous goal. I didn’t realize quite how enormous at the start. The gap between imagining something and actually building it is huge. Ideas don’t cost much: just some imagination and conversation. Institutions need much more—they need rules, systems, money, education, accountability, people, the works.
That’s been one of the toughest lessons. You can picture what something might be. But trying to build the clockwork that actually makes it run? Way harder. Most of that slog goes unseen—drafting and re-drafting documents, stressing over structures, coming up with political stances, obsessing about education plans and the right people, all before there’s much to show for it. Sometimes you’re prepping branches before you’ve even got branches. Or designing a national framework when there aren’t enough folks yet to fill it out. You’re laying groundwork, and at times it feels like busywork. But that’s how institutions are made: you don’t see the foundation until the building stands. But big dreams bring their own headaches. If all we wanted was another civil society group, it’d still be tricky. But we want to shift what’s possible in Azania. You can’t approach that kind of task and cut corners. History tests organizations, a group that wants real influence has to survive the storms. Internal fights, cash crunches, moments when everyone’s excited or everyone’s discouraged, you have to build for all of it.
And more than anything, it comes down to people. All the pretty documents, all the online presence, it comes down to folks who connect around an idea and decide, together, to keep going. That’s the hardest, and the most important, part. I won’t lie. The journey hasn’t gone in a straight line. Some months, things flew — ideas, plans, all of it coming together. Other times, everything just dragged. Stuff happens. Life intervenes. Sometimes the sheer scale just hits you. Or you simply need a break. That can get demoralizing. When you can already see in your head what it’s supposed to look like, any pause feels like failure. You stare at the unfinished parts and wonder if you’re actually getting anywhere. Comparing the dream with the reality, that gap can feel like a punch. But I’ve learned that a stop isn’t always surrender. Sometimes you need to hit pause, but the test is whether you come back to the work.
One of my worst pauses didn’t come from burnout or practicalities, it came from getting mugged. It wasn’t just my own loss; so much of this project lives on devices, in accounts. Suddenly, I was cut off. Everything slowed down. Access, communication, momentum, gone, just like that. Losing your digital toolkit is its own kind of heartbreak when you’re trying to build something. It threw me off. Work I had finally gotten moving, I couldn’t keep up. For a while, I honestly thought that months of effort had just evaporated. But that’s reality. We love to talk about perseverance like it’s this superhero trait. But life’s messy. People get robbed. People fail. Plans fall apart. Sometimes, what you have to do is just start over. It’s not about avoiding problems, it’s about what you do when they land. There’s this line from Trotsky that’s stuck with me through all of this: “Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery…”
I’ve thought about that, especially when nothing was going right—after the mugging, during slow periods, when obstacles felt endless. You need something big enough to pull you out of the day-to-day misery, something that’s worth showing up for. Of course, frustration is easier, cynicism is easier, quitting is easier. It’s easy to tell yourself people won’t care, the project’s too difficult, the world’s not ready. No idea makes all that vanish. But a powerful idea gives you a reason to face it. For me, that’s why I keep coming back to ASJI. At this point, it’s bigger than any setback. The vision’s more important than my irritation or exhaustion.
But I’ve had to learn something else, too. If ASJI’s going to be what it’s meant to be, it can’t just be my thing. That’s a tough pill to swallow. I poured myself into it, every line written, every plan hashed out. So, sure, it’s easy to feel wrapped up in it. But building real institutions means letting go. The project’s true test is if it outgrows me. If someday, ASJI can thrive without me at the center, that’s not a loss. That’s victory. That’s how you build institutions, not personality cults. And we’re not there yet. It’s easy to get overwhelmed thinking about how far we still have to go—growing our base, building real structures, making political education central, turning the founding congress from dream to reality, grounding our constitution in daily practice. Turning ideas into actual action. There’s still a massive amount of work ahead.
But maybe that’s exactly why I should see progress differently. You can’t expect a one-year-old project to behave like it’s been around for generations. Better to ask: are we laying the groundwork? Yes. Every draft. Every hard conversation. Every person who gets what we’re about. Every mistake, every pause, that’s all learning, all part of the foundation. Looking back, I don’t see a neat story. It’s been messy. Stops and starts. Clarity and confusion. Hard work and forced breaks, even dramatic ones, like getting mugged and losing all my access. But beyond all the interruptions, there’s one thing I’m proud of: persistence. We picked up again. The idea lived. The vision stayed.
Maybe that’s what Trotsky meant, life’s never short on reasons to be bitter or cynical. Challenges are a guarantee. But with something worth building, you get some perspective. For me, ASJI is turning into one of those things. Not because it’s sure to win, not because the way forward’s all mapped out. But because I believe it’s possible to make something lasting, something that raises up people and reshapes the politics of this place. That’s the mammoth task, and yeah, the big lesson from these fourteen months is that trying to build something bigger than yourself means you’ll have to pick up the pieces and start over, more than once. You restart. You recover. You learn. You keep going, even, maybe especially, when the progress is invisible. What do I have to show for it today? Not a finished institution —just the beginning of one. And that matters.
So, the work goes on. Not because it’s easy or smooth. But because hard things are the ones that matter. Not because everything’s gone to plan, but because challenges and setbacks don’t get the final say. Not because the future’s certain, but because the idea’s worth it. And when things get rough, I go back to that line: you need a big idea to rise above the mess. For now, for me, that’s ASJI. And the work isn’t finished. We’re still building.
