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Photo by Gregory Fullard on Unsplash
A News24 story has been doing the rounds in South Africa this weekend. An Afrikaner family recently left the country after being granted refugee status in the United States. Fifteen days after they arrived, the father and one of the children got sick. They still had medical aid in South Africa, so they flew home for treatment. Six days later, they tried to go back to the US and were stopped. Who would have thought that voluntarily returning to the country you say you fled from puts strain on the claim that you are a “refugee.” The story is almost too neat, and despite an almost irresistible sense of schadenfreude, the better part of me does not want to make too much of one family’s misguided choices, least of all when a sick child is involved. But I keep coming back to it. These are people who described themselves as exiles from a place that, the moment they were vulnerable, was still the place they knew how to go back to. I read it on Yom Kippur, which began on Sunday evening and ends tonight. Thursday is Heritage Day in South Africa, and I have been thinking about these two occasions together. Yom Kippur is about atonement and return. You take stock of what you did and failed to do in the past year, and of what can still be repaired. Heritage Day asks what we have inherited and what we intend to do with it, though in practice it is mostly a celebration, and South Africa usually observes Heritage Day as an affirmation that diversity is our national treasure. For a long time, I feel that we have had more to answer for than to celebrate. Lately, I have been feeling bleak about South Africa; it’s hard not to. The country is once again facing up to how many women are killed here (following a spate of murders in Gauteng’s East Rand), and calls to the government’s Gender-Based Violence Command Centre have risen sharply this month. Then there is the xenophobia, which I have spent most of this year thinking and writing about. The politics of expulsion is becoming more organized, and foreigners are being blamed for unemployment, failing hospitals, and the general decay of the state. Earlier this month, The Ideas Letter gave a whole issue, “South Africa Agonistes,” to the state of the country. My contribution, “Post-Post-Apartheid,” argued, to put it crudely, that the political order inaugurated in 1994 has reached the end of its historical life. For most of the post-apartheid period, even the fiercest critics of the settlement judged it by the standard of liberation. If you said 1994 had betrayed its promise, you were still saying the promise mattered. What struck me about the anti-migrant marches of June 30 was that here was a mass politics demanding less freedom instead of more. I wrote that the ANC’s deepest monopoly had been “over the horizon.” National liberation was the language a political demand had to be made in if it was going to be understood at all. The editors commissioned three responses, all excellent, and I would encourage you to read them. Brian Kagoro, in “Against Post-Post-Apartheid,” thinks I have mistaken the exhaustion of a political narrative for the disappearance of the material order that apartheid left behind. Declaring a “post-post-apartheid” era, he says, risks holding a premature funeral for a struggle that is not finished. Nic Dawes, in “Not Yet Tomorrow,” has more faith than I do in the constitutional settlement. He finds in it the resources for a “constitutional radicalism” that could widen the solidarities the new politics is trying to narrow. Panashe Chigumadzi comes at me from somewhere else entirely. Her remarkable “Hinge of the Modern World” pushes the frame back by centuries and out past the nation. She argues that South Africa should not be treated as a pathological exception to the world around it. It is “the miniature and not the exception,” a place where the contradictions of the modern racial-capitalist order are unusually easy to see. I have not been able to shake that phrase, partly because I am tired of South African exceptionalism myself. When our editorial team started discussing where to hold our next Festival of Ideas, Cape Town was the obvious candidate, and I found myself surprisingly resisting it. Not that my colleagues were guilty of any of it, but I was worn out by the old story of South Africa as the continent’s liberal enclave, with its constitutional miracle and its cosmopolitan meeting points, the place where Africa becomes worldly and intelligible. South Africans have too often built a national identity by imagining the rest of the continent as disorderly, backward, or simply “elsewhere.” Part of my argument in the Ideas Letter essay was that the distinction between South Africa and “Africa” helped make South Africanness in the first place. And yet there was a reason so much intellectual and cultural energy passed through this country, and a reason something like Africa Is a Country could come out of it. We still have an unusually argumentative public sphere: newspapers that embarrass powerful people, courts that frustrate the state, activists who organize noisily, scholars who disagree in public, magazines that can be rude about everyone. South African photography is one long record of that arguing, which Hedley Twidle and Sean O’Toole trace in their contribution to the same issue, in “The Medium as