Culture, in many respects, is the collective values of a people, and multicultural societies can be very difficult to manage. Henry Kissinger famously told Helen Zille that it is for this reason that South Africa’s democracy might not endure.

Yet while at a somewhat superficial level South Africa has scores of cultural facets potentially at odds with one another, at a deeper level that is much less the case. In poll after poll, South Africans of different class, socio-economic, geographical, racial, and political backgrounds give very similar answers to key questions around values.

Such common ground is routinely prevalent in the views of African National Congress (ANC) and Democratic Alliance (DA) voters, quite at odds with the lazy cliché that they fundamentally resent each other and each other’s values.

To test values cohesion it does not help to ask whether people want more jobs or less crime, because they will all say yes.

To truly test the depth of values cohesion in a society you need to find much tougher, ideally divisive, controversial questions that test the deepest level of how people think the world should best be ordered.

In South Africa’s case one of the simplest tests is around Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy. This is South Africa’s most important policy as it is the primary means by which the apartheid past must be addressed. It is also the most controversial from a public square and national media debate perspective. Theoretically, if the outcome of the public square debate aligns with value clichés, the results should reveal deep values divides between black and white, ANC and DA, and so on.

In a recent poll conducted jointly by the Social Research Foundation (SRF)/TheCommon Sense, respondents were asked the deliberately stark question of whether the policy should be reformed to prioritise poverty over race in terms of who benefits.

In response:

• •Among ANC voters 56% strongly agreed that it should, while 29% were unsure and 14% disagreed.
• •Among DA voters, 83% strongly agreed.

That ANC and DA voters alike might at all agree on the need for reform, and on the basis of that reform, is a remarkable statement on the degree of common ground that exists between South Africans.

[As an aside, The Common Sense believes that South Africa needs empowerment policies that are explicitly geared to accelerate the poor into the middle classes, and it believes that those policies should be based around scorecards that award empowerment points to investors for fixed investment committed to the economy, job creation and maintenance, tax payments, export contributions, and voluntary social investment programmes such as the sponsorship of schools and bursaries, and it further believes that the points earned need to be tradable commodities on a national empowerment exchange in order to ensure that they retain value for the firms that invested in earning them.]

More explicit questions on the same issues have borne out similar results over time.

One of the best examples came from SRF poll questions in 2023 and 2024 on whether, having tried to make the country work, it might not be better to give up and for whites to leave, as that might just about be the easiest solution for everyone.

Given the history, and the depth of current inequalities, not to mention the degree of incitement in the media and on social media, you will not get a more definitive question than that with which to test the extent of common values in South African society.

The answers were, again, very much at odds with the clichés shaped around the country.

• •Of all South Africans, 14% agreed but 75% disagreed.
• •Among black South Africans, 17% agreed and 76% disagreed.
• •Among whites, 5% agreed and 94% disagreed.
• •Among ANC voters, 14% agreed and 84% disagreed.
• •Among DA voters, the figures were 13% and 87%.
• •Among Economic Freedom Fighters voters, the split was 17% to 76%.

In the most recent polling, just ten days ago, a question was asked whether, in the event that no party won a majority in any particular municipality following elections set for the end of this year, the ANC and the DA should simply strike a pact to co-govern. That question is again a very good test of the appetite for co-operation, and the results were again heartening, with 67% of black voters and 62% of white voters agreeing.

What that sort of result speaks to is trust, that at a certain level South Africans across every historical divide have a degree of trust in each other, and the ability beyond that to see the good in each other and thereby to understand how, by working together, that trust and goodwill can be turned to ensuring the success of the country. That is a very sound base from which to build a successful society.