Around 2018 I was added to a WhatsApp group for University of KwaZulu-Natal 1980s alumni. It was overwhelmingly black, with a scattering of minority left-wing activists. As one of the few whites, and by then already on the right, I spent years arguing against the group’s embrace of failed populist economics driven by black grievance. In July 2021, after the Zuma-inspired riots, I left. I no longer felt colour-blindness was possible. Staying would have disrespected both myself and them. I departed in a huff, telling them as gently as I could that their revolution had failed. I felt somewhat vindicated when one of the alumni, now a black Free State farmer, sent me a DM regretting my exit and complaining about the greedy, corrupt Zulus and Xhosas on the group.

In the July 2021 riots privileged middle-class blacks joining the looting spree, packing their Toyota Corollas with pillaged goods. Their leaders had already looted the country of billions — why shouldn’t they get in on the act? The Zuma years of state capture, followed by that unseemly spectacle, shredded my last slivers of hope that an emerging black bourgeoisie would, like the poor Afrikaners before them, supply the competent administrators of a successful state.

I am naturally a liberal who has always cared for the underdog. Now that we are ruled by black people whose greed and incompetence does little good for the “toiling masses” they claim to love, I have stopped feeling sorry for them. I feel sorry for myself, living in a country on a downward trajectory. That is why I am so delighted about “AfriMaga”, as some critics have labelled AfriForum, Solidarity, Sakeliga and the rest. My enemy’s enemy is my friend.

AfriForum, which is led by Kallie Kriel, met recently with the anti-illegal immigration group March and March in an extraordinary “cultural exchange”. March and March’s Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma wants Kallie Kriel to help her build “an AfriForum for blacks”. By which she means she wants to trade black street cred for Calvinist organisational acumen.

When it comes to race and culture AfriForum believes in bilateralism, not enmeshment. Their Head of Cultural Affairs, Alana Bailey, manages language rights, heritage and international liaison. Unlike me, AfriForum never wasted years believing in colour-blindness and non-racialism. Yet the reality remains: we live in a mostly black country; it is dangerous if most of them do not like us.

AfriMaga’s solution is to avoid the dilution of culture that could easily destroy the DA and instead stay true to what they are. As Hendrik Verwoerd and Steve Biko both advised in their different ways, it is best to build coherence within your own tribe before reaching out the hand of friendship to others … something like that. Whatever the theory, I am all for it.

Rian Malan, the oracle of Van Wyksdorp, called this clever AfriForum play a couple of months ago. He urged the DA to get in on the act first and take a more strident stance against illegal immigration, precisely so it could shed its image as the white madam party protective of its Malawian houseboy — and thereby win greater trust from black voters. (It is something of an irony that in South Africa to be anti-African immigrants is to be pro-black.) Too late for the DA. AfriForum has grabbed the initiative.

From Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma’s comments I imagine she is impressed by the fact that AfriForum collects subscriptions from hundreds of thousands of people who get nothing tangible back in return and that to date there has been nary a whisper of funds misappropriated. Imagine if millions of black folk trusted her with their subscriptions; or at least trusted that Kallie was keeping the money safe. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma would quickly become a powerful actor in a country desperate for black leadership, particularly grassroots black leadership. Now imagine AfriForum ensuring March and March were using that money wisely to build a formidable organisational infrastructure (facilitated by tech of course) to fight our wayward elite who have no clue about what ordinary South Africans actually want. Presto: AfriMaga—with its enormous influence across business, the white community, and in America—allied with the country’s most dynamic grassroots black lobby.

Finally, it is here. The sort of disruption Frans Cronje keeps talking about but cannot seem to recognise when it is right in front of his eyes. Who knows — one day people may start talking about “AfriMarcher”, the new cultural hybrid rolling back borderless woke madness, restoring faith and family, and reversing that downward trajectory that has haunted us these past decades.

Iain McGilchrist warns that ours is a sentimental age and that sentimentality is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, cruelty dressed up as kindness. One need only consider the intense sentimental streak running through Nazism to understand the point. Real love requires a special honesty and attention on the object of affection. In sentimentality we have instead empty projection; narcissism masquerading as the real deal. In McGilcchrist’s words: “Love has its rigour.” I thought of this on learning of the suicide of Jason Arday, who basked in public love from a coterie of academics.

Arday was a physical education teacher elevated beyond his abilities into a professorship at Cambridge. The same university, by the way, where our very own Jan Smuts became the first person ever to take both parts of the Law Tripos in the same year — and came first in both.

Arday was promoted because he was black. In a poetic twist it was “race realist” Nathan Cofnas — hounded out of Cambridge in 2024 — who exposed Arday’s academic fraud. Cofnas is now a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium. According to Cofnas, wokeness is a symptom of a widely held mistruth, a bug (if not a feature) of the Enlightenment idea of the boundless malleability of Man — the belief that all population groups are interchangeable in their cognitive distributions.

In his Substack essay “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem”, Cofnas provides evidence that conservatives tend to be dumber than liberals and that to achieve political and cultural influence, “the right needs to figure out how to turn smart people away from the left.” He sets out to understand why “smart people overwhelmingly choose wokeism over right-wing alternatives” and concludes that although “both mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races,” the left “correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs.” And therefore, “smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokeism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.”

For the dumb conservatives reading this, let’s put that in plainer terms: Cofnas says conservatives are not as bright as liberals and that if the right wants power it has to win smart people back. Both the left and right preach that all races have the same mix of talent, but only the left follows through: If the races are the same, then the big gaps in jobs, crime and tests must be caused by racism and therefore wokeism is the logical antidote. Conservatives, of course, hate this logical conclusion. Yet it is both sides who have the wrong premise: talent is not equal across the races.

Woke is particularly irritating because it focuses on trivialities while avoiding the real issue. The racial makeup of elite western institutions is small fry. The real challenge is global.

I asked Grok to name any vaguely decent country with an average IQ below 90. It came up with Botswana, Seychelles and Mauritius and Botswana. There are no well-functioning countries of any significant size with a low average IQ. Never mind what Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Daron Acemoglu or Thomas Piketty say. Socioeconomic development has little to do with geography, mineral endowment, history, disease or democracy. It has almost everything to do with average IQ. According to Grok, the correlation between national IQ estimates and measures of development is 0.7–0.9 — making average IQ the strongest single predictor of national outcomes we currently have. Among high-IQ countries, none are poor except those that follow destructive ideologies, the most obvious example being North Korea. If you live in a high-IQ country that does not have a psychopathic elite, you will be relatively rich and developed.

As South Africa becomes more African, it is converging on the continental mean. After thirty years the facts are in: our black professional-managerial class cannot sustain the complex institutions a modern democracy requires. “Equity”, “empowerment”, “diversity” and “inclusiveness” are the slogans of a failed ideology and a failed post-colonial project. More of the same will only accelerate the decay.

As Grok notes about South Africa:

Population-weighted IQ estimates are low. Despite relatively advanced infrastructure and formal democratic institutions, the country suffers chronic crime, state capture, service-delivery collapse and economic stagnation. Refusing to discuss the most obvious contributing factor has costs. It makes otherwise intelligent observers say foolish things.

Frans Cronje is an otherwise intelligent observer who is blinded by the equality thesis. Consider his apologia for Jacob Zuma and his chosen successor, son Duduzane. Cronje finds little of substance to say about the Zumas. He mentions that Zuma is an avid chess player who impressed his Eastern Bloc handlers and apartheid enemies during the Cold War. As for Duduzane, Cronje is impressed by the fact that he called Alec Hogg “Mr Hogg” in his recent speech at the BizNews Conference and that he could just be the man to widen the appeal of the MK Party beyond the Zulu vote—as if that were a good thing.

As for Duduzane’s speech to the scions of white monopoly capital at the BizNews Conference in the Drakensberg, it was an embarrassment. It is impossible to say exactly what Duduzane stands for, although Cronje seems to have looked into his eyes and seen his soul, as George Bush Jr said of Putin.

At the start of the speech Duduzane Zuma makes an off-colour, ominous joke about drug smuggling, complaining that the promise of snow in the Berg did not materialise and that “There’s more snow being smuggled in through the Durban port than there’s snow in the mountains.” The rest of the speech is as enlightening as a Jason Arday essay. It is filled with banalities and inanities that add zero meaning to the crisis the country faces. Here is a representative sample from the speech:

…there’s a reality on the ground that we need to be serious about and the reality is politics in this country has just taken an interesting turn; as much as people would like to have these conversations and draw triangles, uh, pyramids, graphs, nobody really knows what the future holds. The MK has created an interesting talking point, an interesting dynamic in our South African discussion. You know, table talk, um, at the polls, taxi ranks and purely because of one reason. People have the faith in what the MK brings to the table. They have hopes and they know that the people that occupy this party will bring us to the promised land…

The only moment approaching substance came when — still in the same bumbling, barely coherent style — he called on big business, whites, Indians and coloureds to meet the African majority halfway on populist demands such as free education, land expropriation and the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank. Meeting the Africanists halfway on their populist demands is like negotiating with a hyena over how much of your leg it gets to keep. Give it up to the knee and the realities of tribalised politics will ensure the deal is reopened soon enough as other hungry hyenas arrive to claim their share.

Nothing in Duduzane’s speech, nor in the record of the Zumas, suggests that they grasp the complexities of state-building. Despite his Model C English, Duduzane could scarcely produce a single coherent paragraph of meaning in fifteen minutes. How, then, could he possibly articulate an Africanist institutional vision capable of addressing minority fears? The Zumas know how to run a looting network; they cannot build institutions.

It is absurd and demeaning to his audience for Frans Cronje to treat Duduzane Zuma as the Cambridge academics treated Jason Arday — elevating him as a serious political alternative capable of offering South African voters a credible choice.

I cannot speak for all whites, or all minorities, but I sense that most of us have given up hope of a developing state that has a caring, capable African elite at the helm. This will not happen for many generations to come. In the meantime, unburdened by the stress of hoping for impossible things, we should consider the evidence that — contrary to woke dogma — it is not our fault, nor the fault of our ancestors. It is no one’s fault.

According to McGilchrist, love — which is fundamental to reality — requires freedom on both sides. In this civilisational moment of disquiet about racial disparities we are not free to speak the truth. Such restrictions have been packaged as “kindness.” They are not kind. They are simply sentimental: the self-regarding performance of care that refuses the hard particularity of evidence and the costly demands of reality. We do ourselves and everyone else an evil when we reduce the work of nature to the realm of overweening human sentimentality. Love has its rigour.

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The U.S. Department of State recently published a report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. Released around 20 July 2026, the 100-page document details the Cuban regime’s decades-long campaign of subversion and ideological influence in support of militant anti-American movements.

Not coincidentally, the report followed a few days after a speech by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in which he addressed diplomats from more than 60 countries at the State Department on the resurgence of leftist political terrorism. Rubio had strong words for the ideology behind left-wing violence, calling it a distinctive and unique evil driven by a hatred of civilization; a revolt of the worst against the best and of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.1

The report fleshes out this idea of a revolt of the weak against western civilisation:

While Soviet communism was frequently driven by more practical great-power concerns – the preservation of the Soviet empire and the defense of its material interests around the globe – its Cuban successor was built around a near-singular obsession with the ‘liberation’ of the Global South from its Western colonial oppressors.

This defence of the Global South against a supposedly rapacious west is what some call “Third Worldism”. In the age of free markets and hyper-consumerism it is perhaps fitting that the lingering ghost of global communism emanates from a Caribbean island collapsing into poverty and gangsterism.

As tawdry as Cuba has become, it always held a romantic appeal for leftists, whose wardrobe would not be complete without a Che Guevara T-shirt. The cool factor made Cuban espionage particularly effective at infiltrating American institutions. As a US official put it: “We’re much more open to Latins than we are to people with steel teeth and a Slavic accent.”

As the Report explains, Cuba’s biggest psyop success against America has been the promotion of Black Power ideology and the fomentation of racial discord.

Cuba’s distinctive brand of Third World internationalism, and its explicit appeals to the oppressed “Negroes” of the United States as a constituent element in its coalition, helped create the ideological infrastructure in which black militants could reinterpret themselves not as a minority within the United States, but as a key agent of the Third World revolution. Black Power, in this framework, was not merely a domestic demand for rights, but a front of the global anti-colonial war being waged inside the imperial core.

Cuban ideology helped convince African Americans that, contrary to all the evidence, they are not the world’s most successful, influential and legally protected black group, but instead the victims of “institutional racism” — a term coined by Stokely Carmichael. Through its support for black radicals such as Carmichael, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Robert F. Williams, Huey Newton, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur, “black radicalism was absorbed into the Cuban regime’s larger project: turning the anti-American grievances of ‘Third World peoples’ into one front of a single revolutionary war.” (Today, Black Lives Matter and Democratic Socialists of America, among other left-wing groupings, are the inheritors of that revolutionary legacy.)

