Unchosen Strength: Skills of Survival and Resistance in ‘Post’-Apartheid South Africa

This paper investigates how historically marginalized residents of Cape Town’s navigate and resist the enduring legacies of apartheid that undermine psychosocial well-being. Conducted in collaboration with a community-based NGO, the study employed the Tree of Life collective narrative practice with twenty adults, to explore lived experiences of suffering, identity, and endurance. Through Reflexive Thematic Analysis, seven themes emerged: poverty as the root of distress; faith as both divisive and sustaining; childhood as harm and resilience; the fragile presence of Ubuntu; constrained yet reclaimed youth futures; family and gendered expectations as both pressure and belonging; and strength as necessity. These narratives show that psychological suffering is inseparable from racialized inequality, economic precarity, and eroded social trust, yet also highlight mutual care, spirituality, and collective meaning-making that restore dignity and agency under structural oppression. A central theme concerns what participants described as unchosen strength: embodied, relational, and ethical capacities developed to endure and resist structural violence. Within this terrain, the notion of skills of survival gains legitimacy—not as a celebration of endurance but as a critical response to the conditions that demand it. These practices challenge romanticized notions of resilience, reframing it as resistance: a situated, political, and moral practice that reclaims meaning, solidarity, and humanity amid systemic abandonment.