The Ideas Letter

Thirty years ago, South Africa was heralded as a harbinger of a just and non-racial order. After decades of a criminal, repellent regime, Nelson Mandela’s ascension to the presidency and the restorative work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, designed to heal the country and provide national unity, gave the country—and the world—abundant hope. Three decades on, that hope has been dashed. A miniscule percentage of the Black majority are landowners or control any of the means of production. Inequality is rampant and accelerating. Nearly half of the working-age population can be considered unemployed. And, as in so many other societies, the central scapegoats are immigrants—in this case, Africans from elsewhere on the continent. What happened? Is this political moment an anomalous outbreak of xenophobia or evidence of a durable new mass politics centered on exclusion and deportation?

I was recently in South Africa and spent time with a few of the writers for this special issue. William Shoki, the editor of Africa Is a Country, one of the wisest magazines focused on the continent, pens our lead essay, a tour de force tour d’horizon about what he calls the “post-post-apartheid” era. For Shoki, South Africa has entered a new political moment in which the Pan-African promises associated with the democratic transition no longer animate popular politics. His conclusion is bleak. Moral condemnation and anti-xenophobia campaigns will hardly alter the material and organizational conditions that produce a politics of exclusion. He’s also skeptical that any existing left-populist vehicle can redirect popular anger toward emancipatory ends.

Brian Kagoro, a colleague at the Open Society Foundations, our managing director for Africa, esteemed for his decades-long struggle for transitional justice and constitutional reform on the continent, leads the responses to Shoki.