It was enormously cunning of the Cuban regime to situate the frontline of its ideological war against America on the invisible boundary that separates white and black. And doing so has had enormous implications for South Africa.

When I came of age in the late 1980s, I was fortunate not to have to fight Cubans in Angola. But I know others who were on that frontline, when Cuba had 50,000–60,000 troops backing the Angolan MPLA government against Jonas Savimbi’s Unita, which enjoyed support from the US and South Africa.

The Angolan War made strategic sense for the apartheid government, lending credibility to its claim that it was shielding the country from a communist takeover. Equally, it made perfect sense for the African liberation movements—and their Cuban allies—to wage war against a white supremacity regime backed by what they saw as a racist American empire.

Along with the Soviets, Cuba was instrumental in training ANC guerrillas in Angola from 1976 to 1988. As Nelson Mandela put it:

When we wanted to take up arms we approached numerous Western governments for assistance and we were never able to see any but the most junior ministers. When we visited Cuba we were received by the highest officials and were immediately offered whatever we wanted and needed. That was our earliest experience with Cuban internationalism.2

Today, on the international stage, the ANC continues to do the bidding of Cuba, aligning in sentiment and ideology with those states that feed off anti-western propaganda. It is a bitter irony that much of the chattering classes in the West have been taken in by a propaganda campaign spread by some of the world’s vilest regimes: Cuba, Iran, Russia, North Korea and China.

Where does that leave South Africa? And what hope for the western-adjacent white minority here?

An intriguinig insight from the State Department report is that Cuban communism proved more durable than the Soviet version because it abandoned economics. Soviet Marxism still had to deliver material results. When it failed, the ideology collapsed with it. By contrast, Cuban Third Worldism is not about counting widgets it’s about righteous romance. Its energy comes from permanent racial and civilizational grievance — the conviction that the West’s achievements are original sins and that the oppressed of the Global South (including African Americans and by extension black South Africans) form a single revolutionary front against “imperial” civilisation. This is a resilient ideology. It can endure failure in Cuba, and South Africa for that matter, while blaming it on the ruthless imperial enemy. Besides, radicals are seldom chastened by the results of their failed economic policy.

Third Worldism thrives on resentment rather than construction, on diagnosing western “whiteness” rather than building competent states, which is why Rubio calls it a “revolt of the worst against the best”.

The warning for South Africa is that the same ideological current that trained MK cadres in Angola and reframed black American struggle as anti-colonial war still frames white South Africans as the local embodiment of the imperial enemy. Classical liberals must confront the perverse ideology of Third Worldism, which weaponises black failure against them, the very people best able — and most willing — to help.

Hoping for better governance or economic pragmatism from the ANC is useless while this deeper narrative remains unchallenged. The real contest is civilizational: whether grievance ideology continues to set the terms of debate, or whether a clearer defence of competence, inheritance and western achievement can reassert itself.

Rubio’s determination to overthrow the Cuban regime is a godsend. The defeat of that evil regime, or its collapse, would be a body blow for Third Worldism and prove hugely beneficial for South Africa’s white minority, whose final line of defense remains classical liberalism.

For South Africa’s beleaguered minorities, that would not solve every domestic problem. But it would remove one of the most potent external legitimisers of the politics of permanent racial grievance. It would also open space for a politics that values practical solutions for black advancement, not ones based on hateful ideologies that keep the races at each other’s throats.

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Common)

On 21 July, RW Johnson passed away at 82 years of age. His death marks the end of an era in political commentary for South Africa. No other writer was as erudite, forceful and well-researched as Johnson on the failure of African nationalism. Johnson, although a supporter of Britain’s Labour Party, was an old-school classical liberal, an avatar for a generation of white, English-speaking liberals whose fate it was to live in an ideological no-man’s-land between the warring nationalisms: Afrikaner and African.

Although he had once been an anti-apartheid activist running from the security police, in the 90s and noughties he performed the role of party-pooper, pouring cold water on the Rainbow excitement. But by the time of the Zuma presidency he had become our Cassandra, a straight-talking prophet we ignore at our peril.

Johnson, who was born in England, carried no racial baggage. He did not see blacks as inferior, and so he had no guilt about telling them the truth. In a BizNews article (“Maimane, Malema, Mashaba – career missteps from egos run riot”) he had a go at these black politicians with this line: “One is left marvelling at the pervasive egotism of African politics.” My sense is that he despised ANC rule not so much for how it affected whites but for how it harmed the prospects of ordinary blacks.

Perhaps his most famous line was that the country “can have a modern industrialised economy or it can have the ANC, but it cannot have both.” As an impeccable liberal, he could not quite bring himself to racialise that statement: that South Africa can have a modern industrial economy or a black government, but not both. “The ANC” is the go-to tag for decrying all that is wrong with African governance. But really — would another African party (EFF, Inkatha, MK, ActionSA) do any better? (Note his comment above about the egotism of non-ANC politicians.)

The same sleight of hand is at work in this comment: “The management of a modern industrial society requires skills, economic understanding and managerial competence which the ANC just doesn’t have.”1 This is hardly a problem for South Africa, given that we live in a multiparty democracy. The true problem is that the wider African middle-class, not just the ANC, is thin on managerial competence. Indeed this reality is our great insoluble. Did RW think that apartheid was better than what we have now? Sort of. In Fighting for the Dream (2019) he stated:

The pre-1994 state built a formidable infrastructure, a developed economy and a series of powerful and efficient institutions – the Armed Forces, Eskom, Transnet (including a large railway and port system), the civil service, a strong police force, a highly developed water distribution system and much else besides … [ensuring] that individual or sectional interest within the ruling group were held in check and subordinated to a strong sense of national interest.

He contrasted this with the ANC, “a political elite that is a mass of conflicting interests, no solidaristic sense of itself and, as night follows day, little or no sense of the national interest.” It has been the lament of black liberation thinkers that a people is only respected when it can look to a winning mother country for pride and succour. In 1994 South Africa became the new great black hope. Surely, they were not going to squander this opportunity, what with Solomon-like wisdom of Mandela and the whole world rooting for our success. Not so, as RW noted.

For any liberal, communist or African nationalist, indeed for any democrat, the awful possibility now exists that majority rule – the goal so long fought for – will go down in history as a sad failure. That would not only give the verdict to the white-right but it would also seem to invalidate, or at least to mock, the popular struggles of the whole century. Such failure would not only have tragic repercussions for any sense of black pride and self-respect in South Africa; it would also have repercussions for black self-confidence and race relations right around the world.

The sad failure of majority rule has delivered us to a new reality. While the death of apartheid was meant to augment black pride, it has in some ways had the opposite effect. Black self-confidence has taken a knock. There is the tenderpreneur swagger and those silly aspirational advertisements aimed at the baser instincts of our black diamonds; and there is the stupid bravado of Julius Malema. None of it adds up to confidence and self-respect. Promoting people beyond their capabilities, empowering businesses beyond their functionality, has only put a veneer of success on crushing failure. The engine of competence, innovation and institutional integrity in this country remains mostly in the hands of the white minority. Should they leave, the house of cards called South Africa collapses.

Did Johnson hold out any hope for a non-racial, democratic South Africa? Unsurprisingly, if he had any hope, it was for a DA-run country. As he wrote in a 2024 piece on the GNU: “What is badly needed is a DA leader who can conjure up the poetry and history of the liberal tradition and project that tradition into the future so that the country is offered an alternative vision of how things could be.” But what is that alternative vision? Your own people are selling you down the river and you’d be better off with principled white liberals calling the shots instead. Would ordinary black folk be susceptible to such a message? Perhaps.

RW Johnson was a friend and collaborator of South Africa’s pioneering social scientist Lawrence Schlemmer. Decades before Frans Cronje was telling us that black South Africans are more moderate than we assume, Schlemmer had reached the same conclusion. As Johnson pointed out: “There was an appetite even within the ANC mass electorate from the very beginning saying it would be better if the ANC worked together with the whites, with the business community. Mass opinion, including ANC mass opinion, is strongly against affirmative action.”

The masses might be against affirmative action and woke two-tierism, but the cultural and media elite across the western world, and our black elite in South Africa, believe strongly that certain identity groups need a special dispensation, their own tier of values and expectations that will ensure their dignity and protection against the brute forces of merit and market competition. It is a grand irony that what was once the excuse of the right for their racism— that blacks are different from whites and so must be treated differently — is now the excuse of the left for their “reverse” racism. How will South Africa, or the entire western world for that matter, ever escape the curse of two-tierism that so irks classical liberals like Johnson?

Alas, two‑tierism probably has generations left to run before it collapses under its own contradictions. This means that whites — liberal or conservative, racist or pro‑black — must create a redoubt of their own values and principles within whatever enclave they find themselves in. I am of the opinion that the vast majority of white folk and many others from across the racial spectrum are, as Schlemmer and Cronje’s research suggests, broadly aligned to Johnson’s classical liberal values. If we are to honour the man we can do so by proving that plain human decency, fair play and forthright truthfulness still go a long way in this country. The Africanist dream is over, but that does not mean the nightmare must begin. Through simple acts of kindness and honesty we might yet disprove some of his darker prophecies and turn classical liberalism into a self-fulfilling hope.

(AI-generated image)

To understand the culture war, we must grasp what made the West distinctive and why it now faces an ideological crisis.

More than any other civilisation, western civilisation has transcended kinship-based morality in favour of a universalist ethic. Writing for Aporia magazine, Peter Frost has observed that “Christianity replaced a situational morality based on kinship with a universal one of fair play toward kin and non-kin alike.”1 The impetus for this change came mainly from colder climes, “northwest Europe, where human relations have long been characterized by weak kinship ties, nuclear families, late marriage and solitary living for at least part of adulthood.” From this we get what Jonathan Schulz calls WEIRD societies (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic), which “tend to be more individualistic, independent, analytically minded, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity, obedience, in-group loyalty, and nepotism.”2

The genius of the West springs from a certain personality which is useful for building winning nations, but lacks the common touch. This WEIRD personality has a propensity to care more for the universalist ideal of humanity than for their own flesh and blood. Clannish values are of course the exact opposite of this and—as any South African will tell you—not ideal for nation-building.

The genius of the West lies in this combination of hyper-individualism on the one hand and on the other universalist ideals that align with objective truths. No other societies have so successfully incentivised individual genius or extended freedoms and opportunities so readily to the masses.

Western religion was central to this achievement. Christianity is a universalist creed grounded in timeless truths applicable to all humanity. Christianity also sacralises individual conscience as if it were divinely inspired—a tendency supercharged by the Protestant Reformation. The combination of individual freedom and objective truth-seeking proved a winning formula. As Francis Fukuyama has pointed out, the west pioneered the trifecta of modern political order: rule of law, accountable government, and state-building. The story is somewhat different from the great civilisations of the East.

Religious traditions such as Buddhism and Taoism may, in some respects, be more effective than Christianity at uncovering universal truths and liberating the individual from superstition and social repression. Certain forms of Buddhism are relentlessly unsentimental and evidence-based, free of the childish supernatural appeals on which Christianity relies. Why, then, did Europe rather than China pioneer the Industrial Revolution?

Peter Frost argues that a key factor was the balance of power between religion and state. “Christianity created parishes, schools, hospitals, universities, ecclesiastical courts and, more broadly, what we call the rule of law—all of which existed alongside the state and, to some degree, above it.” By contrast, “In East Asia, religious institutions were weaker, less independent and less developed. State institutions were therefore less constrained, being accountable solely to the state.”

Frost cites the ninth-century Chinese suppression of Buddhism: the closing of monasteries, the seizure of temple assets, and the imposition of bureaucratic control. To counter Buddhism’s other-worldly emphasis on celibacy and meditation, the state promoted Confucianism, which places the family and filial piety at the foundation of social order, while harmonising the clan within a broader hierarchical system.

Today, the Christian universalism and parallel institutions that underpinned western modernity are in crisis. Liberal universalists confront the awkward reality that some groups adapt more readily to WEIRD norms than others. Their response has been a woke turn: doubling down on the sacralisation of individual dignity (especially for those who struggle to adapt), while diluting commitment to objective truth.

Meanwhile, enraged right-wingers threaten to dismantle the global order, coming up with their own conspiratorial versions of objective truth, unnerving centrists. Neither woke overreach nor the dismantling of globalised systems offers a viable path; current technology and economic interdependence make the latter impossible. The parallel “religious state”—spanning culture, media, law and global institutions—operates instead in a fog of toxic ideas. It blames failures of adaptation on western flaws, rather than recognising that a truly universal system cannot accommodate all groups equally. Genetics and culture are deeply intertwined: law-abiding, nation-building populations in Europe or China were not merely educated for such traits, they were bred for them.

