IN between the flood of bad news that often fills our timelines there is something that cuts through the noise.
A video of a graduate paying tribute to the matriarch in his family is a powerful reminder that not everything is broken.
In the video, Anthony Timoteus, taken in 2022 but who could not bring himself to share then, posted the video last week in which he visited his late grandmother’s place of work to pay homage to her.
In the clip which has now been shared more than 1.8 million times, he arrives at the scrapyard where she used to work dressed in his graduation gown to honour the woman who helped him obtain his degree.
She passed away a year earlier, and never got a chance to show her what she had made possible.
The video wasn’t staged or overly dramatic, there was no big speech. It was just a quiet moment captured between a young man and the memory of the woman who supported him.
Although Timoteus paid for his studies with bursary money and a part-time job, it was his grandmother who washed and cleaned at the scrapyard well past her retirement age to help cover his living expenses.
He says she never stopped working because she had mouths to feed. There are many grandmothers like her in this country.
The video matters not because it went viral, but because it tells a very real South African story. The kind that we don’t often see when we talk about education, poverty or even success.
It is a story that shows how hard families work and how the little they have stretched to give the next generation a better chance.
South Africa is a country plagued by the noise, but this beautiful moment cuts through. It was about dignity and sacrifice.
That should still mean something.