Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu: Yes, bad things are happening in South Africa

Daily Maverick

15-05-2025

Ah, Chief Dwasaho! I wish there were another way to narrate this grim tale, but the recent exodus of my compatriots to the so-called Land of Milk and Honey has jolted me into righteous unease.
This week, a group of 49 white South Africans — Afrikaners by identity — made their great trek to a faraway land, granted refugee status by the United States for alleged racial persecution here at home.
Yes, you heard that right. Outside the glare of the mainstream, white-owned media, a narrative of white genocide in Mzansi is being whispered in corridors, polished in think tanks, and paraded as gospel.
It is spoken of in hushed tones, my leader. No one counts the white bodies, they say, because the 'bloody communist government of the ANC' is always watching.
I was triggered by seeing them waving American flags and grinning like Lotto winners. That old nightmare returned: forced removals, police boots breaking down doors, black bodies contorted on cold floors, bleeding dreams deferred, and 'left stinking like rotten meat'.
Yet for some, their dream caught a first-class flight to the US. Ours — indigenous people — never left the townships, informal settlements, and villages where dreams rot.
My leader, my unlikeable late father, a factory-floor philosopher of note, warned me sternly in early '94: 'Don't you dare vote for the convict — Nelson Mandela.' He was dead serious. He believed democracy would end civilisation as he knew it. He assured me, with the conviction of a man raised on Huisgenoot and boerewors theology, that the white man was very clever.
'No black man,' he intoned, 'can run a country.' His tormented soul, I now realise, was weighed down by the sheer heft of indoctrination. He swam in the bloodied waters of racial myths, justifying white wealth as destiny rather than design.
White affluence
If it is still believed, history tells us white affluence did not fall from the sky like manna. It was chiselled from black backs, broken in the gold, coal, and asbestos mines.
Our forebears, armed only with aching limbs and dignity, earned peanuts underground. Many suffocated in silence. Others died coughing up their last wages in blood — compensation paid only to their widows, in crocodile tears and zinc coffins.
But the myth persisted. White people worked hard, while black people loafed in the sun. The factory-floor philosopher believed that, too. I refused to buy it, and he never forgave me.
My leader, since 1652, we've been pawns in a colonial chess game where the rules are rigged and the referee is an accomplice. The mines didn't just swallow lungs and lives — they harvested black dreams, crushed between shifts and shafts, while shareholders drank whisky in New York City, London, and Sandton and paid their housekeepers in leftover rice and expired mayonnaise.
Their offshore bank accounts in Zurich overflowed with money stolen from the dreams, sweat, blood, and tears of black men. Men who were herded into inhumane mining compounds — concrete coffins of misery — far from their ancestral lands, their wives, livestock, and dignity.
They were uprooted, stripped of language and land, and made to toil in shafts that reeked of dynamite and despair. The white masters remained above ground, sipping Scotch in crystal tumblers, while below, black lungs filled with dust, not air. Men became numbers. Families became remittance slips.
City life? Not for them. It required a passbook — an instrument of state surveillance stamped with contempt. You needed a permit to breathe in white areas. A permit to walk. A permit to work. A permit to live.
And God forbid you fancied a taste of the white man's liquor. You either needed a 'coloured' surname or had to renounce your very bloodline for a shot of Scotch.
Stripped of choice and dignity
Our grandfathers, stripped of choice and dignity, were herded into state-sanctioned beer halls where they were force-fed sorghum beer, not brewed in communal celebration but churned out by white monopolies turning a profit on sorrow. A grotesque corruption of umqombothi, that sacred Zulu elixir once poured to honour ancestors, welcome newborns, and celebrate the harvest.
Even our serenity was stolen — the right to hear birdsong without surveillance, to wade in the river without suspicion, to watch mountains in stillness without fear of displacement. It was the freedom to laugh, dance, sit beneath a tree, and hear the soft, jubilant racket of children at play, lost forever.
I know, leadership. This letter may read like the ramblings of a scatterbrain. I've already eaten my figures, but worry not — I'm seeing my psychologist soon. Where was I?
Nonetheless, I am a big fan of the post-apartheid dispensation, warts and all. I conceived this Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu as a small national service, a weekly liturgy of loyalty and scrutiny. Since 2018, I've written with the faith of a Zion Christian Church pilgrim on the dusty road to Moria.
At the height of this column's notoriety, there were watering holes where I was persona non grata. I would enter and feel the chill, not from the aircon, but from cadres who had read my latest piece.
In other taverns, I held court like a township Plato. I sat on upturned crates, decoding your utterances with the precision of a sangoma interpreting bones and Budget speeches. There, I played political oracle for a captured audience, most in various states of intoxication, offering analysis between sips of Windhoek Lager. Still, I scribbled on, fuelled by the belief that South Africa would find its promised rhythm somewhere in all this mess.
Sadly — and I know this may sound like it's coming out of the blue — but the 47th president of the United States, Donald 'Mr Tariffs' Trump, has a point: ' Bad things are happening in South Africa.'
It's just that he got the victims mixed up. The tragic truth, my leader, is that terrible things are indeed happening — not only to the 49. But to the millions of South Africans who have no offshore accounts, no white tears to weaponise, and certainly no 'special visa' to Texas.
Born on the wrong side of the veld
They are black. They are born on the wrong side of the veld. They don't sit at the table of the productive economy. They are hired to mop the floors of white households — over 90% of South Africa's 861,000 domestic workers are black women. They're not in boardrooms either. Only 47% of board members are black.
Meanwhile, white South Africans hold 65.9% of top management posts. Black South Africans? Just 13.8%. At the lower end, 82.8% of workers are black. No 100 black-owned companies can be found or listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Instead, blacks push trolleys full of recyclable shame, part of the 60,000 to 90,000 informal waste pickers who trudge our pavements.
Most lucky to be employed are security guards, 2.7 million of them, the majority black, car, business and school guards, guarding a white future they'll never be invited to live in or taste. The most tragic of all is that 40,000 Afrikaners own half of South Africa; let it sink in.
Yet, the DA resists anything that tinkers with unearned white privilege. How do we confront the grotesque income disparities — the top 20% of the population (white people) hold over 68% of income? The bottom 40% of the population holds 7% of the income, which has become the very architecture of our democracy.
Some among us, conveniently cloaked in foreign passports, flee to America the moment we threaten their comfort with redistributive policies — be it the Employment Equity Amendment Act, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill, the Expropriation Act, or the once-intact Citizenship Act that barred dual nationality. Imagine a South African-turned-American refugee still voting back home. We now have super citizens — voting in South Africa, America, and Australia — mocking one person, one vote.
This, dear reader, is a cocktail of apartheid's lingering legacy and the ineptitude of our governors and present-day mandarins — those promoted beyond their intellectual stations by a system that mistakes loyalty for competence.
Indulge me, if you will: Where is this democratic government meant to find the money to buy back stolen land and redistribute it to the 80% of our people squeezed into informal settlements, 4,297 of them nationwide, accommodating more than two million households, in township ghettos, and forgotten rural villages?
Till next week, my man — send me to the US for tea with Uncle Sam. DM