Modern liberalism’s great conceit is that culture and genetics can be disentangled. The man-as-computer metaphor encourages this illusion: culture as software, bodies as hardware. Thus, liberals allow themselve cultural critiques that pick holes in non-whites (e.g. Black children suffer from a culture that denigrates learning, or radical Islamism encourages political violence) but discussing “hardware” is taboo. Yet genetic discoveries show culture has profoundly shaped human evolution, selecting for traits that reinforce and extend it. If humans are like computers, then we are like classic Apple Macs—hardware and software fused seamlessly from the ground up. We shouldn’t expect every society to run our liberal “universalist” operating system. What if their firmware is optimised for a different architecture entirely? Forcing it risks the political equivalent of a kernel panic, which is exactly what woke represents.

A Copernican revolution on human diversity is overdue: restore objective truth across all domains, instead of walling it off to the hard sciences while social "science" preaches secular dogma in a lab coat.

(AI-generated image)

The reclusive Rian Malan has emerged from the Klein Karoo with a timely provocation: an open letter to Helen Zille, published on BizNews, arguing that the DA should take a tougher stance against illegal immigrants.

As the author of My Traitor’s Heart, Malan was hailed by V.S. Naipaul, John le Carré, and the New York Times as our indispensable sociopolitical commentator. I tend to agree with them and am glad that his traitorous heart beats on … in Van Wyksdorp, a remote dorpie in the Klein Karoo.

In My Traitor’s Heart (1990) Malan presciently hinted at the doom that would befall us, long before it became acceptable to second guess the “miracle transition”. Today, in Van Wyksdorp, he enjoys his own private South Africa, absent the black masses in whose name the country is being ruined, dispensing “loaves of bread, baked beans and kind words to the coloured dronkies who stand at the gate” calling his name.1 Malan has a soft spot for coloured South Africans, who bring out the repressed liberal lurking beneath his right-wing exterior.

In discussing the discovery of his “cousins” while researching a book on coloured Malans, he wryly observed: “many were just like me. Loved rugby, spoke Afrikaans, drank too much and harboured doubts about the direction in which the country was heading.” In Van Wyksdorp, Malan wanted to show solidarity with them and maybe even do some nation building. But ultimately the cause closest to their hearts is “foreigners flooding in to steal their jobs and corrupt their women,” and thus he is now weighing in on the debate to support them.

Malan concedes that builders and farmers in the Western Cape have reason for preferring Malawians and Zimbabweans to local coloured labour. But politics is about perceptions. He points out that the DA is squandering an opportunity to win indigenous trust by talking tough on borders, instead ceding political ground to dubious players like March & March, Jacob Zuma’s MK Party and Gayton McKenzie’s Patiotic Alliance. His regret for Helen Zille’s party — “a genuinely non-racial outfit, capable of running tight ships” — is that “had it taken a strong stand on open borders, the DA might now be topping the polls and heading for the Union Buildings, where it could clean up corruption, repair broken institutions and enforce firm but fair immigration laws.”2

Malan is making a point that confounds us all. If politics were merely a technocratic business of choosing the best people to steer the ship of state then obviously the DA would be a shoo-in. But in a mass democracy, politics is somewhat tribal: part performance and part collective therapy. A party steeped in white-derived notions of progress — environmentalism, the rule of law, individual rights — will always struggle to capture the black majority’s imagination. For the black intelligentsia it tears at the soul to vote DA. For the masses, it may simply offer a means of revenge on liberation elites for screwing up their future.

Kudos to Helen Zille for her gritty realism: Helen the Builder, fixer of potholes and institutions, deft avoider of ideological traps on race and Israel, shrewed political survivalist where minorities remain forever on probation. But why should we have to efface ourselves to politically fit in? To care too deeply about what the black majority might think of us is its own Orwellian repression — especially when the sins of the fathers render us perennial suspects.

Minorities have no choice but to follow Malan’s pessimistic rendering of the rainbow nation and build their own private Van Wyksdorp: a personal dorpie of competence, culture and quiet defiance. Not for nothing has the Karoo featured so prominently in white South African literature. Barring a miracle whereby the black masses vote with their brains and not their hearts and install the DA in the Union Buildings, it is only the “Karoo” that will save us. I mean the metaphorical Karoo: that still, quiet part of our psyches where white people go to escape the realities of Africa, or rather the realities of difference that the contemporary cultural mania of woke so fanatically disavows.

(AI-generated image)

In a recent interview about his new book, The End of Normal, Max du Preez and Pieter du Toit (deputy editor at News24) looked genuinely puzzled. Why are so many white South Africans joining AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement? Why do so many Americans support Trump, and so many Britons back Farage?

These experienced journalists have reported extensively on the failures of post-apartheid governance. They know the statistics on crime, corruption, state capture and institutional decline. Yet they still struggle to understand why large numbers of white people are turning toward explicit identity politics and populist figures.

In the interview du Preez spoke about the 1976 Soweto uprising that the black schoolchildren needed no communist agitators because their direct experience of oppression and marginalisation meant resistance was “in their blood.” In other words, it is part of the human psyche to fight for one’s honour. But du Preez, a card-carrying member of the Woke Industrial Complex, cannot grant whites their honour, their God-given right to defend the reputation of their ancestors.

JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) is a prophetic depiction of South Africa’s unending, zero-sum struggle for racial honour. Amazingly, for the world’s most celebrated living author in one of the world’s most celebrated post-modern works, the plot of Disgrace centres on the black gang-rape of a white woman, Lucy.

Lucy’s response to the ultimate dishonouring is the ultimate woke gesture. She does not abort and she chooses to stay on the land (expropriated from her) under the protection of one of her rapists. What else is a guilty white settler colonist supposed to do? Leave, apparently. After publishing Disgrace, Coetzee lasted three more years in black-ruled South Africa before emigrating to Australia in 2002.

Some, like du Preez and du Toit, accept the logic of perpetual disgrace. Whites must atone forever by dissolving their group interests. Fair enough. But what if we simply want to carry on living here, free of ideology, in safety and ordinary middle-class respectability?

The practical response to the failures of African rule is enclaving: retreating into secure estates, boomed-off suburbs, and privately managed spaces that “state-proof” daily life. In these bubbles one can remain fashionably woke, tweeting about Trump and pronouns while Africa simmers outside the walls.

As 30 June approaches, that simmering Africa outside the walls is about to boil over in anti-immigration marches, demanding the very order and border control the state cannot provide. You don’t have to share the Afrikaner right’s nostalgia for Boer War heroes or their Jonsson workwear dress sense to grok that without them we’re screwed.

Solidarity’s goal is “that everyone who wants to work, must be able to work well and reach their full potential.” That’s not racist; it is wise and profound. AfriForum’s vision is for “Afrikaners to continue living meaningfully, permanently free, safe, and prosperous at the southern tip of Africa while co-existing peacefully with other communities.” I’ll keep paying my subs and convert to Afrikanerdom if they can pull that one off. The ideology of the fightback boeties is not white supremacy, it is survival through enclaving. Viva!

South Africa is now the global vanguard of the enclavist revolt: pragmatic, unapologetic communities choosing order over ideology. The old liberation movements had the moral high ground and squandered it on looting and incompetence. We — I count myself a fellow fightback boetie — are earning the high ground the hard way, one failing municipality, one collapsed parastatal, one looting spree at a time. Eat your heart out, Tommy Robinson. Our blob is dissolving itself.

As someone living in a country whose state was once strong and functional and is now entirely unfit for purpose, it intrigues me how unserious and absurd much of our political discourse has become. It would be understandable if South Africa’s predictable demise were the exception, but it is not. We are the template. Western elites appear to be committing suicide by surrender to barbarism, both at home and abroad. I believe South Africa is pretty much done for as a viable settler colonial project that could have established a bulwark of European civilisation on the dark continent. That civilisation has been defeated, but not by the dark continent. Meanwhile, the viability of Israel as a bulwark for European values in the Middle East is on the precipice, with the Jews — the world’s most civilised people — facing another Holocaust.

The demise of South Africa, the suicide of the West, yet another great betrayal of the Jews … the apocalyptic direction of our world demands a grand thesis by way of explanation as to what has gone wrong with our civilisation. If you disagree, watch a clip of the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a debate to decide the leader of the free world, no less. It is somewhat ironic that both Republicans and Democrats viewed the election of the opposing candidate as a civilisational catastrophe. They were both right — except the catastrophe predated the election by at least a century. That is the argument of Neil Postman in his 1985 masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death (subtitle: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business), who compares the televised presidential debates to the famous 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas to win the Illinois senate race. These lasted three hours, with the first speaker taking the stage for ninety minutes. Thousands watched in rapt attention as Lincoln and Douglas battled out their position on slavery and what the rights of blacks should be in the new states of Kansas and Nebraska. Reading over the debates one might be shocked to find that Abraham Lincoln sounds more like a hardcore white supremacist than the great emancipator of the black man for which he is celebrated today. To settle the nerves of his all-white audience in Charleston, Illinois, he assured them, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races”, to which he received hearty applause. Speaking out against intermarriage of black and white, Lincoln followed up by telling his audience: “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

Such talk is fodder for the race warriors of the left who are determined to explain away the inexplicable differences between the races. But the point Postman makes in his book, and the truly shocking aspect of these speeches, is how complex and erudite the rhetoric was and how ordinary citizens were able to comprehend them. Here is a sentence from Lincoln’s speech that we know landed well with this audience, because the transcript notes the “uproarious laughter and applause” it generated:

I will add one further word, which is this: that I do not understand that there is any place where an alteration of the social and political relations of the negro and the white man can be made except in the State Legislature—not in the Congress of the United States—and as I do not really apprehend the approach of any such thing myself, and as Judge Douglas seems to be in constant horror that some such danger is rapidly approaching, I propose as the best means to prevent it that the Judge be kept at home and placed in the State Legislature to fight the measure.

Could a modern politician, even if they could muster such erudition, have the courage to test the intelligence of their audience with such a lengthy sentence — the punchline being so distant from the setup?

What has changed since 1858 that politicians now speak in anodyne soundbites that cannot possibly convey subtle meaning and the true contradictory nature of most wisdom that demands we hold various thoughts in our heads at once? According to Neil Postman, “the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television … has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas.” As Marshall McLuhan famously put it, “the medium is the message”. A medium made for television entertainment does little justice to good politics, religion, education, and journalism. We cannot make sense of our world and manage the grand challenges that face us — be they radical Islam or racial diversity — because the mass of citizens are operating in a medium that simply does not allow for the subtle distinctions and complex contextual renderings needed to make sense of them.

Postman expresses real disdain toward “the news of the day,” which of course has found its way into our current medium of social media platforms:

The idea that there is a content called “the news of the day” was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is, quite precisely, a media event.

The serious business of statecraft and policy has been turned into mass entertainment. And seeing television as anything but entertainment is itself an absurdity that has discombobulated the minds of the masses. As Postman puts it, the real problem is content that takes itself seriously. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eyewitness News, and Sesame Street are.”

The only medium that can properly accommodate complex ideas and genuine sensemaking in the post-Enlightenment age is typography. If our dominant media cannot filter for civilisation — if they cannot elevate well-read civilised people — then civilisation itself is demeaned, relativised, and dragged down to what is visually appealing and seductive, but not nearly complex enough to sustain it.

This is the real smoking gun of our demise. Thus, I find most of what is said about South Africa and its interminable racial issues to be of little value. Because we live in the age of the soundbite, it is simply impossible to say anything of value about such a complex subject without mouthing platitudes or being outright offensive. To make sense of South Africa is to hold various opposing thoughts in your head at once, without your head exploding. In truth, there is no political solution to the contradictory nature of the place; and certainly no political solution to resolve our racial differences, which are only a problem because we live in a post-Darwinian, post-Christian age that catastrophises biological difference, lest some are thought intrinsically inferior and beyond the redemption of progress, as if it is progress and not the redeeming breath of the Divine that will save us.

Thus, let us find at least some wisdom from very wise people who lived in the age before television and who could construct complex and perplexing thoughts that at least offer context and guidance, if not simple solutions, to South Africa’s conundrum. Here is what Jan Smuts had to say, in a 1906 letter to John X. Merriman, the prime minister of the Cape Colony:

I sympathize profoundly with the Native races of South Africa whose land it was long before we came here to force a policy of dispossession on them. And it ought to be the policy of all parties to do justice to the Natives and to take all wise and prudent measures for their civilization and improvement. But I don’t believe in politics for them. Perhaps at bottom I do not believe in politics at all as a means for the attainment of the highest ends; but certainly so far as the Natives are concerned, politics will only have an unsettling influence. When I consider the political future of the Natives in South Africa I must say that I look into the shadows and darkness; and then I feel inclined to shift the intolerable burden of solving that sphinx problem to the ampler shoulders and strong brains of the future.1

Politics certainly does have an unsettling influence on a majority population that is being taught at school and university that their plight is due to the evil doings of whites and that redemption lies in the sniffing out of evil racism and the destruction of white power.

