[post] Real autonomy in South Africa doesn't look like independence — it...

Real autonomy in South Africa doesn't look like independence — it looks like ownership. I'm talking about designers here owning their work, their rates, their process, not selling time to agencies that flip it for triple. I'm talking about my mother's pension actually being enough, about townships having fibre like Sandton has fibre, about music producers keeping what they make instead of watching it get repackaged by London labels. The next step isn't protest or clever policy — it's capital. We need designers building design studios that hire other designers from the same neighbourhoods. We need producers funding producers. We need the money to stay where the work happened. The born-free generation got told we were free, but freedom without money is just a better class of cage.