When someone makes a remarkable life from a poor beginning, admiration comes easily. The harder business is deciding what, exactly, we are admiring. Their persistence? Their ability? Or the distance they had to travel because opportunities available to other people were placed so far beyond their reach?
IOL’s report on Navi Pillay presents a journey from poverty in Clairwood to international recognition. The supplied headline does not establish the precise nature of that recognition, so its reference to “Nobel glory” should not be treated here as confirmation of a Nobel award. Even with that uncertainty, the way such a life is framed deserves attention.
There is a temptation to turn an exceptional achievement into reassurance about the world. Someone found a way through. Therefore, a way through exists. Therefore, perhaps the people who remain stuck simply have not tried hard enough.
That last step is where admiration becomes careless.
One person’s achievement tells us something about what a human being can accomplish. It cannot tell us how many equally capable people spent their lives dealing with obstacles that consumed the time, money and energy achievement required. We rarely get their biographies. There may be no public milestone around which to arrange the story.
Of course, there is a danger in going too far the other way. Explain a life entirely through its circumstances and the person disappears. Effort matters. Decisions matter. A difficult beginning does not make someone merely a product of hardship, any more than a comfortable beginning makes every later achievement fraudulent.
We can recognise someone’s agency without making their hardship sound useful.
That distinction has consequences close to home. A young person struggling to study may need quiet, transport or paid hours reduced more urgently than another speech about determination. A colleague with ability may need someone to reconsider a requirement that has little to do with the work. Encouragement can help, but it can also become a very inexpensive substitute for help.
An account of an extraordinary life ought to leave us interested in the people whose possibilities are still taking shape. Before asking whether they have the resilience to overcome an obstacle, it is worth asking who has the power to remove it, and why it remains there.