If there is a “solution” it is to be practical and modest about the possibility of progress and to eschew one-size-fits-all ideologies. The stronger brains that were meant to solve the colour question never came along. We are now so addled by the communication technologies of the day, technologies that defy any chance of delivering the sort of nuance needed for the task, that we can only revert to Smuts for an answer. I leave here with perhaps the wisest words he was able to muster on the subject, from his 1943 speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association:

The problem of race and colour in the Empire is a root problem. It is going to test our wisdom, our farsightedness, our statesmanship, our humanity, probably for generations before any solution can be reached. You can have no simple standardized solution, no general formula, no patent remedy to a problem such as the vast diversity of race and colour, culture, and levels of civilisation existing in our Empire. It calls for continuous experiment, for variety of treatment, and for very prolonged practical experience before any satisfactory solution could be reached.

Last week I wrote about Winnie Mandela’s involvement in the murder of at least twelve people during the turbulent transition from apartheid. A reader pushed back, calling the accusations an apartheid “propaganda campaign to discredit her”.

But it was the opposite. The fact is that Winnie Mandela as the head of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) should have been held culpable for their crimes. By 1990–91, when the trial against her was unfolding, the government was in delicate negotiations with her husband Nelson Mandela, who attended the proceedings and made clear that a harsh outcome could undermine trust in the negotiations. The 1991 trial resulted in Winnie’s conviction for kidnapping and being an accessory to assault (not murder), with a six-year sentence reduced on appeal to a fine and suspended term. Despite the weight of evidence, no further serious prosecutions followed.

Credible investigative accounts document the crimes in detail. Fred Bridgland’s Katiza’s Journey (1997) and Emma Gilbey’s The Lady (1993) draw on extensive interviews, court records and witnesses. Katiza Cebekhulu, a former member of the MUFC, maintained his account consistently: over several days in late December 1988, Winnie and her thugs beat 14-year-old Stompie Seipei to the edge of death. After Dr. Abu Asvat had advised hospital treatment as the only way to save his life, Winnie instead stabbed Stompie in the throat (as attested by Cebekhulu), putting an end to his prolonged suffering. Asvat was later murdered, with the killers attesting that Winnie gave them the murder weapon and put them up to it. Jerry Richardson, MUFC coach, was convicted of Stompie’s murder; Winnie was acquitted of direct murder but held responsible for the kidnapping and assaults. Richardson was the fall guy for Winnie Mandela’s heinous crimes. (Cebekhulu has since reinforced his testimony in his own 2024 book, Winnie Mandela, Stompie Moeketsi & Me.)

The TRC—hardly an apartheid instrument—later implicated Winnie in multiple abuses by the MUFC during its special investigation. It found that she and her associates were directly or indirectly involved in assaults, kidnappings and the murder or attempted murder of at least a dozen individuals in that period. Soweto residents, including schoolchildren, even burned her house to avenge the killings.

Why am I going on about this story? Because at the heart of it is a moral tale about the evil of woke ideology.

In today’s woke world it is the done thing for white folk to surrender moral authority to black folk; it is taboo therefore to harp on about the crimes of a black “heroine” such as Winnie. But the Winnie Mandela saga exposes the ugly and unworkable compromise of South Africa’s 1994 transition, while offering a scalpel for dissecting woke ideology’s failures here and abroad.

Woke thought is, at its core, racialised Leninism: a self-appointed vanguard of activist-intellectuals (many of them white) claims the moral authority to reallocate power from the “white oppressor” to the “black oppressed”. It blends noble savage romanticism, Marxism and a secularized Christian victim-saviour narrative. Victimhood confers unassailable authority and dissent is blasphemy. Given apartheid’s genuine evils, South Africa was the one place in the world where woke was somewhat justified, and why we are celebrated to this day as a sort of woke triumph.

In 1994 the apartheid government and the wider western world that had been so antagonistic to it needed a moral hero for the handover. Nelson Mandela’s charisma and moderation allayed white fears and facilitated the surrender of power. But apartheid’s exhaustion, combined with global revulsion, produced a rushed transition founded on wishful thinking. The transition began with the betrayal of Winnie Mandela’s victims, as justice and the rule of law were compromised from the outset when she escaped with virtually no consequences for her role in the killing of children — or, at the very least, for being complicit in those murders.

The illusion of the new South Africa required believing the ANC possessed the institutional capacity to run Africa’s most advanced economy. Yet they could not even control one of their wayward members when she went on a killing spree. What hope was there that they would provide institutional order to South Africa? Contrary to woke dogma, racial victim status does not confer competence and virtue.

Post-1994 reality has been brutal: no, I am not talking about the collapsing infrastructure and institutions, the deteriorating law and order. I am talking about the brutality that post-1994 reality has meted out to the psyche of the hopeful white liberal. In short—given the hopes of Africanism—there is simply not the depth of technocratic and managerial talent within the black community here to build a nation worthy of respect, one that would confer pride and moral authority on the black man. In such circumstances the bitter hatred toward whites or toward America, the “imperialist west”, etc, is understandable. Such is the sting of disappointment at the catastrophic failure of uhuru. In such circumstances, if I were black, I am not sure I would find consolation in the woke fairytale of white wickedness as the cause of my ills. What could be more disempowering than believing that only the end of white racism will lead to black success? To believe that is to give all the power to the white racists.

South Africa’s failure is a crisis for woke ideology globally. With white rule gone here, the left’s attention has shifted to Israel — the last so-called “settler colony” — as if the Jews can afford the catastrophe that would follow from compromising themselves the way white South Africa once did. Therefore it is in the interests of western conservatives and the pro-Israel lobby to question the “miracle” transition from apartheid to majority rule.

South Africa is on a downward trajectory that would only be arrested if we stopped being the world’s most woke country, where it seems that the entire state apparatus is dedicated to subtracting moral authority from whites and giving it to blacks in a zero-sum woke move. But should we continue our slide, which is inevitable unless the Democratic Alliance were somehow gain power, then let South Africa be a warning to the West. Woke does not work. Moral authority cannot be shifted by totalitarian ideology from one group to another. Moral authority must be fought for and earned.

The irony is that today with our black ruling elite way out of their depth, the dignity gap between the races is worse than ever. You need only look at a news story or see the state of institutions run by black political parties (noting how the mostly-white private sector is holding it all together) to shudder at the mismatch between ideology and reality. We all know that the frustration at this failure will be taken out on successful whites, who daren’t ponder the truth: to notice the mismatch between ideology and reality is to peer into the abyss of a nightmare from which there is no reprieve.

I don’t like the reality any more than every other South African of whatever race. But I have a forlorn hope, wrapped in a warning, for the reader who thinks criticism of Winnie amounts to anti-black propaganda. The black elite faces a stark choice: cling to the woke inversion of reality or reach out in genuine partnership with minority communities who possess critical skills and capital. Redemption lies in trust and competence, not in guilt or myth. The rainbow revolution was built on lies and dead bodies. Unless you stop evading accountability through magic words like “racism” and confront what it truly takes to build a successful nation, you will be left with no nation at all.

I am currently visiting Johannesburg and found myself travelling on Winnie Mandela Drive, which was renamed in 2023 from William Nicol Drive. There is something painfully symbolic about this renaming, representing the utter failure of the Africanist project to remake the country in its own image since 1994. What follows is an excerpt from my book South Africa: In the Name of the Father (2023), which explains why the renaming was so ill-conceived. The evidence and quotations below are drawn mainly from two books: Fred Bridgland’s 1997 Katiza’s Journey: Beneath the Surface of South Africa’s Shame and Emma Gilbey’s 1993 The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela. (Given the woke turn of recent years, it is debatable whether books like these by white authors would be published today.)

Stompie James Seipei Moeketsi died on New Year’s Eve 1988. His death is one of several murders attributed to Winnie Mandela and the members of her Mandela United Football Club during the crucial years of South Africa’s transformation to African rule. Winnie Mandela, who had trained to be a social worker at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work, University of the Witwatersrand, was dubbed by supporters as the “Mother of the Nation”. But journalists Fred Bridgland, Emma Gilbey, and John Carlin present copious evidence that fingers Winnie and her Mandela United Football Club in as many as sixteen murders.

On 11 February 1989, thirteen months after Stompie was killed, Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison to be warmly embraced by a star, Winnie Mandela. Within those thirteen months, Winnie ordered the murder of Dr Abu Baker Asvat, her personal doctor. Evidence suggests that Dr Asvat, an anti-apartheid activist, died because he refused to back Winnie’s story that the kidnapping of Stompie Seipei (and Stompie’s comrades Pelo Mekgwe, Thabiso Mono and Kenny Kgase) was a rescue operation to save the teens from the homosexual clutches of Methodist priest Paul Verryn.

Asvat examined Stompie on New Year’s Eve 1988, telling Winnie, “The boy is seriously ill. He could die at any moment. I cannot save him. You must take him to hospital.” That night Stompie was dead; twenty-seven days later Asvat was shot by Cyril Mbatha and Thulani Dlamini. In 1997, Mbatha testified to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that Winnie had ordered the killing, even giving them the murder weapon. Mbatha also told the TRC that the police were not interested in hearing about Winnie’s involvement in the crime. (The white establishment was negotiating with Mandela and the ANC; it was no longer in their interests to prosecute Winnie.)

By some interpretations of the story, I have it all wrong: Winnie was not the perpetrator, she was the iconic indigenous victim of a racist white establishment. Was she? Winnie was not entirely indigenous. As biographer Sisonke Msimang notes in The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018), Winnie had some European ancestry, inherited via her mother. Besides, her victims were themselves indigenous Africans. Indeed, this pattern continues to this day: an indigenous elite portrays itself as the victim of a white conspiracy, giving it cover to exploit the indigenous masses.

Why didn’t the ANC stop Winnie from committing those crimes? They tried. On being informed about the latest Winnie saga, ANC head Oliver Tambo (exiled in Zambia at the time) lamented, “What must I do? We can’t control her. The ANC can’t control her. We tried to control her; that’s why we formed the Crisis Committee. You must tell the Crisis Committee they must do more.” The Mandela Crisis Committee included Struggle luminaries like Beyers Naude, Sidney Mufamadi, Frank Chikane and Sister Bernard Ncube. With all that moral firepower they could not save Stompie or Dr Asvat. Bridgland notes that they could have testified against Winnie but, “were more concerned about how the Winnie problem would look to the outside world.”

The conspiracy to protect Winnie, or at least the squeamishness in confronting her, extended beyond our borders. Although Britain eventually gave refuge to key witness Katiza Cebekhulu, other European countries refused him sanctuary for fear of alienating our new elite. In the interest of a smooth transition from white to black rule, South Africa and the international community made a shameful compromise in dealing with the “Mother of the Nation”.

One of the legends surrounding Stompie Moeketsi was that he had memorised the Freedom Charter and could cite excerpts during political debates. The Freedom Charter was largely the brainchild of radical white activists, who drafted it after canvassing black opinion on their expectations for liberation. In 1955, the South African Congress Alliance — which included the ANC and its progressive white and Indian allies — sent volunteers across the country to ask ordinary Africans about their sociopolitical aspirations.

A segment of African opinion called for the complete removal of whites from the country. Yet because the campaign was organised by a non-racial alliance, such explicitly racial framing was anathema to the project and was therefore excluded from the final document. In parts, the Freedom Charter is childlike: “Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no one shall go hungry.” There was also the promise to end laws that controlled the movement of black people, “Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished, and laws which break up families shall be repealed.” The document reflects the ideology of well-meaning socialist intellectuals, and an authentic cry for African dignity.

Notwithstanding my cynicism, the Freedom Charter was prescient, anticipating—in some detail—the social democratic values that prevail today. Amazingly, the ANC has delivered on some of those promises. “There shall be a forty-hour work week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers.” And, “The aged, the orphans, the disabled and the sick shall be cared for by the state.” Today, the government pays welfare grants to approximately 19 million South Africans.

What exactly did the Freedom Charter mean to Stompie? His effort to memorise it has a ghoulish denouement. Katiza Cebekhulu heard Stompie, in a semi-conscious state, mumbling passages of the document in those last awful hours before Winnie Mandela plunged a dagger through his throat.

Living in South Africa demands a certain amount of pretending. But pretending that Winnie Mandela was a struggle saint who deserves to be memorialised is a moral inversion too ghastly to accept.

Why is it that no matter how often the left is proven wrong, it keeps winning the ideological war? Conservatives have been correct about the failures of communism, the importance of fathers in child-rearing, the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution and radical feminism, and the challenges of large-scale diversity. Meanwhile, progressives get away with excusing communist regimes, narco-states, and Islamic theocracies.

