I am fascinated by what drives driven people. It is almost never one thing.
Ambition, anger, childhood, opportunity, injustice, ego, service, luck. We are all complicated tapestries of the things that happened to us and the things we decided to do about them.
That is probably my favourite part of sitting down with people for The Debrief. I am less interested in what somebody has achieved than in understanding what made them believe they could do it in the first place.
And for days after my conversation with Tessa Dooms, I kept thinking about something she said.
“Power does not concede without a demand.”
I have known Tessa, or at least known her work, for more than a decade. We have occupied many of the same spaces around politics, governance and civil society.
She is variously described as a civil society leader, activist and policy strategist. I think of her more simply as someone who gets stuff done.
There is a razor-sharpness to the way she thinks about South Africa.
She can diagnose a political problem with the precision of someone who has spent years studying institutions, but she talks about those institutions with the impatience of someone who has also spent years watching what happens when they fail.
Perhaps some of that comes from where she started.
Tessa grew up in Eldorado Park, in a household and community where service was part of everyday life.
That resonated deeply with me because I grew up in a service household too.
There is something about being raised by people who are constantly doing things for other people. It embeds in you an awareness of the other. Somebody needs food. Somebody needs help. Somebody needs a lift. Somebody’s child needs looking after. Somebody’s family is struggling.
You learn very early that your life cannot only be about you.
But Tessa made me think about the limits this too.
What happens when good people spend their entire lives rescuing people from the consequences of broken systems, but nobody fixes the system producing the crisis?
As Tessa put it:
“We don’t just need stopgap solutions... We need societal level interventions that shift entire societies.”
That stayed with me. Because South Africa has an extraordinary culture of community intervention. When something fails, somebody steps in. Churches. Mosques. NGOs. Community activists. Feeding schemes. Gift drives. Volunteers.
It is beautiful and dysfunctional.
We become extraordinarily good at helping people survive things they should never have been forced to survive.
That is where Tessa’s understanding of power becomes interesting.
Working in civil society taught her something that many of us take too long to learn: the people sitting in powerful rooms are, as she puts it, “just okies.” I loved that.
If the people in power are just people, then perhaps we have given power too much permission to intimidate us.
Which brings me back to that line:
“Power does not concede without a demand.”
We often talk about leadership as though it is something bestowed upon particularly special people.
Tessa talks about it differently.
Leadership sometimes begins with the audacity to raise your hand.
To say: I disagree.
To ask: why?
To insist: this is not good enough.
And, eventually, perhaps to say: I think I can do better.
That requires a particular kind of courage, especially for women.
What also stood out for me was when Tessa spoke about the “angry Black woman” trope and her refusal to shrink herself to accommodate it.
Her response is wonderfully uncomplicated:
“I can be angry and right.” I have thought about that line a lot too.
We have become very interested in the aesthetics of disagreement. Was she too loud? Was he too aggressive? Could she have said it more nicely?
Sometimes anger is entirely rational. If your community has no water, anger is rational.
If children are growing up surrounded by dysfunction that adults have normalised, anger is rational.
If governments repeatedly fail at delivering the most basic things required for human dignity, anger is rational.
The useful question is what we do with it. Tessa’s answer is organising.
My conversation with Tessa was ostensibly about politics, governance and leadership.
I left thinking about audacity.
Watch my full conversation with Tessa Dooms on The Debrief with Qaanitah Hunter.
And then tell me below: what have we become too accustomed to accepting?