a Site of Struggle.” O’Toole’s history of the South African photobook runs from Drum through Ernest Cole, Peter Magubane, and Afrapix to what became of documentary photography after apartheid. These were photographers looking at a country that was always also arguing about what it was. The institutions are battered and uneven, and I don’t want to romanticize them. But some of the freedoms are real. Reporters Without Borders ranks South Africa 21st of 180 countries in its 2026 press freedom index. It describes a diverse media landscape with a strong investigative tradition, while noting that journalists here still—and increasingly—face intimidation and attacks. But see how quickly I have become an exceptionalist again? Here Panashe’s distinction helps. South Africa does not have to be exceptional to matter. It may matter as a miniature, because so many of the conflicts of the modern world have been squeezed into one political space. Conquest and migration, race and capitalism, enormous wealth next to enormous deprivation, several languages, religions, and historical memories pushed up against one another. The democratic experiment never solved any of this. What made it interesting was how openly it put the problem on the table. This is why the Afrikaner refugee story interests me, beyond its obvious ironies. One current in contemporary Afrikaner politics has responded to the failure of common institutions by imagining a more separate future, with parallel institutions, cultural autonomy, permanent minority status, and eventually even territorial self-government. Afrikaner politics is not monolithic. But this tendency puts an old South African question in a new form. When a common political world disappoints us badly enough, do we repair it, abandon it, or retreat into smaller worlds of our own? Apartheid had an answer to difference, which was separation. Race, territory, school, neighborhood, language, and citizenship could each be divided and administratively enclosed. The democratic wager was far more ambitious. Nobody serious thought our differences would disappear, or that history could be wiped clean in 1994. The bet was that people formed by radically unequal histories could still share a political world, and that the permanent categories of settler and native, insider and outsider, could give way to a citizenship in which you did not have to become the same as everyone else in order to belong. As I put it in “Post-Post-Apartheid,” political identities are made, and what has been made can, with political effort, be unmade. That wager has failed in countless ways. Reading the responses to my essay, though, I have started to wonder whether failure is reason enough to give it up. There are some ideas we need because reality keeps falling short of them. The United Nations is the obvious example this week. The 81st General Assembly’s general debate opens in New York tomorrow, and few institutions supply such regular evidence of their own inadequacy. But the UN’s inadequacy does not make the problem it was built to address go away. States with wildly unequal power still have to share a world somehow, and power still has to answer to something larger than itself. Democracy can work like this, and so can the university. The institutions become compromised, sclerotic, hypocritical. But we can only call them hypocritical because some ideal survives to judge them by. I think South Africa may be one of those ideas. I don’t mean the Rainbow Nation, the comforting story in which reconciliation finished the work of justice. I don’t mean South African exceptionalism either, which makes us special by quietly making everyone else deficient. I mean something more modest and much harder, which is the proposition that people who do not share a history, an identity, a culture, interests, or even an account of the past might still have to make a world together. My respondents do not agree about what that world should look like, or even, in Panashe’s case, whether the nation is the right container for it. But read together, the essays in South Africa Agonistes all object, from different directions, to treating pessimism as the place where thinking stops. I began September convinced that a story had ended. I am ending the month less sure that a story ending and its possibilities running out are the same thing. So, back to the family in the News24 story. I don’t want to recruit them into an allegory they did not choose. But their odd round trip shows something about belonging that political rhetoric tends to hide. A place can disappoint you, frighten you, fail you, even become somewhere you imagine leaving, and still be tangled up with the most ordinary facts of your life: the doctor you know, the medical aid card in your wallet, the people you phone, the airport you fly back into when something goes wrong. I have stopped asking whether South Africa has lived up to its idea. It plainly has not. What I want to know is what we would lose if the idea stopped organizing our imagination altogether. I don’t have a confident answer. Confidence about South Africa has been hard to come by lately. But I think a country can stop convincing you as an achievement without exhausting itself as a project. And disillusionment, however well earned, is not by itself permission to abandon the common world. – William Shoki, editor
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