Now 125 years of age, the terminally indisposed South African state is faltering on its last legs. The forces for sustaining it are spent, and new fragmented dispensations of benevolent disparate micro-republics, malevolent warlordships, and areas of complete governmental absence are emerging against the backdrop of a withering state.

The Union of South Africa was established in 1910 after the devastation of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), which was soon followed by the National Convention of 1908 to 1910. From this convention emerged the then new state, the Union of South Africa, through the South Africa Act / Zuid-Afrika Wet, a statute of the British Parliament.

Thanks to the spirit of reconciliation prevalent at the time between the Afrikaner and English segments of the white population, the details of the constitution for the new state negotiated in the National Convention and formalised in the South Africa Act were relatively easily agreed to.

White South Africanism

The consensual ideology on which the new state was premised was White South Africanism, founded on two pillars.

First, the new state recognised the linguistic and cultural rights of its two segments of the white populace based on actual equality. This was encapsulated in one of but a handful of entrenched provisions of the South Africa Act, which recognised English and Dutch (from 1925 Afrikaans) as the two languages of the state, to be treated on a basis of substantive equality.

In this way, British imperialism, which was the main force provoking the Anglo-Boer War, had conceded to White South Africanism, in return for which Afrikaner nationalism under Free Staters M.T. Steyn and J.B.M. Hertzog was prepared to enter the Union on these terms.

Secondly, White South Africanism, which excluded the black majority from the Union’s power regime, was indeed white. Save for minor exceptions also included in entrenched sections of the South Africa Act (to be removed in consecutive decades), the franchise and, as a consequence, political power, were exclusively white.

White South Africanism received further impetus through highly controversial legislation in 1913, barring blacks from owning land in White South Africa and providing for black homelands / Bantustans for the various black ethnic groups. The aim of this was to permanently set black people on their own constitutional path, bound to lead to autonomy and possibly independence of the black ethnic groups, thus permanently safeguarding White South Africa.

White South Africanism with an Afrikaner character

In 1948, following the National Party’s electoral victory, White South Africanism assumed an Afrikaner character, and under the banner of Apartheid, it became more explicitly racially separatist.

There was no serious threat to white rule and White South Africanism, at least not until the mid-seventies, when two significant events started to turn the tide against White South Africanism and white rule. The first was the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the transfer of power in the former Portuguese territories of Mozambique and Angola to black Marxist rule, soon afterwards followed by the collapse of Ian Smith’s white government in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). The second was the Soweto uprising in the winter of 1976, which proved to have breathed new life into the then moribund African National Congress and the internal struggle against White South Africanism.

The Afrikaners, through the National Party and increasingly supported by the white English section of the populace, distinguished themselves as redoubtable state builders. Under its watch, the public service, police, and the army became formidable forces and the economy, especially in the Verwoerd years, grew rapidly.

The National Party proved a formidable guarantor of public peace: the very embodiment of the monopoly of lawful (in terms of the law of the time) power, including violence, which is the quintessence of statehood. No one could challenge it: not organised crime, which was essentially non-existent, and not the feeble armed wings of the ANC or the PAC, even at the zenith of their always meagre strength, or any other non-state force.

Secondly, White South Africanism guaranteed the basis for a national economy. It did so through the creation, expansion, and maintenance of infrastructure. This included a national supplier of cheap electricity; a smoothly functioning transport system, rail, road, and ports; local government; water infrastructure, including numerous catchment dams and canals; an excellent telecommunication system; and whatever else is required for sustaining the infrastructure of a flourishing economy.

But a third factor proved to be the Achilles heel of White South Africanism and white rule. Its ideology of exclusive white rule was not sustainable in an essentially unitary state with a nationally integrated economy. It ran into increasing problems of legitimacy in South Africa and abroad in an international ideological climate that, in the last decades of the twentieth century, allowed no space for race-based politics.

This caused the white rulers of South Africa and the last exponents of White South Africanism to finally relinquish power to the almost universally acclaimed ANC, believing that liberal constitutionalism (a supreme constitution with entrenched individual rights in a Bill of Rights adjudicated by impartial courts) would guarantee the fool-proof apparatus to carry the South African state under the new dominant ideology, namely that of African nationalism as applied by the African National Congress (ANC).

