It’s been over a decade since former South African President and global icon Nelson Mandela passed away. Every year on his birthday, 18 July, South Africans, and everyone around the world, are asked to dedicate 67 minutes of their time to helping others. The number marks the years Mandela spent in service — from his early legal work in Johannesburg and underground activism, to his imprisonment on Robben Island alongside other stalwarts of the liberation struggle.

This year, Mandela Day arrives during a particularly volatile moment in the country. Just last week, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Lucky Mkhwanazi publicly accused Police Minister Senzo Mchunu and other senior officials of disbanding a task team investigating political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal, and of concealing evidence. These are serious allegations, with the potential to shake national politics. In response, President Cyril Ramaphosa has ordered the formation of a commission of inquiry.

All this unfolds against a backdrop of deepening instability. The Government of National Unity is fragile, always one disagreement away from collapse. In Mandela’s home province, the Eastern Cape, recent floods have resulted in deaths and left communities reeling. At the same time, budget cuts to key health programmes are raising alarms about the state’s ability to care for its people.

OkayAfrica took to the streets to speak to young South Africans about their thoughts and feelings about Mandela Day. For Sivenathi, a student at the University of the Western Cape, the day represents “the effort and progress made towards addressing the injustices of the past.”

She continues: “It also poses a solution for us to work together towards addressing those injustices, and taking a collaborative and bottom-up approach to addressing the issues we face as a society because of our past.”

Buhlebethu Magwaza (31) agrees. As the project lead at Youth Capital, a campaign advocating for key policy changes to solve youth unemployment, she recognises the urgency of a youth locked out of employment opportunities. She plans to spend Mandela Day helping young people format their resumes and with reading and comprehending job descriptions. For her, the day is about “collective action.”

“It’s about what you can do with your community to give back. It’s about being courageous, it’s about unity, and doing something for someone. Mandela was really about nation building and what we can do to ensure that everyone contributes to a better South Africa, continent, and even the world,” she says.

Compassion and courage are two values of the revered former statesman that she still abides by today. “To solve today’s development problems, we need to be courageous. In the same breadth, we need to be compassionate; people are going through a lot. We need to remember that we exist within our communities; therefore, we must remember to always be kind in whatever we do,” she says.

The legacy of the man, however, has not gone unquestioned. For many, Mandela’s vision of a “rainbow nation” feels increasingly out of step with South Africa’s present-day realities. The post-apartheid promise of equality and justice remains unfulfilled for millions. Rising inequality, corruption, unemployment, and deep mistrust in political leadership have led some to view Mandela Day as symbolic at best, performative at worst.

But Magwaza reckons the day is still relevant.

“Especially in a world that is going through so much,” she says. “It’s always important that you give back. You go back to communities, see what can be done, and how you can contribute. As someone who works in the youth unemployment space, I think now more than ever we need to pull together to come up with solutions,” she says.

Thapelo Tapala (13), a student, learnt that fighting for one’s rights is important while being taught about Mandela in school. But he doesn’t think that people nowadays pay attention to the day. To his generation, Mandela represents freedom. “We’re young people who need our rights and our freedom,” he says. His cousin Anesu (15) agrees that young people don’t really pay attention to Mandela Day anymore. “I think it’s just another day for them. He does mean a lot to us, even though we don’t really show it in anything we do. He fought for our freedom, and that is why we are where we are now,” he concludes.

July 5th marks Algerian Independence Day. In 1962, it became the first African country to liberate itself from 132 years of French occupation and colonization, having waged an eight-year-long guerrilla war.

But Algeria wasn’t done fighting imperialism. It poured its energy and resources into helping other colonized countries, positioning itself as the spearhead of Pan-African and internationalist action at the time.

It is widely known that Afro Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon dedicated himself to the Algerian cause, using his experience with the National Liberation Front to formulate a theory of liberation in his books, The Wretched of the Earth and Toward the African Liberation.

It is less known that in the newly liberated streets of Algiers, you would have bumped into Black Panthers, fighters of the African National Congress, and militants from Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, the Canary Islands, or Namibia.

“During the War of Independence, Algeria had large support from African countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Mali, Ghana, and Congo,” filmmaker Hassane Mezine tells OkayAfrica. “It was part of the essence of the Algerian revolution to support national liberation movements from other countries. The Algerian national project of liberation was not just an Algerian project. It was an African project.”