There is a soft totalitarianism at work—an Orwellian inversion of morality enforced through the policing of language and thought. Because lefties tend to be more intellectual than us, they get to play “Big Brother”—or perhaps that should be Little Sister, the cute and kind two-year-old whom you daren’t piss off for fear of the ensuing tantrum. And nothing is more certain to trigger that lefty tantrum than belief in biological heredity.

It is universally accepted that individuals inherit traits, talents and predispositions from their parents and ancestors. The deadly taboo begins when we extend this obvious truth to races. Since the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945, this recognition has been treated as radioactive. The West “over-learned” the lesson of the Holocaust—or learned the wrong one entirely. Before the war, casual national chauvinism and ethnic preference were normal across Europe and much of the world. Nationalism was understood as rooted in shared blood as much as in shared language and culture. Back then you didn’t just hold a national passport; you belonged to a people—English, Italian, Swedish, Japanese, etc. Much of the world—especially East Asia—still operates on this basis and has largely avoided the West’s self-destructive nihilism.

Diversity is a challenge, but it needn’t be catastrophic. It can even be instructive and expansive to mingle with those of different ethnicities. Yet—contrary to the lefty pluralist fantasy and in keeping with what is happening in Europe right now—diversity is likely to make you more conservative. Living among people who look, speak, and think differently sharpens one’s own identity and fosters group solidarity. In South Africa the abelungu—and particularly the amabhunu—get this. No one is coming to save us, so it’s best to build some in-group ties, an ethnic and moral moat to protect us from a predatory state and collapsing institutions.

Yet belief in inherited group differences remains the ultimate sin — the one taboo that cannot be questioned. This prohibition endures despite overwhelming evidence from behavioral genetics, twin and adoption studies, and consistent global patterns of achievement. Worse still, denying the obvious violates our deepest intuitions and the very pattern-recognition machinery that evolved to keep us alive.

The righteous aggression of wokesters toward anyone who disagrees makes perfect sense once you understand what “woke” actually is. As the pro-heredity philosopher Nathan Cofnas puts it, wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously—that is, “taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously in the face of persistent disparities between groups.” The equality thesis holds that there is an identical distribution of socially relevant inborn traits—such as intelligence and conscientiousness—across groups. Many of the great European Enlightenment figures, from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Claude Adrien Helvétius, were adherents of this view, and it became a foundational liberal assumption.

In modern liberal democracies both the mainstream left and much of the mainstream right treat the equality thesis as unquestionable. While classical liberals adopt a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward group differences, woke intellectual warriors take the equality thesis to its logical and incendiary conclusion: If groups have identical distributions of talent and drive, why is society still so racially stratified? The only possible answer is an inherently racist culture with its boot on the neck of the black man. This justifies their revolutionary purge of the white man’s legacy — his heroes, his ideas, his history.

If the right is to prevail in the culture war and win the battle of ideas, it must break the heredity taboo. Would acknowledging inherited group differences lead to racial supremacism and murderous hatred? Quite the opposite. At this rate, the continued denial of heredity is what leads to totalitarianism and murderous hatred. In some ways, it already has. The legacy of equality-by-any-means-necessary societies is instructive. The Soviet Union, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and Maoist China all rejected natural differences between people. They treated social inequality as an intolerable moral blight, justifying the slaughter of tens of millions in their fanatical anti-hierarchical crusades.

But what about Nazi Germany? One of the primary drivers of antisemitism has always been the fact that Jews consistently outcompete the surrounding populations, breeding jealousy and resentment. No one likes competition — especially the stupid and the angry, who combine to invent conspiracy theories as a coping mechanism. When it comes to the professions and business, European Jews have long been a natural cognitive elite; and therefore a natural target for those who resent their success. In South Africa, the real threat of murderous racial hatred comes from the black left (“Kill the Boer”), not the white right. Whites here are in many ways like the Jews: a high-achieving, self-reliant minority that makes an easy target for hateful populists.

Never mind that they are plain wrong and that their ideology has caused history’s most heinous mass murders, the left wins because it offers a flattering (if false) universalism: everyone is infinitely malleable and failure is always someone else’s fault. It is time to stand up to these deluded people and stand up for the truth: We inherit the world from our ancestors—biologically, culturally and morally. This acknowledgement is the foundation of any sane society and the denial of it is the great sociopolitical catastrophe of our times.

Yes, we are all human. Recognising inherited differences doesn’t make us less brothers and sisters under the sun — it simply stops us from punishing reality for refusing to conform to comforting illusions.

In Fighting for the Dream (2019), the liberal commentator RW Johnson—hardly a friend of Afrikaner nationalism—gives the white ruling class from 1910 to 1994 its due. They built, he writes, “a formidable infrastructure, a developed economy and a series of powerful and efficient institutions—the Armed Forces, Eskom, Transnet (including a large railway and port system), the civil service, a strong police force, a highly developed water distribution system and much else besides,” all while subordinating sectional interests to a coherent sense of national purpose.

He contrasts this with the ANC, “a political elite that is a mass of conflicting interests, [with] no solidaristic sense of itself and … no sense of the national interest”—a leadership willing, in his view, to sell the country to a family of criminal Indian immigrants.

What Johnson calls the ANC’s fragmentation, I have described as “tribalism”: power that is personal, fluid and contingent, centred on personalities who channel the collective without imposing institutional discipline. White observers struggle to grasp it because our own societies left tribalism behind centuries ago—passing through feudalism into the nation-state. Tribalism can look democratic and inclusive (flat, participatory, emotionally humanistic), yet it is also horde-like and resistant to sustained order and progress.

Of South Africa’s post-1994 presidents, Thabo Mbeki came closest to breaking the tribal pattern. He had a clear vision and tried to impose it from the centre. All things considered he did not do badly. But only a tyrant in the mould of Paul Kagame could have crushed the factionalism and kinship networks to put the bureaucracy and party in service of a genuinely successful black-run state. Mandela stood above the tribe through moral authority but ultimately his beloved “tribe” (the ANC) was sovereign in his moral universe, as he kept reminding everyone with his oft-repeated: “I am a loyal and disciplined member of the African National Congress. I am therefore in full agreement with all of its objectives, strategies and tactics.” Ramaphosa talks a good game but is only slightly less tribal in orientation than was Zuma, as white South Africa has been rudely reminded of since he became president. The frog-boiler cannot even bring himself to decry “kill the Boer”.

RW Johnson has been predicting doom since the 1970s, yet he still lives here in relative peace and comfort as do many of us. This is South Africa’s great paradox: no matter how badly the centre decays, middle-class life remains tolerably decent, if a little frayed around the edges.

Political analyst Frans Cronje explains it best when he notes that the strength of private enclaves rises in direct proportion to the weakness of the state.1 A slightly weak state produces slightly strong enclaves; a very weak state produces very strong ones. Should the state collapse entirely (which Cronje does not expect) the enclaves would simply become entirely strong.

If one measures South Africa against the original colourblind dream—whether liberal, communist or Africanist—of a black-led industrial powerhouse defeating stereotypes about black rule, then Johnson’s pessimism is justified. Putting aside the symbolism of it, the liberal angst of South Africa’s failure, Cronje’s optimism is most welcome. So long as I give up the colourblind hope I can learn to live with enclaving—a modern form of laagering that keeps tribal chaos out. In this scenario the state will flirt with utter failure but probably remain adept at extorting taxes; middle-class citizens will seize responsibility where the state retreats and defend themselves where it turns predatory and over-extortionate.

This reality is already priced into “South Africa Inc.” Ramaphosa can be replaced by someone worse (Mashatile) who can ally with worse still (Zuma, Malema). Each downgrade weakens the state further, making enclaves stronger and bolder. As conditions deteriorate, ordinary citizens may also rethink their voting patterns and recognise their dependence on non-state institutions—many of them white-run. That dependence may even encourage moderation.

Cronje points out that there are four times more private security officers than police, and that Eskom is being bypassed with explosive growth of solar power. Modern technology—cheap localised generation, satellite internet, online echo chambers—makes enclaving easier and more viable than at any time in history.

Johnson’s bleak verdict (state failure equals national failure) and Cronje’s more sanguine one (state decline equals enclave rise) frame the deeper question: what does South Africa’s trajectory mean for the world?

Johnson himself puts it sharply: for any liberal, communist, African nationalist or democrat, “the awful possibility now exists that majority rule—the goal so long fought for—will go down in history as a sad failure. That would not only give the verdict to the white right but it would also seem to invalidate, or at least to mock, the popular struggles of the whole century.”2

The Struggle, Mandela and the Rainbow Nation were cruel jokes—not on the “hateful racists,” but on liberals and democrats, particularly white and Indian ones. At some point the failure of South Africa—the last, best African hope of equalling the developed world—will lend credence to uncomfortable ideas about hereditary cultural patterns. The intellectual contortions required to avoid these thoughts are becoming impractical, exhausting and self-defeating. They do little to help the very people one claims to protect.

My heart breaks for decent Africans—the Zimbabwean Uber drivers who see their children only once a year because opportunity has vanished at home. The taboo must be faced. South Africa’s troubles will soon look modest beside broader continental state failure and the growing pressure of millions of ordinary, often Christian, Africans seeking refuge in functioning societies. The enclaves may hold for now but the colourblind question will not go away.

(Image generated by AI)

I recently watched a YouTube video titled Tourism in South Africa – The De-Developing State by the British creator Britannica. As a South African, it was painfully embarrassing. It holds up a mirror to the enclaved lives we lead and the steady degradation of what used to be functional public spaces.

Yet we keep repeating the same hopeful mantras: free elections, the world’s most progressive constitution, Mandela magic, rainbow nation, Rugby World Cup glory, etc. The reality is that since 1994 South Africa has been de-developing: infrastructure is crumbling, policing has collapsed, industry is shrinking, and our cities are decaying. (For proof of how badly our cities have deteriorated, check out Johannesburg in the 1970s, when it was a functional paradise compared to today.)

What makes this especially awkward for liberals is how neatly the decline tracks the replacement of whites and other competent minorities in institutional leadership and in the country as a whole. Here’s what they should teach in development studies: hang on to your skilled minorities or watch your institutions rot and your country collapse into post-colonial chaos.

This is not comforting talk for our black political elite, who prefer the narrative of racial pride, anti-racist dogma, and historical grievance about the destruction of their tribal arcadia. Meanwhile, western ideology enables South Africa’s destruction by rejecting the “let skilled minorities help you” approach in favour of the “you are failing because of racism” excuse. To understand how this dangerous inversion took hold, we need to go back to the beginning.

Human societies scaled up from small bands of hunter-gatherers to modern democracies through distinct stages. But they all started with tribalism — the default setting of political organisation in pre-literate societies. Tribes are held together by kinship, language, shared blood, and personal loyalty. Chiefs, elders, or “big men” rise through charisma, military success and ritual authority. Power is personal, fluid, and contingent. It rests on consensus and reciprocity, not formal institutions.

Sound familiar? This is African politics: “big men” in suits wearing Rolexes and driving BMWs as they navigate the shifting currents of tribal loyalty, patronage, and personal favour rather than rules or institutions.

But a big man is not a lord; tribes are not feudal orders. Tribalism precedes feudalism in the development of political order. Feudalism replaces the fluid kinship loyalty of tribalism with structured hierarchy and contractual relationships, as seen in history’s most important feudal societies — medieval Europe (c. 9th–15th centuries), feudal Japan (c. 12th–19th centuries), and China’s Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE).

A lord grants land (fiefs) and protection in exchange for military service and farm labour. Unlike tribalism, feudalism is class-based and literate. It prefigures the modern state with crucial innovations such as secure property rights, contractual obligations, clear hierarchies of authority, and written legal customs. These features created greater stability, allowed power to scale beyond personal loyalty, and laid the groundwork for individual rights, the rule of law, and eventually capitalism.

As Francis Fukuyama noted, once a feudal lord’s rights were legally recognised, they were no longer subject to endless renegotiation by kin groups. No wonder European colonial administrators were frustrated by African tribal chiefs, whom they mistook for feudal lords, believing they could “buy” land from a chief who had no permanent right to sell it. White South Africans made the same mistake in 1994. Even a constitution that gave the black liberation movement virtually everything it wanted is now treated as negotiable by Africanists who — it seems — cannot even wait to boil the frog (as President Ramaphosa famously described his strategy for dealing with the whites). This is the deep frustration of liberal whites who still believe they are living in a modern state, only to discover they are actually living in tribal Africa, where agreements are constantly reopened according to the shifting moods of the tribe.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of state failure many people still cling to the fantasy of a successful, black-run modern democracy in South Africa. We must dismantle this fantasy if we are to come to terms with the reality of living in Africa. Here is my shot at doing so.

