Nando's picks up on a nation starting to believe
For a long time the logic of what South Africa could be was kind of clear, but the tangible evidence of its existence was fleeting.
Roughly a year ago, we wrote an opinion piece in the Daily Maverick about how 'something appears to have changed in South Africa'.
It's impossible to pinpoint exactly what 'that something' is, but the best way we can try to capture it, is that how it feels, is that the country has for the first time, started to believe in itself.
To others this kind of synthesis is going to make no sense at all, but to South Africans this (I think) frames 'this something' perfectly.
For a long time the logic of what South Africa could be was kind of available, but the tangible evidence of its existence was fleeting.
More and more and more however. glimmers of hope are lingering a little longer in our collective consciousness.
We are a nation that is perhaps, finally, starting to believe.
Nando's have picked up on this too (as you might expect), but unlike any other brand in South Africa that might have taken the brief and tried to shoehorn a feel-good narrative into the gap, the Nando's treatment of the subject matter presents itself as more of an intimate reflection of the thick social present, than a forced journey towards a commercial punchline.
Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here. There is still an unbelievable amount of hard work and reparation that still needs to be done. It would be irresponsible to even suggest that just because glimmers exist that we should for one second think that a darkness has been dodged.
But it's also important to grab 'this thing'...this something, that nobody can explain, and continue to carefully kindle it into being.
Hope isn't a strategy, but it's only in the presence of hope that a strategy finds fertile ground.