Revolutionaries and exiled militants received training in guerrilla-style warfare, financial support, and political education. Nelson Mandela famously declared, “The Algerian army made me a man,” and Guinea’s Amilcar Cabral called Algiers the “Mecca of Revolution.”

“This was a time when Algerians met people from other places who had the same struggle with a history linked to colonialism and a need for liberation,” says Mezine. “I think that young people in Algeria are very aware of this up to today.”

When London-based Algerian cultural organizer Dénia Dimsdale wrote her master’s thesis about the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, she found that most diasporic Algerians of her generation were unaware of the great role their country played in the post-independence era.

“The festival was a beautiful moment in history where Algerians still had a fractured sense of identity - are we French or are we Arab?” says Dimsdale. “Pan-Africanism just came from the sky, gifting Algerians their African identity. But then the government at the time saw it as the perfect opportunity to hijack it and use it for its own gain.”

One of the comments on Dimsdale’s thesis was that she had arrived at an unfair conclusion, saying that the government had hijacked Pan-Africanism. “This information is so difficult to access. I found nothing [about it] online in French, English, or Arabic,” she says.

Said Djinnit, a former Algerian diplomat, witnessed post-independence Algiers, where he began his career working with foreign liberation movements. “You can choose to look at the Sahara as dividing or uniting Africa,” he says. “I’m a Pan-Africanist, I think it unites us.”

Djinnit dedicated his life to Pan-African unity, serving in the African department of the Algerian government and becoming a key architect of the ‘African solutions to African problems’ approach. “The position in Addis Ababa, Africa’s capital, is as important for Algeria as New York,” he says, refusing the divide of North and Sub-Saharan Africa and calling it “pure fabrication. Africa is geographical space, a continent. Not history, not mythology, but reality.”

Algeria was one of the founding members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, establishing a Liberation Committee and an African Battalion tasked with coming to the aid of revolutionary and liberation movements in need of weapons, money, or militants.

“Through people like my father and his colleagues, Algeria has kept a key role in continental peace and security architecture in the 21st century,” says Dalil Djinnit, Said’s Algerian Ethiopian son. “Based on their experience and budget, Algeria is perhaps the only country in Africa to have this capacity.”

Unsurprisingly, the post-independence era, which many may consider a revolutionary utopia, was marked by harsh realities. The rapidly changing world order left no time for a continent as vast as Africa to figure out unity while nations were still embroiled in their liberation struggles. The Pan-African spirit dwindled. Algeria was plunged into civil war in the 1990s, which led it to look inward.

“[The younger generation’s] idea of Algeria stops with the Civil War because no one wants to talk about that or anything that happened after,” says Dimsdale. A growing economic and cultural influence from the Gulf brought what Mezine calls “a counterrevolutionary influence” to the country, stirring it away from Pan-African education and towards a stronger Arab and Islamic identity.

In a survey conducted by OkayAfrica last year, asking North Africans to share the stories they grew up hearing about each other, there was a general impression that Algerians are not interested in inviting non-Algerians to their country. Considering their Pan-African efforts, this might seem counterintuitive.

“I think this can be linked to the traumatic experience of being French,” says Dalil Djinnit. “Algeria is trying to protect itself,” agrees Dimsdale, but also notes that Pan-Africanism has lost its fire across the continent.

“At the OAU’s opening summit in 1963, Ben Bella said, ‘Let us all agree to die a little … so that the people still under colonial rule may be free,” says Djinnit. “Are you hearing any such statements from any other African leader today? Now, people are in survival mode; they are not dreaming anymore.”

As Algeria commemorates its triumph over colonial oppression, all Africans and formerly colonized peoples should remember July 5th as a historic milestone and turning point for the project of African self-determination and unity.

Mezine believes that we are once again at a turning point where the fundamentals of the Algerian revolution are seeing a revival. Djinnit actively advocates for this revival.

Algeria plays a big role in the African Union, continuing to be a champion for Western Sahara’s independence from Morocco, issuing debt forgiveness to other African countries, and providing billions of dollars to Sahelian countries.

“The [Algerian] government is aware that there is a real need to have people getting back to their relationship with the southern neighboring countries first and then to the rest of the continent,” says Mezine. “Governments know that the African people are the red line of liberation.”

“When I was a young diplomat and attending the OAU meetings, there was a sense that we were together, building our common destiny,” says Djinnit. “I attended the last African Union summit, and honestly, it looked like a panel discussion. We need an African moral rearmament.”