Pre-literate tribes are not held together by political ideology, monotheism, or philosophy but by blood ties, kinship, shared ancestry and raw personal loyalty. This is why Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau fetishised the “noble savage” as a pure innocent, uncorrupted by bourgeois civilisation. Marx drew inspiration from the romantic currents in early French socialism, itself rooted in Rousseau’s noble savage myth. Friedrich Engels, heavily influenced by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, later portrayed pre-literate tribes as a classless, egalitarian golden age in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

This romantic yearning for a simpler, pre-modern existence remains at the emotional core of leftism — and even spills into New Age spiritual movements with their sweat lodges, plant medicine quests and “warrior weekends”. In 2026, this highly emotive ideology has fused with anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and anti-westernism into a perfect storm of luxury beliefs. Comfortable, upper-middle-class people can afford to romanticise the tribe while sipping oat milk lattes served to them by an illegal immigrant. Not so the African masses who must suffer under tribal elites who cannot build functioning institutions, as my Zimbabwean Uber drivers often remind me.

In 1994, liberal and centrist whites hoped for a modern, non-racial nation state to replace the capable but morally ugly white supremacist one. Instead, we got tribalism, emboldened by a delusional left-wing ideology that cast Mandela as the noble savage who would redeem racist South Africa. In terms of political order, this country took a huge step backwards in 1994. With every passing year, a return to genuine state-building and national coherence looks less likely.

The state is being tribalised, which weakens it over time. But even a weakened state can wield dangerous power against its perceived enemies. In this reality, feudal thinking is not romantic nostalgia. It is survival. South Africa is not moving forward into a bright, non-racial future. It is sliding backward into older, more primitive forms of political order. The smart play is to stop hoping and start fortifying. For minorities it is rational to build “feudal” enclaves of gated communities. But more importantly, we need to adopt a feudal mindset — replacing the state as our highest political value with a sacred hierarchy of blood, kin, community, loyalty and duty. Unlike fluid tribalism, feudalism sanctifies order itself: a structured, almost religious chain of obligation and authority that gives life meaning and resilience far beyond the failing state.

Thankfully, a determined fightback fraternity is already leading the way. Organisations such as the Solidarity Movement, Sakeliga, Lex Libertas and the Cape independence movement are building the parallel structures, legal defences, and institutions that will be essential for minority survival and self-reliance. They deserve our full support.

(AI-generated image)

I recently asked Google about the claim that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The world’s most influential company—one that launders influence for profit—insists it was genocide, not merely war crimes or military overreach.

Then in late April, one of the world’s greatest living authors, JM Coetzee, turned down an invitation to the 14th International Writers Festival in Jerusalem. He told the festival director that over the past two years the State of Israel has been conducting “a campaign of genocide in Gaza that is disproportionate to the murderous provocations that took place on October 7”—a genocide that received enthusiastic support from most of the Israeli public, “including the intellectual and artistic communities” who “share in the guilt for the atrocities in Gaza.” According to the double-Booker- and Nobel-winning author, cleansing Israel’s name would take many years, “if it is interested in that at all.” The sins of the Jews, it seems, cannot be so easily washed clean.

The “Gaza genocide” lie is monstrous. It is a perversion of plain common sense. It is also the ultimate bad-faith move against a people who have already endured more than their fair share of them. But it was a masterstroke by the left-Islam (“red-green”) alliance to turn the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust into a global cause célèbre on behalf of the murderers. Behind it all lie two twisted ideologies intertwined, a noose strangling European civilisation—a civilisation that owes much to the Jews and which, in turn, helped make Israel the success it is.

Leftists love victims and hate nuance. For them the victim is Christ on the cross, an object of worship. Their ideology demands purity: clean lines between sacred and polluted. It bothers them that Israel was built by the world’s ultimate victim group—the Holocaust survivors of Europe. The Israel story does not fit their settler-colonial-versus-indigenous-noble-savage narrative. The Jews have been fighting colonialism and imperialism for two and a half thousand years. The establishment of Israel is a miracle of anti-colonial defiance. Yet the haters latched onto a handful of Palestinians who received a raw deal in 1948 and turned that resentment into a raging conflagration.

Back to JM Coetzee, author of Disgrace (1999), a book that prompted President Thabo Mbeki to complain it furthered stereotypes of blacks as violent rapists. The plot turns on the gang-rape of the protagonist’s daughter by black youths. Against her father’s wishes, she refuses to report it, viewing the crime as justified collective punishment for the sins of white colonialism.

In 2009 Coetzee decamped to Adelaide and became an Australian citizen. He calls Adelaide a “paradise.” Given that his oeuvre rests on the angst of the white colonial experience, one wonders whether he believes Adelaide would remain a paradise if it were majority Aboriginal. Honest Argentinians, Americans, or Australians must admit that genocides work—if committed early enough and thoroughly enough to prevent any indigenous revival. (America’s race problems are not indigenous they are imported: enslaved Africans.) Yet the Jews of Israel only partially displaced Arabs and allowed most to remain. Those “refugees” who fled the 1948 conflict have become the eternal pretext for leftists and Islamists to seek the destruction of the Middle East’s only dynamic, decent, liberal country.

I have no doubt that had any other powerful people colonised Palestine, they would have genocided the Arabs long ago. But the bookish, intellectual, law-obsessed Jews have shown the restraint of David refusing to kill Saul. In urban warfare against an enemy that deliberately maximises civilian casualties, the IDF’s civilian-to-combatant death ratio is roughly 1:1 or at most 1:2—the lowest in history for this kind of fighting. Compare it to US operations against ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa, where civilian deaths were orders of magnitude higher.

To be a true leftist, however, is to be a true believer, not a factual nit-picker. We know the script in South Africa: the myth of the guiltless noble savage, the perpetual victim who has replaced Christ on the cross. We must believe Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. We must believe Nelson Mandela was a saint who washed away white sins and delivered non-racial paradise. The settler-colonist is always wrong. Any resistance, no matter how bloodthirsty, must be understood sympathetically. But the sympathy is totally one-sided. This same ideology brands indigenous Europeans “racist” for resisting mass immigration onto their sacred lands.

In 1987, Israel made the mistake of awarding the then not-yet-world-famous Coetzee its prestigious Jerusalem Prize. In his acceptance speech he intoned gnomically: “We have art so that we shall not die of the truth.” As if Jews die of truth rather than suicide bombs and Iranian missiles. If anyone is fleeing the truth, it is Coetzee himself. Thirty-two years of post-apartheid South Africa gnawed away at his liberal shibboleths. He cannot stand Israel and he cannot stand South Africa, because he cannot stand the truth.

In that 1987 speech Coetzee, the hyper-privileged white South African, declared: “The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life.” You know Coetzee is bullshitting when his famous controlled minimalism deserts him. Albert Schweitzer lived in colonial Central Africa without a deformed and stunted inner life. Apartheid did not deform Coetzee’s inner life—it made him world-famous. My own inner life grew more deformed and bitter after apartheid as my liberal ideals collided with reality.

I feel genuine sorrow for Julia Fermentto-Tzaisler, artistic director of the Jerusalem Writers Festival, whose inner life is the opposite of deformed and stunted. Kevin Bloom’s anti-Israel piece in the Daily Maverick (Complicity and collective guilt — JM Coetzee shuns Jerusalem literary festival) conveniently omitted her reply to Coetzee. Here it is, unchanged:

Mr. Coetzee, I would like to share with you some of what I have experienced since October 7 as a Jewish-Israeli woman, as a writer and as the director of a writers festival, living in Tel Aviv. First, I wish to set the record straight. I believe the term “murderous provocation” is not appropriate for the events of October 7. Hamas terrorists planned this massacre for more than five years. They trained, raised funds, gathered intelligence and prepared large numbers of personnel for their genocidal mission — to kill Jews. I emphasize the word ‘Jews’ because when the terrorists entered the Gaza envelope communities — an area recognized under international law, contrary to the widespread mistaken perception that it is occupied territory — they shouted in Arabic, ‘Itbah al-Yahud’ — ‘slaughter the Jews’. They did not say ‘slaughter the Israelis,’ nor even ‘the Zionists.’

Even if one sets aside the murder, rape and abductions, October 7 was not an uprising of the oppressed. It was an expression of a jihadist ideology that sees the very presence of Jews in the Land of Israel and Palestine as intolerable, and something to be fought with absolute and uncompromising violence. Alongside all this, since October 7 a bloody and unbearable war has been taking place in Gaza. But Israel went to war in Gaza in order to dismantle Hamas, so that it would not commit such crimes again.

As a South African writer who fought apartheid, I would have expected — or perhaps dreamed — that you would extend a hand to me, that you would say to me, “Fight, my daughter. Do not stop fighting.” Writers and literature have a role, and it is not to remain silent or disappear. But instead, in your email, you chose to push me deeper into the abyss in which I already find myself. And you ended your letter by saying that forgiveness, repair and healing are nowhere on the horizon. You left me in despair. We do not know each other, but I do not believe despair was ever your way — not as a writer and not as a person who cares about the world and about human beings. And I am sorry that this is the fate you and the international community designate for me, and for people like me.

Yes, Mrs Fermentto-Tzaisler—the Islamists want to cleanse Palestine of Jews, and leftists cheer them on as if one Holocaust were not enough. But you are mistaken about Coetzee and despair. His great novel Disgrace could just as easily have been called Despair. I write these words a stone’s throw from where he once lived before he exiled himself from that great killer: the truth. I see it every day, eroding everything I once believed. No matter how many fresh liberal platitudes I apply, they peel away like old paint.

Coetzee fled South Africa because he could no longer bear the despair. I would forgive him that flight if he had shown some grace toward others facing the same impossible conundrum. Instead, this deluded man emptied his own despair onto a Jewish-Israeli woman already drowning in it. Despair was always his way—an unexpurgated French existentialist despair unhappily exported to this sunny continent, where his prose has been poured like poison into the wells of the western mind.

In the end, Coetzee did not reject Jerusalem because of Gaza. He rejected it because facing the truth of Jewish success in state-building would force him to confront the hollowness of his own literary mythology. Israel refuses to die of the “truth” as it is conceived by leftists. That, above all, is what cannot be forgiven.

(The first Union cabinet, 1910; in the public domain; image enhanced by AI)

As a paid‑up member of Lex Libertas, Ernst Roets’s minority‑rights pressure group, it pains me to contradict one of its cherished myths. Roets, a man I greatly respect and admire, argues that the Union of 1910 was an Imperial British imposition — a centralised state foisted on white South Africa against its will. The claim has since hardened into received wisdom across the conservative white commentariat, the “fightback fraternity” of which I am a humble foot soldier.

In times like these whites cannot afford to be picky about ideological bedfellows. We are a tiny, ever‑diminishing minority whose historical privileges make us perennial targets for resentful political elites. I am genuinely grateful that the Solidarity Movement, Sakeliga and now Lex Libertas are holding the line against the looting class tearing at the fabric of what was once a coherent and functional state.

The fightback fraternity now carries real credibility in Washington, where the predicament of white South Africa is something of a cause célèbre among Republicans, particularly younger ones. Adjacent to this is a layer of public commentators — Willem Petzer, Renaldo Gouws, Rob Hersov, Gareth Cliff — who keep the issues alive in the public square. I don’t agree with everything they say but I am glad to have prominent voices defending middle‑class white South African interests. I also happen to believe that defending those interests is the only serious hope South Africa has of escaping the post‑colonial African doom loop.

Beyond opposing corruption and racial discrimination against whites, what does the fightback fraternity stand for? Broadly: self‑determination — the proposition that white South Africans and other minorities need not sink with the ship of state. Hence the proliferating vocabulary of escape: state‑proofing, enclaving, localisation, devolution, Cape secession (championed by the Cape Independence Advocacy Group, now folded into the Solidarity Movement via the Freedom Front Plus). Who knows how far any of this will go, but it is shifting the Overton window. For the first time, the looting fraternity is being forced to fight on ideological terrain it finds uncomfortable — to explain why the people who pay the bulk of the country’s taxes and own and run the businesses that generate the rest of them are subject to some 140 race‑based laws distorting legitimate business decision‑making and adding enormous costs to doing business and applying one’s professional expertise.

South Africa’s real miracle is the absence of hot war: no conflict on our borders, no race war in our streets. That is to be celebrated. But it comes with a caveat — an interminable cold war in which ideology is the proxy battlefield. In this race‑ideological struggle, an honourable draw is the best available outcome. Ideological defeat for South Africa’s European and European‑adjacent minorities would mean the end of us here.

That is why it is of existential importance that the fightback fraternity continues to make life difficult for the comrades. Electoral politics — whatever the statistical optimism of the DA or commentators like Frans Cronje — is an unlikely path to salvation for pro‑business white South Africa. When race is a proxy for ideology, elections become a racial census. Our best options are civil‑society pressure and the shrewd exploitation of geopolitical openings, none more propitious right now than the rise of Donald Trump.

