Yiyang Zhuge is a political theory doctoral candidate at Boston College. She has completed the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia. In an interview last year with the Jack Miller Center, a think tank based in Philadelphia, she argued that the Western tradition, as it now travels abroad, has lost much of its ability to explain why it is worth admiring.

Instead of giving foreign students reasons to understand and value it, the West often gives them the language and tools to tear it down.

Zhuge was speaking about East Asia, but her point applies powerfully to South Africa.

Three Waves, and South Africa Caught Them All

Zhuge says China received the West in three forms: first as Enlightenment liberalism, then as Marxism, and later as postmodernism. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese intellectuals adopted these ideas in turn. Each wave brought Western ideas in a radical form, but not the older tradition that made those ideas possible.

South Africa followed a similar path. Mission education and Cape liberalism helped shape a black intellectual class that took constitutional government, property rights, and legal equality seriously. That first wave helped lead to the founding of the South African Native National Congress in 1912, later renamed the African National Congress (ANC). The second wave came through the ANC’s alliance with the South African Communist Party, which supplied the language of the National Democratic Revolution. The third wave arrived after 2015, when decolonial theory, critical race scholarship, and settler-colonial studies became common in South African universities.

All three were Western imports. And all three were taken up by the people most willing to learn from the West.

The Statue Fell First, Then the Reading List

The Cecil John Rhodes statue was removed from the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 9 April 2015. But the bigger change came afterwards. Rhodes Must Fall and the curriculum decolonisation campaigns argued that inherited knowledge was a tool of domination and should be dismantled. In one widely shared 2016 recording from a UCT student meeting, a participant even suggested that science should be set aside and rebuilt from an African standpoint.

This was often presented as an indigenous demand. But the main ideas behind it were Western. The claim that knowledge is shaped by power, that language is political, and that Western universalism hides local interests came from European and American universities. South African students did not invent the argument against the Western tradition. They inherited it from that tradition’s own institutions.

What South Africa Actually Inherited

Modern South Africa depends on Western ideas and institutions. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, judicial review, an independent judiciary, separation of powers, private property, a free press, and universities all come from the same tradition that is now often attacked.

South Africans often defend courts because they are courts, and the Constitution because it is the highest law. But few people make the deeper argument: that these institutions come from an intellectual inheritance worth understanding and protecting. If South Africa wants to dismantle parts of that inheritance, it should at least know what it is giving up.

Nobody Made the Positive Case

This is Zhuge’s point applied to South Africa. The West gave South Africa its critique, but not its defence. In many universities, Western ideas are now used mainly to explain why the West should be distrusted.

A student who wants to understand constitutionalism, judicial independence, or old warnings about faction and demagoguery may struggle to find serious teaching on those subjects. But that same student can easily find courses explaining why those ideas are suspect.

Praise, Not Only Critique

Zhuge argues that education needs more than criticism, it must also be able to recognise greatness and explain why it matters. Her translation of Plutarch is meant to show Chinese readers that the West’s achievements in liberty and progress rested on deeper moral and political ideas.

South Africa needs a similar correction. This is not about nostalgia for Europe, rather that South Africa needs to survive. A country that cannot explain why its institutions are worth keeping is unlikely to keep them. Courts, property rights, constitutional limits, and the rule of law cannot be defended by procedure alone. They need people who can explain what they are for.

The Western inheritance reached South Africa through conquest. That is true, but it does not decide what South Africa should now do with its courts, Constitution, and institutions. The country is free to reject what it inherited. But it should understand that the arguments for demolition were also imported, often from the West’s own universities, and that those who wrote them will not have to live with the consequences.