By Sipho Singiswa
Dear people of Iran,
On this Worker’s Day, I send Black revolutionary love from South Africa to your workers, your artists, your youth, your mothers, your dock labourers, your engineers and your defenders of sovereignty. I send it as an ex-Robben Island prisoner and as a Black South African who has lived under white power, colonial violence and imperial manipulation. I know the pressure empire brings to a people who refuse outside command. I know its strategy in media, politics, economics and war. I know the punishment it reserves for a nation that insists on history, dignity and self-rule. Iran has carried that punishment for decades and still stands upright.
I write to you in a period when Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei has placed the Strait of Hormuz at the centre of the present struggle and spoken of a new phase in its management. Iranian reporting has tied that position to sovereignty, regional autonomy and the end of foreign abuse in the Gulf. President Masoud Pezeshkian has described the US naval siege of Iranian ports as “an extension of military operations” and “intolerable”, while Washington keeps the threat of renewed war alive. That language from Tehran carries the weight of a people who understand that siege and diplomacy can arrive in the same breath from imperial power.
What commands my respect is the way Iran built for resistance. Your country did not survive by trusting foreign capital, by waiting for mercy from sanctions architects or by surrendering national life to market dogma. Ayatollah Khamenei has tied production to national strength and workers to the backbone of production. That language locates labour inside sovereignty itself. It gives workers a political place far larger than the narrow wage relation. It says a besieged country survives through its own hands, its own factories, its own fields and its own disciplined will.
That lesson reaches deep into governance. Article 150 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic keeps the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in being so it may continue “guarding the Revolution and its achievements.” That constitutional duty extends beyond a narrow military role. It ties defence to the preservation of a revolutionary order and to the institutions, infrastructure and social achievements that grew from that order. Iran learned through war and sanctions that a revolution must defend ports, roads, energy systems, supply lines and public endurance as part of one national structure. I look at that and I see a country that understood what siege demands.
South Africa did not build that kind of protective state after liberation. We won political office without securing economic command. We allowed foreign capital, ratings agencies, donor agendas and comprador politics to discipline our future. We left workers exposed. We let industry weaken. We watched public capacity shrink while elites learned to speak the language of markets and moderation to the very powers that had no interest in our full freedom. Iran, under harsher assault, built institutions for endurance. South Africa, after apartheid, left its people too close to the wolves of the market. Our unfinished revolution has much to learn from a country that treated sovereignty as a daily economic task rather than empty rhetoric at a ceremony.
I also write to you through Palestine. South Africans remember how empire named our freedom fighters terrorists while white domination ruled through law, prison and gunfire. We recognise the same script in the treatment of Palestine and in the effort to criminalise every force that refuses settler power and Atlantic command. Iran has kept faith with Palestine through a long season of betrayal and silence. That commitment belongs to a wider anti-colonial memory shared across the Global South. It tells oppressed people that military power cannot manufacture justice by repeating the word security.
The current phase around Hormuz exposes the imperial method in concentrated form. The United States seized the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska while mediation efforts were active and while a ceasefire still stood. Tehran called the operation piracy and treated it as a ceasefire violation. Europe then moved to widen sanctions linked to Hormuz while Washington sought support for reopening the strait on American terms. The same powers now try to present Iran as the force strangling the world economy, even though their blockade, siege and war pressure have already cut roughly one-fifth of global oil and gas flows and driven energy prices sharply upward.
I honour in Iran more than endurance under attack. I honour a totality that empire cannot easily penetrate. I honour a civilisation that keeps poetry, ritual, scholarship, memory, architecture, faith, production and defence alive under siege. I honour a governing order that learned how to protect the national body instead of offering it up for dismemberment by foreign power and local greed. I honour a people who continue to create while they resist. A country that still makes art under siege has refused one of empire’s deepest ambitions, which is the conquest of internal life.
I send this letter from South Africa with no imperial permission and no liberal apology. Many of us remain oppressed under the afterlife of colonial power, and many of us still search for forms of political courage equal to the age we live in. We look to Iran and we see a people who held the line under sanctions, sabotage, war and media vilification. We see workers placed inside the national project. We see a revolutionary guard constitutionally tasked with protecting the revolution and its gains. We see a state that built for survival. We see an anti-colonial memory still active in the present. We see, in your confrontation with Washington, Israel and Europe, a lesson for every people who want sovereignty without submission.
On this Workers’ Day, I send you solidarity from one wounded part of the Global South to another. May your workers remain steadfast. May your artists keep creating. May your youth inherit sovereignty rather than dependency. May your mothers and fathers continue to watch their children play. May your defence of Hormuz strengthen all peoples who refuse imperial command.
Our unfinished revolution in South Africa stands to gain from Iran’s example in governance, production, endurance and political nerve. Revolutionary South Africans who remain oppressed should stand with Iran, learn from Iran and recognise in your struggle a living lesson in how a people survive siege without surrendering labour, culture, memory or will.
Sipho Singiswa is Director of Media for Justice, a political commentator and a struggle veteran.