It won’t be pretty. But I believe the fightback fraternity can salvage something from the wreckage. To do that, however, we need a principled and honest ideology — which is precisely why the Roets meme about 1910 concerns me.

Britain did not impose the Union on white South Africa. Yes, Britain won the South African War (1899–1902), but it then granted responsible government to the former Boer republics — the Transvaal in 1906, the Orange River Colony in 1907 — specifically so that the settler colonies could determine their own constitutional future. Union was not a British project; it was a settler project. The settler whites wanted it, virtually to a man. The Transvaal parliament, spanning the full white political spectrum, voted almost unanimously in favour. There was no white political movement of any consequence opposing Union, before or after 1910. More tellingly: even after Hertzog’s National Party took power in 1924, and even under D.F. Malan’s more radical Nationalists from 1948, Afrikaner nationalism never tried to unwind Union back into its four constituent parts. It wanted to capture the unified state, not dismantle it.

The only organised opposition to Union came from black South Africans, channelled through the South African Native National Congress — founded in 1912, renamed the ANC in 1923. Blacks were not consulted about Union and, beyond lodging complaints with the British government, had no means of opposing it. They knew that absent the protective embrace of the British Empire — which was generally far more liberal on the “native question” than settler whites — their citizenship would become ever more degraded.

And so it came to pass. In 1910 the qualified black franchise in the Cape was nominally entrenched, but successive white governments stripped it away in 1936 and did the same for Coloured voters in 1956.

The hubris of white South Africa — enabled but not driven by Imperial Britain — was to build a country in which they were a distinct minority of roughly 20%, without consulting a single person from that non‑white majority. That was the great own goal of white South Africa, finally registered on the scoreboard in 1994. The founders of Israel in 1948 were careful to avoid the same mistake, ensuring by means fair or foul that Jews constituted a solid majority within the borders of the new state. White South Africa never did the political arithmetic.

It is perverse to blame Britain for the centralised state. Of Imperial Britain’s many genuine sins, this is not one of them. It is also more than a little disingenuous. Right‑wing whites never questioned centralised power when the centre was competent and served their values. Centralisation is only a problem when the centre turns against you.

The case for devolution today — localisation, enclaving, secession, call it what you will — is really about state‑proofing, and tactically it is sound. But if the post‑1994 state were governing reasonably well, I would oppose devolution. It is unprincipled to live within agreed national borders for eighty‑odd years, harvesting enormous benefits for your chosen group, and then — the moment a democratic dispensation arrives — pretending you never consented to the unified state in the first place.

In the end, this is not a quarrel with 1910. We do not crave localisation, enclaving or secession because Britain wronged us a century ago. We want them because the post-1994 state has become a machine of predation: corrupt, collapsing and animated by an Africanist ideology that treats the white minority with open contempt. It is far safer, of course, to blame the long-dead British Empire than to name the living reality. The Empire packed its bags eighty years ago and cannot answer back. Even Ernst Roets, for all his courage, will not speak the plain truth in public: that the central problem is not centralisation itself — billions live decently under capable central states — but the specific institutional underperformance that reliably follows African majoritarian rule and the quiet reversal of political order it has brought. What we want is a state that is both competent and colour-blind. What we have is neither.

Decentralisation is therefore not historical revenge; it is our last line of defence. And whether the ANC ever grants it formally or not is almost beside the point. The process has already begun. The age of the unitary nation-state is quietly giving way to something older and more elemental: feudalism by another name. Where the centre rots, power simply drains back to the provinces, the cities, the gated communities, the ethnic networks, and the private security companies that now keep the lights on. South Africa is not marching toward some enlightened federal future; it is sliding back into the pre-modern default. The only question left is whether we have the clarity and the will to shape that descent into something survivable for ourselves and our children.

(AI-generated image)

On an ordinary Tuesday morning in New York Harbor, a battered cargo ship flying a neutral flag slips past the Statue of Liberty, just another anonymous workhorse in the endless stream of global trade. Dockworkers wave it through routine checks. Commuters on the Staten Island Ferry sip coffee, scroll their phones and pay it no attention. Then an explosion tears through the ship’s hold. The blast causes limited structural damage but releases a fine mist of radioactive material. Within minutes, sirens wail across Lower Manhattan as an invisible plume drifts over Battery Park, Wall Street, and the subway entrances. Panic surges through crowded streets. Bridges and tunnels slam shut. The world’s financial capital, caught completely off guard, begins its transformation into a contaminated no‑go zone as the internet lights up with the biggest story since Hiroshima.

This nightmare scenario is what haunts Donald Trump and underpins his confrontation with Iran. He doesn’t say the words “dirty bomb,” but that is the unspoken casus belli behind his stance toward the Islamic Republic.

Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, arming Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Shia militias across the region. It has enriched uranium to near‑weapons‑grade levels and shown every intention of acquiring nuclear capability. A dirty bomb delivered by proxy or merchant vessel is the perfect asymmetric weapon.

Critics in the legacy media dismiss the threat, deranged by their hatred for Trump and paralysed by a misplaced guilt about confronting regimes led by people of a different ethnicity. Yet the Iranian regime is deeply unpopular among its own people and deeply antithetical to everything modern liberals claim to hold sacred. Its record of executions, forced hijab laws, and persecution of minorities such as gays and Baha’is should make this war as morally straightforward for liberals as Ukraine’s defence against Russia. But the ideology of anti‑Europeanism has seeped into Western institutions, weakening them from within. If the Islamic Republic ever manages to set off a dirty bomb, it will be because the West’s dirty ideology enabled it.

Before the 1979 Revolution, Western progressives hailed Ayatollah Khomeini as an anti‑imperialist liberator. Even Salman Rushdie was initially sympathetic. That changed when The Satanic Verses (1988) prompted Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his execution — the only time in modern history a state has placed a bounty on a foreign writer’s head. Instead of rallying to Rushdie, segments of the Western intelligentsia blamed him for “provoking” the faithful. That moral inversion was never corrected. If anything, it has been institutionalised: in 2023, the United Nations appointed Iran’s ambassador to chair the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum.

The Iranian regime is not merely a government; it is a cause. It fuses Shia millenarianism with Marxist victimology and exports chaos through proxies while enriching its clerical‑military elite. History shows that decisive military defeat is the fastest way to discredit toxic ideologies. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Nasser’s Arab nationalism and the American Confederacy all lost their aura of inevitability once they were beaten on the battlefield.

South Africa confronts a parallel problem. The ANC, like the Islamic Republic, is less a government than a cause — black liberation fused with Marxist grievance. Both regimes justify corruption, thuggery and economic mismanagement as necessary weapons against supposed historic “oppressors.” Both have been indulged by a self‑hating Western left that mistakes resentment for justice.

Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, patron saint of this tradition, romanticised the noble savage and childhood innocence while abandoning his own five children to an orphanage — a fitting metaphor for the irresponsibility baked into this worldview. His intellectual descendants in South Africa have built a state that sees itself as exempt from the ordinary duties of governance — law and order, clean administration, economic growth — because its sacred mission is to rectify global racial injustice.

Bad ideologies produce weak states. When the Iranian regime collapses — and I believe it will within the next year or two — the blow to the ANC’s moral authority will be severe. Its legitimacy rests heavily on perpetual black victimhood and Western racial guilt. That narrative loses power when anti‑American regimes start to fall. After all, Anti‑Americanism is a form of anti‑Europeanism. America is a European colony that surpassed the old land empires of Russia, China, Persia and the Ottomans — and eventually Europe itself. Of course it is hated: a nation of Europe’s castoffs who made good … or rather, made Great. This hatred is ideological fodder for our own gangsta government, which resents the European castoffs who made Africa’s greatest state at the psychological expense of the black man.

Racial resentment dressed up as justice has already hollowed out much of the South African state. Continuing down that path will land South Africa on the same dustheap of history that awaits the mad mullahs of Tehran. The alternative is simpler and more practical: drop the globalist cause, run a competent government and build a winning African nation.

I recently read Hannes Wessels’s A Handful of Hard Men (2015), an account of the Rhodesian SAS. Growing up in South Africa in the 1970s, while the Bush War raged next door, it formed part of our childhood mythology — a “Vietnam” for white southern Africa.

Born a pinko liberal, I naturally felt sorry for the “gooks” being massacred by the racist Rhodesians. Amid the white man’s last stand in Africa, the “Rhodies” developed a gentle — and at times not so gentle — form of racism as a defence against their imminent demise.

Rhodesian comedian Wrex Tarr rallied war-weary audiences with his Chilapalapa (Fanakalo) routines. Such material would be verboten in today’s politically correct climate, but poking fun at stupid “terrorists” and childlike blacks was bang on the money for the Rhodies.

You can hear him on YouTube with his “fairytale about the Rhodesian African athlete Spike Sbaleka who went to the Olympics”. It’s a bit rum for these PC times, but not so over-the-top that YouTube would ban it. Perhaps Tarr drew unconsciously from the old Music Hall tradition. Spike is the yokel — the country bumpkin whose naïve honesty shows up the sophisticates. For white Rhodesians — poor cousins betrayed by their posh English betters — Spike was their catharsis.

The Rhodesians were not only frustrated about being looked down on by their posh overseas cousins, they were also frustrated at the Bush War, so typical of late-colonial conflicts. Although the colonists were winning all the battles, they were losing the war.

Wessels’s rip-roaring read focuses on the ultimate Rhodie prototype: Captain Darrell Watt, a Shona-speaking farm boy with a genius for bush warfare. Watt joined the SAS in the late 1960s and fought through to the end in 1979. In countless contacts, invariably outnumbered, he never lost a battle and lost only one soldier under his command — and that because the soldier ignored his orders. He was also instrumental in helping establish RENAMO in Mozambique as a counter to FRELIMO’s support for ZANU.

Today, Watt lives as a contented white African in western Zambia, protecting the Mushingashi Conservancy from poachers — a job he is uniquely suited for. The Zambians gave him citizenship and even the honour of Tribal Headman.

But for many he remains on the wrong side of history for having defended white minority rule. In interviews he carefully refers to his old enemies as “freedom fighters,” a phrase that must stick in the throat a little. Watt is a cultural hybrid — a white African who loves the continent on its own terms, not a frustrated liberal trying to turn blacks into whites.

A poignant passage in Wessels’s book describes Watt coming across an old African man dressed in animal skins, living a primal life little changed for hundreds of thousands of years. Watt cannot help envying him for being so at one with the bush, unencumbered by the anxieties of civilisation.

Today only about 25,000 whites remain in Zimbabwe — a fraction of the roughly 270,000 in the mid-1970s. The vast majority left because they feared or loathed black rule. Here in South Africa, a generation into majority rule, some 4.5 million of us whites remain. Around two million have emigrated. Those of us still here face the same identity crisis as the fleeing white Rhodesians. Who are we and what are we doing here? Do we become white Africans playing some sort of tribal or feudal game, or do we persist with our liberal principles in the hope that reality will eventually bend to unrelenting decency?

In 1979 Rhodesia briefly entered a penumbral zone between white and black rule. It was called Zimbabwe Rhodesia, with Bishop Abel Muzorewa as prime minister. The civil service, judiciary, military and police stayed largely in white hands, and whites retained a guaranteed share of parliamentary seats. Call it “white supremacy lite” if you like, but I would bet the farm that today’s Zimbabwe would be a far better place for both white and black had that compromise endured.

The compromise country of Zimbabwe Rhodesia was flat-out rejected by Britain and the international community. The war continued through 1979 until white Rhodesia, bullied, manipulated and ultimately betrayed by Britain, threw in the sponge. The freedom fighters got their way. Mugabe swept to power in 1980 and ZANU-PF has ruled ever since, more recently against the wishes of the majority. As the old racists used to warn pinkoes like me: “One man, one vote — once.”

White colonials in Africa endured an ideological pincer movement in the 20th century, with liberals and Marxists alike backing radical racial equality. Rousseau, who fetishised the noble savage, summed up the romance of radical equality: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

If everyone is truly equal then it is an unforgivable insult for a black vote to count less than a white vote. You could hardly accuse Britain under Margaret Thatcher of being Marxist. Yet when it came to Rhodesia both Conservative and Labour governments stuck to the policy of NIBMAR — No Independence Before Majority Rule — even though it would deliver the country to the communists.

NIBMAR was why Ian Smith, the honest Rhodesian farmer and wartime RAF pilot, declared unilateral independence (UDI) in 1965. Smith could see with his own eyes that majority rule would prove disastrous. What made Rhodesia the “Switzerland of Africa” was the guiding hand — the “civilisational ballast,” if you will — provided by its quarter-million whites.

One imagines Smith pleading with the British not to cave in to the Patriotic Front, led by the Soviet-backed Nkomo and Chinese-backed Mugabe. But even under Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s most right-wing prime minister in a generation, the elites held firm on radical racial equality and effectively handed the country to the communists.

