As the war in Iran reaches its 39th day, many of the Iranian diaspora in Cape Town and Stellenbosch are experiencing the war from a distance. They face no physical threat, and yet they are still caught by their emotional proximity to the crisis.
The war, led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President of the United States Donald J Trump, began on 28 February with strikes across Iran, including a girls’ primary school that killed at least 168 students and staff alone.
The escalation has since resulted in retaliatory strikes on US military bases in the Gulf, the death of Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, thousands of casualties and widespread repression across Iran.
Survivor’s guilt
For Dr Sepideh Mehraban, a Tehran-born academic and artist currently living in Cape Town, the war is not something she experiences physically, but she does experience it constantly.
“I feel the distance from my homeland more intensely during times like this — the longing, and the constant awareness of what my people are enduring in the midst of war. It’s devastating to feel so powerless in the face of catastrophe,” said Dr Mehraban.
Dr Sepideh Mehraban in her Woodstock studio, Cape Town. Mehraban holds degrees from the University of Alzahra in Tehran, a postgraduate distinction from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University. Her layered works combine paint, text, archival imagery, and found materials to explore memory, identity, and power. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
Dr Mehita Iqani, a research professor in media studies at Stellenbosch University (SU), also experiences the war differently. Iqani, who was born in London to an Iranian father and British mother, has always felt distant from her homeland.
Iqani explained she often feels hopeless and angry that she has never visited her homeland. “In moments like these, my sense of identity becomes stronger, more present,” she said. “When you leave your homeland, you somehow become more of it.”
Both Iqani and Mehraban said they felt a sense of guilt: they are safe in South Africa while their compatriots struggle between a tyrannical regime and a US-Israeli-backed war.
“I feel a deep sense of responsibility, as well as guilt and distance,” Mehraban said. “I feel that I should speak about my homeland, to amplify the voices of 90 million people who are currently silenced in a blackout.”
The war on your feed
In an age where war is livestreamed, the instinct is to reach for your phone. When Iranians in diaspora try to contact their family, they are usually met with silence due to the internet blackout in Iran. Mehraban described a troubling dynamic of the emotional toll of using social media during a war.
“What is frightening about social media is how it can turn images of war and death into something almost detached — endlessly circulated, stripped of the human stories, lives, and histories behind them,” she said. “Over time, this constant exposure can numb people.”
Despite the desensitisation many experience, Mehraban still felt motivated to continue speaking out. “Freedom of speech does not exist,” she said of life under the regime. She explained that under the Islamic Republic, censorship begins in childhood. From the earliest years of schooling, children learn to police their speech, a habit that follows them into adulthood. Dissent carries severe consequences, including fines, imprisonment, or even torture and execution.
“My art and research has always been rooted in Iran. Even when I was living in Tehran, I drew from poetry and, in indirect ways, reflected on the country’s politics — open criticism of the regime was not possible,” Mehraban said.
Iqani is strategic in what she posts online. She does not post anything that is polarising, but rather focuses on reasonable and sensible reporting that highlights the human cost of the war and regime.
“Commentary that was thoughtful, that was not ragingly monarchist or ragingly pro-regime, like I’m against the regime, but I definitely wanted to also be sure not to amplify a pro-monarchist agenda either, because I don’t believe in that, and I think it’s very polarising,” said Iqani.
Dr Mehita Iqani giving a lecture at Stellenbosch University’s Journalism Department on media-walking and Eco-tourism research on 19 March. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
The local blind spot
South Africa occupies an unusual position in the Iran War. It is not a mere observer, but a country with direct economic and political ties to the Islamic Republic.
“South Africa rightly stands with the people of Sudan and Palestine,” Mehraban said. “Yet it supports the Iranian regime, citing Iran’s support of the ANC during apartheid. But does the Iranian government truly support its own oppressed people?”
An example of South Africa’s economic ties is the MTN Group’s significant stake in Iran’s telecommunications sector. Investigations by Ra’eesa Pather at Open Secrets, an independent civil society organisation, have examined how the South African telecoms giant’s operations in Iran have supported state-led suppression – including complying with the government to shut down internet access during wartime and protests.
As internet blackouts are imposed on Iranians during uprisings and now amid war, the infrastructure enabling that silence is a South African shareholder. It is a story that has largely gone untold in mainstream local media, Pather explained at a film and discussion night in support of the Iranian people’s freedom struggle hosted by Stellenbosch University’s Journalism Department on 5 March 2026.
“If you are reading this and are an MTN customer, it may be worth reflecting on these issues,” said Mehraban.
Iqani identified another problem in how Iran is represented: “One thing that’s missing is an acknowledgement of the diversity of opinion and political perspectives. Especially in Western media, Iran is treated as a monolith.”
The tendency to treat Iran as a monolith is compounded by South Africa’s own political choices. Writing in Daily Maverick on 22 February, Dr Anisa Mahmoudi, a postdoctoral fellow at the HF Oppenheimer Chair in Human Rights at SU, noted that South Africa, on 23 January, abstained from a UN Human Rights Council resolution condemning Iran’s violent repression of protesters and calling for an investigation into the regime’s actions, despite ongoing reports of mass arrests and killings.
Mahmoudi argued that this silence sits in dissonance with South Africa’s own constitutional inheritance, particularly when, just weeks earlier, a government minister addressed a commemoration of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, while invoking the legacy of South African women who marched against apartheid oppression.
No to the bombs, no to the regime
One thing every Iranian SMF News spoke to emphasised is that most Iranians are against the regime. Evidence of this can be seen in recent protests, which began on 28 December 2025. These protests represent the largest uprising in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution. A New York Times investigation published in February documented testimonies from Iranians, mostly doctors, describing the scale of state violence used to crush the movement.
Mehraban is unequivocal: Iranians have been fighting for regime change for 47 years. However, fighting the regime is not the same as welcoming a foreign-imposed war. “They believe in change from within, through people’s power and collective choice,” she said. This distinction is one that international coverage has consistently suppressed. Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda, an Iranian-Congolese filmmaker, founder of the Collective for Black Iranians, and PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town (UCT), spoke about this in a recent interview with Africa Is a Country, an independent pan-African digital publication. She pointed to the crushed protests of 2009, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022 (which Iqani has a tattoo of on her arm), and the January 2026 protests, which foreign actors might have infiltrated, as evidence of sustained internal resistance, she said to Africa Is a Country.
Dr Sepideh Mehraban’s art in the form of a carpet, as part of the Eyes on Iran project, at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, across from the United Nations, New York, 2022-2023. PHOTO: Dr Sepideh Mehraban
“The fact that there is foreign meddling does not erase the grassroots fights, the protests, the dissent that has existed in Iran since before the internet,” said Hoveyda. “It does not erase the working-class dissent, women’s dissent, minoritised groups’ dissent, the everyday Iranian dissent, the everyday Iranian woman who is simply tired of being policed in the street by the Guidance Patrol. None of this becomes null and void because there is foreign meddling,” she said.
In the same interview, she described how Iran’s African community has been caught between the violence of the state and the violence of war. While she is deeply concerned about what is happening, she is equally concerned with who gets to speak about it. The diversity of Iranian society, its ethnic minorities, religious communities, and working class, are routinely erased in favour of the loudest, most well-funded voices, Hoveyda explained.
What Iranians want, she argued, is the chance to decide for themselves.