If and when South Africa unravels…..

Foreigners will be the first ones to bite the dust.

• They are here illegally. They are undocumented.
• They are taking our jobs. They are the leading cause of our unemployment.
• They are dating our women. They sell us fake goods.
• They are responsible for rising crime levels. They are into drugs, prostitution, and human trafficking, “abohambe”.
• They are congesting our spaces. We are forced to share our schools, hospitals, and roads with them. They are also vandalizing our infrastructure.
• Makwerekweres don’t look like us, they are darker and dirty. They don't bath, their armpits smell like dead rats.
• They are cowards, they don't wanna change their own countries. “Kwerekwere Go Back Home”
• They are the reason why our economy is not growing.

Then falls the Boer Farmer.

• They stole our land. The land belongs to us. We are the rightful owners of the land.
• They have no respect for us. They don't view us as human beings.
• They do not want to share the land.
• They are responsible for our poverty.
• They are not like us, “Dubula ibhunu”, “Kill the Booer”.
• They abused us during apartheid, we need reparations or else retribution.

Then it's all Boers and all White People

• They are racist.
• They want to recolonize us. Let's send them back to where they came from. What was van Riebeck thinking when he landed here?
• They want to overthrow the republic. We need to teach them a lesson.
• They force us to praat Afrikaans. We don't like their Afrikaner nationalism built around farming and language. We need to stop their madness. This is our country.
• They are all racists. they undermine us at every given opportunity.
• They have too many privileges.
• White Monopoly Capital has too much power over us. We need to take back the economy.
• They are deliberately sabotaging the economy. They are taking capital away from the country. They are also manipulating our currency.
• They think Western Cape is not part of South Africa. Let’s go and get it from them.
• They don't want to share the wealth. That’s the reason why we are poor. There is enough wealth for everybody, it's only concentrated in the few hands of abelungus.

Then it's the Indians and Coloureds.

• These Indians don't respect us. They pay us belittling wages.
• They are not Africans. They should go back to India.
• They are not black. They think they are whites and they consider themselves better than blacks.
• Why do they speak Afrikans?
• Their culture is different from ours. They have loose morals. They are drunken clowns.
• They don't belong here.
• They are dishonest, reckless and promote gangsterism

Then it's the Venda’s and the Sothos

• They are not proper South Africans. “These Vendas are Zimbabweans I tell you”.
• They are book criminals. Look what happened to VBS.
• They think they are smarter than all the other black South Africans.
• They are not us.
• Pretoria should be ours.

Then it’s the Xhosa’s

• They are not Zulu’s. Mzansi is a Zulu nation and should be the Zulu nation. This is the nation of our great ancestor Tshaka Zulu.
• They have been dictating how government runs for a very long time. Mandela was a Xhosa, as well as Thabo Mbeki. Too many presidents from one tribe.
• They think the ANC belongs to them alone. Viva amaZulu viva.

Love should be stronger than hate, but it's actually not. The things that have the potential to divide us are dangerous because when they are toyed around with they have the potential to light big fires.

Love and unity take a lot of time to grow. They need to be nurtured. Hate, division, and war take a few months to ferment. It's like how the markets perform. A bull run takes years but a bear-run can play-out in a few days or even hours, reversing all the gains that took a decade to play-out. Twenty years of nation-building can be reversed in a couple of years.

The Unraveling of the Rainbow Nation seems to be something that has a very small probability of occurrence, if not a zero probability. As usual, humans are pretty bad at attaching probabilities to events that seldom happen.

What are the chances that foreigners can be chased away, maimed, killed, massacred? What are the chances that the same can happen to Afrikaner white farmers? What are the chances that white people can be viewed as the problem in South Africa and be chased away like what happened in Zimbabwe? What are the chances that, after more than 160 years of living in Natal, the Indians can be chased from those areas?

It looks like it can never happen. We are past that age. People are civilized nowadays. But civilization itself is a function of the mind, and the human mind is a very fragile vessel that can easily buy any narrative on sale.

If the economy does not grow, and a prolonged economic crisis of some sort plays-out, then the human mind easily gets affected by the economic environment. In times of crisis, division reigns supreme as people look for someone to blame. Sooner or later, someone somewhere in the country comes with a “them vs us” narrative that splits up society. And so, it unravels, piece by piece.

What will divide us is the narrative sold by those who drive the agenda of division. The narrative will be packaged in a manner that makes it very easy to sell, as such the generality of the populace can easily buy it. It does not matter if the contents of the narrative are true or false. What matters is that people can believe in them. Facts and outright falsehood are concocted into a package that is believable.

The saving grace will be the government. A strong government will debunk the division narratives, foster unity, and lead the nation.

However, the most important factor in ensuring the continued success of the rainbow nation is economic growth. The absence of broad-based growth is the perfect recipe for a dramatic unraveling.

Food for thought!

Ciao!