In radical equality we taste the evil brew created by mixing the decency of liberalism — with its high ideal of human worth — with the uncompromising hatreds of communism, not least the hatred of “Western imperialism”. Ultimately, Britain sacrificed white Rhodesia because postcolonial leaders such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere threatened to break up the Commonwealth if Mugabe did not come to power. Lord Carrington chaired the Lancaster House Agreement that paved the way for Mugabe. He later admitted that he and his team knew ZANU-PF had used mass intimidation to secure votes, yet they rubber-stamped the result anyway. Carrington considered Rhodesia a distracting sideshow worth the sacrifice in the broader Cold War context.

On such compromises are entire civilisations lost. In a striking historical twist, Britain itself now faces a civilisational threat. Mass immigration fused with woke dogma has made its cities unrecognisable, its quiet towns playgrounds for Pakistani rape gangs, and its once-proud army incapable of defending its own people. Good old Smithy must be chuckling in his grave with a touch of Schadenfreude at the British sophisticates who once looked down on him as the stupid yokel racist.

I am currently preparing myself to deliver a talk this Saturday at Alma Café in Cape Town (bookings through Quicket), about two fascinating characters: Jan Smuts and Queen Frederica of Greece.

Remarkably, my research has led to an interesting convergence of two of my hobbyhorses: South African history and Eastern spirituality. Yes, not exactly two fields that naturally go together. But therein lies a tale.

When Smuts met Frederica during the Second World War, she had been evacuated to South Africa after the Nazis invaded her adopted country, Greece, where her husband, Paul (“Palo,” as she called him), was heir to the throne. The relationship between Jannie and Freddie is pregnant with mystery and intrigue. For a start, it was a friendship that Winston Churchill did not approve of. Frederica was a Prussian princess whose four brothers were fighting in the Wehrmacht, and whose grandfather was Kaiser Wilhelm II — the man Churchill held responsible for causing the First World War.

In the admittedly unlikely event of Smuts and Frederica sharing a pillow, there would have been no end of risk in the secrets Jannie could have let slip, given that he was a trusted confidante of Churchill. Churchill wasn’t taking chances: he insisted on organising a bodyguard for Freddie, who of course doubled as an informer for the British.

But he need not have worried. Princess Frederica of Hanover (as she was known before she married Palo) was 100% German by birth and 100% Greek by adoption, taking her role as Greek princess — and later Queen Consort in 1947 on the death of Palo’s father — with the utmost commitment and seriousness.

Smuts and South Africa experienced their own traumas in the 1940s, with white South Africa split between Afrikaner (generally against) and English (generally for) the Allied cause, culminating in the traumatic (for most non‑Afrikaners) defeat of Smuts in the 1948 election by D.F. Malan’s National Party, whose flagship cause was apartheid. But these surely pale beside what Greeks endured during the Nazi occupation, the murder of tens of thousands of Jews, and then a civil war (1946–1949) between communists and royalists that cost the lives of roughly 150,000 Greeks — a conflict in which Queen Frederica played an important, and often under‑appreciated, role in defeating the communists and keeping Greece aligned with the West.

In today’s jargon, Frederica was an operator. She took her royal destiny seriously, seeing herself, as Plato might have, as a “philosopher‑queen.” But she was more than a pretty royal face, fodder for Hello! magazine. She was also very bright, and able to hold her own with the famously sharp Smuts. It helped that she was genuinely interested in Smuts’s philosophy of Holism. This was the ideal way to flatter the old man — and to use him to secure her Greek throne. (Smuts played his part by putting in a word for the Greek royal family with the British and Americans in the wake of the Allied victory.)

But besides the politicking, like Smuts, Freddie was a spiritual seeker. Perhaps, unlike Smuts, she actually found the font of spiritual truth. By the time she died in 1981, she had found her guru in India and had become a follower of Jagadguru Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi Swamigal. She wrote authentically about the merits of meditation and, in her own mind at least, had cut the Gordian knot that has tied up the Western mind in confusion — that supposedly unbridgeable divide between science and soul. Freddie credited her interest in physics with leading her toward non‑dual realisation. Remarkably, she kept up a correspondence with Werner Heisenberg, one of the great physicists of the day, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, and the man behind Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, by which we cannot simultaneously measure both the position and momentum of an electron.

In one letter she told Heisenberg: “Identification with the ‘seen’ brings multiplicity and separation. Identification with the ‘unseen substance’ brings non‑duality, harmony, THE ONE.”

There is much to unravel about Frederica, and about her remarkable — and somewhat mysterious — relationship with Smuts. For a start, why did she, on Smuts’s passing in 1950, collect up all the letters she had written to him and refuse Piet Beukes (Smuts’s biographer) access? Some things just cannot be measured simultaneously: Smuts’s value to South Africa and his denial of African rights; the nature of his relationship with Frederica, Platonic or not; and the difficulty of living in this world, seen and singular, while remaining non‑dual and animated by the great Unseen.

But perhaps I can unravel a little of the mystery this Saturday at the Alma Café. I hope to see you there to unravel it with me.

(Smuts surveying the San Francisco skyline)

(Note: On 4 April at Alma Cafe in Cape Town I am giving a talk on Jan Smuts and his relationship with Queen Frederica of Greece. Jannie & Freddie: A South African Love Story, Bookings on Quicket.)

Over 46 years of apartheid, direct state killings of black protesters numbered in the low thousands. In early 2026, Iran’s regime killed 7,000–30,000+ of its own citizens in mere weeks. Yet, South Africa was a far more important cause for the United Nations back in the 1980s then is Iran today.

The three countries that were most interfered with by the United Nations were Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa, and Israel. How was it that these “problem children” of the West drew such sustained flak from the UN, while monstrous communist, Islamic, and postcolonial regimes often evaded comparable scrutiny for mass murder?

The UN’s obsession with South Africa manifested in repeated annual General Assembly resolutions condemning apartheid, calls for boycotts, arms embargoes, and even the establishment of a dedicated Special Committee Against Apartheid. These actions were far more persistent and comprehensive than the relatively muted responses to, for example, the Khmer Rouge genocide, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or more recent Syrian and Iraqi atrocities. One of the reasons for this is the anti-West voting blocs of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which wield serious influence in the General Assembly.

It is a great irony of history that one of the main champions for the United Nations Organisation (UNO), as it was then known, was South Africa’s prime minister at the time, Jan Smuts. Smuts wrote the Preamble of the United Nations Charter1, which was adopted by 50 nations in San Francisco on 26 June 1945.

But Smuts found himself on the wrong end of history for South Africa’s race policy. As he revealed in a letter to his friend Lady (Daphne) Moore in 1947:

Colour in the world and in South Africa has become more intransigent because of the acclaim of human rights at UNO. How is the practical compromise to be found? That is the problem which confronts us in South Africa and me in particular. The world is reeling between the two poles of White and Colour. What is the future of our races going to be? And in South Africa the problem is coming to a head.

In that same letter to Lady Moore, Smuts confessed to his own ambivalence about equal rights:

On one side I am a human and a humanist, and the author to the preamble to the [United Nations] Charter. On the other I am a South African European, proud of our heritage and proud of the clean European society we have built up in South Africa, and which I am determined not to see lost in the black pool of Africa.

Was it fair that the European civilisation established by racist whites in Africa be dissolved into the “black pool of Africa” as per the demands of the United Nations? Smuts thought not. Although he lived to see only five years of the UN in operation, he didn’t like the direction it was taking, stating that the League of Nations (forerunner to the UN) had done a better job, “managing world affairs with a decency and fair respect for ten years” before being derailed by “the Hitler blitz.”

Smuts distrusted the pretensions of the UN to “world government and world reform,” noting that this was “a task for which it is hopelessly unfitted.” It is a measure of Smuts’s prescience that his critique of the UN cuts to the core of the issue. What was meant to be an organisation that stops nations from fighting each other and invading each other, became one that was singularly interested in the oppression of non-white peoples.

As Smuts complained in 1947:

We [South Africa] have a well-ordered, well-governed state, but the influence of UNO policies has been profoundly disturbing and upsetting. Countries who cannot govern themselves now sit in judgement on others who have done their job fairly well in spite of all sorts of difficulties… Democracy without leadership is a sham, and the UNO seems to me a democracy without leadership … a talking shop in which incompetents and misfits rule by counting heads.

Poor Smuts would be turning in his grave at the latest UN travesty. The UN has been true to type in its response to the US-Israel attacks on Iran, with Secretary-General António Guterres condemning the strikes as a violation of the UN Charter and a “grave threat to international peace and security” that would have “catastrophic” consequences. No, it is not a catastrophe for well-run countries—with happy populations—to eliminate would-be suicide bombers with nuclear weapons vowing to kill Jews en masse.

The true catastrophe began in 1945 at San Francisco, where democracy—originally a noble mechanism for legitimating political authority—was subtly turned against the West itself. As waves of postcolonial states entered the United Nations, and as western populations underwent relative demographic decline, the imbalance grew ever more pronounced. Well-intentioned liberals in the West gradually ceded moral and institutional leadership to an emerging majority animated by anti-western resentment and Third-Worldist ideology, transforming what was meant to be a concert of sovereign nations into a forum where numerical majorities could impose their priorities on a shrinking minority of decent, well-run states.

In his last film role before dying of a brain haemorrhage, Richard Burton played O’Brien (a sinister agent of the Inner Party) in the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948).

In the Ministry of Love, O’Brien systematically tortures Winston Smith (played by John Hurt), breaking his grip on reality. Strapped to a torture apparatus, Winston clings to the arithmetic fact that two plus two equals four. Burton, as the party man O’Brien, chillingly insists, in his distinctive Welsh voice, “If the Party says it is five, then it is five”—as he turns up the dial, sending Winston howling with pain.

When O’Brien holds up four fingers and asks how many there are, Winston initially says “five” to appease him. O’Brien rejects this: “No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four.”

The true horror of the Party’s totalitarianism lies not in forced confessions or outward obedience, but in the demand for inner conversion. The victim must genuinely embrace the absurdity of the Party’s “truth.” Power must triumph over objective proof; the soul itself must surrender to the collective delusion.

For Orwell, the erasure of objective reality by those in power is the ultimate dystopian nightmare. This idea echoes in postmodern thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, who view truth as constructed and enforced through power and discourse. But where Orwell warns against it, many postmodernists celebrate the dissolution of independent truth as liberating—especially for marginalised groups challenging western hegemony.

South Africa’s continuing crisis mirrors the Party’s insistence on “two plus two equals five.” The root cause—a leftist shift in thought—has been noted by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama: “The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often-psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.”1

By “psychological demands” Fukuyama refers to the lingering sense of inferiority felt by many whose ancestors were colonised, conquered, or enslaved by the West. This unease intensifies when such groups “come second” to white westerners. At the same time, mainstream white western opinion has increasingly aligned itself with the perspective of the “victim.” Many white westerners psychologically project themselves into the experience of those who resent them, becoming guilt-ridden and self-hating; or perhaps angry at conservative whites for refusing to play their nihilistic game.

In South Africa, black citizens now control the state—a major psychological victory that addresses the trauma of colonial defeat. Yet the continued success of a skilled white minority in South Africa prevents full “equality” in Fukuyama’s psychological sense. Meeting this demand would mean upending reality itself—making two plus two equal whatever the “comrades” declare.

South Africa’s leaders, scarred by decades of Afrikaner domination, have adopted a strikingly similar approach to apartheid’s solution for the “poor white problem”: creating sheltered employment through a huge, state-funded bureaucracy to elevate a group into the middle class. The civil service (excluding state-owned enterprises) employs about 1.2 million people, with average salaries around R50,000 per month. The public-sector wage bill consumes roughly 12% of GDP—among the highest proportions globally—yet delivers crumbling infrastructure and institutional ruin.

Despite this, the narrative persists: with just a few more training courses, anti-corruption drives, or professionalisation efforts, this bloated, overpaid structure—an artificial black middle class—could function like a “normal” civil service in a normal country.

It’s conceivable the ANC could choose a pragmatic, pro-business, non-anti-white leader like Patrice Motsepe, who might shrink the state, unleash the private sector, and enact real reforms. Yet an existential slow torture continues: the pressure to adopt postmodern western lies—insisting white colonialism is the sole ruin, white supremacy worse than any other, and that replacing white skills with black ones will succeed if only we believe hard enough.

In a majority-black country, this denial is not a luxury but a necessity for psychological “emancipation.” Objective reality—seen in everyday experience, history, and outcomes—must be erased. Black and white must be declared equal, even if the country—Africa’s outstanding exception in modern functionality—is reduced to dust. This is the quiet horror: a nation torturing itself into embracing what eyes, evidence, and common-sense reject—all in the name of power over proof.