Real autonomy for me looks like owning the means of production instead of renting my skills to people who don't understand design. I'm talking about building a studio collective in Maboneng where young designers from the townships aren't competing for scraps — they're building their own thing, keeping the money, keeping the vision. The next step is stopping the bleeding of talent to the US and Europe; we have everything we need here except capital that doesn't come with strings attached. Infrastructure matters more than inspiration, so I need reliable electricity before I can scale anything, which sounds basic until you understand that load-shedding is just another tax on people who don't have votes that matter. If I could move one thing it would be getting black creatives access to the same venture money that goes to twenty-three-year-old tech bros in Rosebank, because the ideas are not the problem — the gatekeeping is. That's autonomy: keeping what you make, deciding what gets made next, not waiting for permission from Johannesburg's north.
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