Black South Africanism practised by the ANC

The ANC assumed the reins of power in April 1994. Under the ANC, Black South Africanism embraced the South African state with even more passion than its predecessors, thus strikingly acting in continuation of its White South Africanist predecessor.

The ANC’s South Africanism paraded to be more inclusive and hence more genuinely South Africanist than White South Africanist ideology. After all, the franchise is universal, and the constitution of which the ANC is the primary author purports to be non-racial in keeping with the explicitly non-racial course the ANC claims to have been pursuing ever since the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955. Even policies like Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Affirmative Action (now not convincing anymore) pretend only to remedy previous discrimination and still seek to parade as non-racial, inclusive, and therefore purely South Africanist at root.

Just before the election of 1994, the ANC’s self-confident slogan was that it was ready to govern. With its saintly leader, Nelson Mandela, at its helm and its unprecedented international acclaim and widespread local support, you might have been forgiven for believing that the ANC was indeed ready to govern as it said it was. However, South Africa’s dismal history since 1994 decisively proves that if the ANC was ever ready to govern, it was but for a fleeting moment.

For decades now and increasingly so, we are tormented daily by a never-ending avalanche of reports of the marauding of state assets, corruption, deteriorating infrastructure, violent and organised crime, and the like. Moreover, the police are severely weakened, divided, and riddled with criminality in its own ranks, while the army is a tragically ludicrous shadow of what it once was. Criminality seems to have become a feature of many organs of state, such as the prosecutorial authority, that together with the police must take the lead in combating crime, but have now proven simply far too weak to discharge their mandate.

The evidence at the Zondo Commission a few years ago graphically brought to light the thorough sickness of the South African state. Moreover, in its aftermath, the inability of government and relevant state institutions to remedy these ills proves the sickness incurable.

Failing in three crucial respects

Thirty-one years ago, in 1994, when the generally hailed new constitutional dispensation was introduced, something much more profound and extreme, yet at the time not generally realised, also occurred. That was when, on the watch of the ANC, the inexorable path towards the failure of the South African state also commenced.

Firstly, the ANC, under the flag of what assumed notoriety as transformationism, which is the cornerstone of the ANC’s interpretation of Black South Africanism, allowed the once formidable public service, police, and army to falter. Together with that, the once proud infrastructure of South Africa is collapsing, and can hardly sustain a national economy as it once did.

Secondly, once again because of transformationism, the state lost its monopoly of violence in favour of a collection of legitimate institutions in the civic and private sector, who are taking over the responsibility for the public peace, as well as illegitimate marauding forces of violent and organised crime for which the state struggles to be a match.

Lastly, the very ideology of transformationism, which was supposed to sustain the coherence and cohesion of the ANC’s brand of Black South Africanism, is quickly losing credibility and traction. Most relevant is Black Economic Empowerment, now proven not to be a strategy for the advancement of the black population in general, but merely a deeply corrupt stratagem for the oligarchic entrenchment of the ANC’s cadre class. Transformation has lost its appeal and now shows itself to be an illegitimate concoction in the same way as Apartheid once lost legitimacy.

New dispensations

This leaves most of the South African populace to their own devices, not to save the South African state, which they cannot do, but to save themselves individually and their communities, which they can do. Many, especially middle-class people, are exceptionally versatile, resourceful, and simply tough. They assume responsibility for things previously exclusively associated with the state. They look after their own security, generate their own electric power, assume increased responsibility for the education of their own children and themselves, repair public facilities in their own neighbourhoods and even rural areas, and much more.

To that end, they establish formal and informal institutions. Business plays an increasing part in all this. Ironically, the South African state under the totalitarian-minded ANC is also playing its part. On the one hand, the weakening public service remains in retreat, creating more space for an active civic and business sector to advance with more responsibilities and functions. On the other hand, the state also simply delegates more functions to the private sector.

In this way, autonomous non-state enclaves, micro-republics, and the like are all taking shape in many places. This is no easy task, because taxes (actually extortion, because the return for the taxes is either non-existent or boils down to financing a criminal state) are still payable. Yet, undoubtedly, a new dispensation is coming about. South Africa is not being saved, and a new encompassing South Africanist ideology is not in formation, but a variety of new autonomous, community-based entities and areas of safety, civility, and growth are being established in the region we still call South Africa.