Many years ago, I was driving to my first life drawing session on a bitterly cold Highveld morning. The sky was steel-grey, the roads icy, and the car heater barely doing its job. It was one of those mornings where even your bones feel the cold.
As I turned onto the highway, the radio began to play Nana Mouskouri’s Song for Liberty. I turned up the volume. Something in the clarity of her voice cut through the gloom. There was joy in the melody—but also sadness. A kind of longing. That song stayed with me long after I arrived and unpacked my drawing board. That morning, I realised how central liberty is to the human spirit.
Liberty—real liberty—is rare.
Just last week, I was leafing through a book on Berlin Wall graffiti, a catalogue of the wall before and after its collapse. I was once again struck by the sheer humanity etched into its concrete skin. Every spray-painted face, slogan, shape, and scratch told a story of resistance, longing, hope—and endurance. Not polished, not commissioned. Raw and real. A public scream against confinement.
And I found myself asking: Where is liberty to be found today?
We’re not building walls anymore—we’re writing laws. Surveillance, censorship, biometric IDs, internet restrictions, imposed ideologies—liberty is slowly being swapped for security, conformity, and control. In the country I live in, people have lost more freedoms than they’ve gained. The socialist bureaucratic net tightens, quietly and daily. It’s not as dramatic as a wall, but it’s just as enclosing.
The old Berlin Wall, especially on the West Side, became a giant protest canvas. Artists like Thierry Noir painted rows of colourful cartoon heads, each one a silent witness. Dmitri Vrubel gave us the unforgettable Fraternal Kiss—an ironic, haunting embrace between Brezhnev and Honecker. Kani Alavi painted It Happened in November, showing the flood of East Germans finally crossing to freedom—so many faces, filled with joy, fear, uncertainty.
One mural shows a Trabant, the iconic East German car, crashing through the Wall. Painted by Birgit Kinder, it wasn’t just an image—it was a prophecy. The wall would fall. The world would change. People would breathe again.
But now, decades later, I wonder: Did liberty win? Or did it just change shape and move out of sight?
So, where do we find liberty today?
Not in institutions. Not in international bodies. Not in the ever-expanding rulesets of governments or the ideologies of either Left or Right. Both sides, when unchecked, tend to treat people as parts of a machine rather than individuals with souls.
No, I’ve come to believe that liberty now lives inside. In the heart. In the soul. In the mind that dares to think freely. That holds on to dignity. That resists—even quietly.
Sometimes liberty is the decision not to conform. Sometimes it’s the refusal to hate when you’re told to. Sometimes it’s art. A sketch on cold paper. A mural on a wall. A note in a song. Lines from a poem.
When the world grows dark, and bad people do bad things to good people, liberty retreats inward. But it doesn’t die.
The Berlin Wall artists knew this. Their work wasn’t only protest—it was survival. It was a poignant reminder that even in concrete and barbed wire, even in states that crush the human spirit, liberty can still find expression.
If you’re curious, take a virtual walk along the East Side Gallery in Berlin. These murals speak more honestly than most headlines today. They speak of what it means to be human.
So, the question remains: Where is liberty to be found?
Answer: Inside us. And in every act—small or large—that honours the freedom of the human spirit.
