Every so often, the chief executive of our oligarcho-anarchy, Cyril Ramaphosa tries to achieve the impossible – to address the nation. This is impossible because there is no South African nation.

The never-ending quest for building a South African nation, is a glaring confession of the absence of the nation. After all, if a nation was in existence, there would be no need for trying to build it.

The non-existence of a South African nation is, however, no teary stuff. We neither need a nation, nor should we try to fabricate one.

Nevertheless, the Constitutional Court’s buoyancy about the South African nation knows no limits. Occasionally, it has conceived of the South African nation in categorically homogenous terms as a living organism and hence in strikingly Rousseauan Volente Generale terms as a single collective moral agent.

Hence, several justices have professed that the nation has common aspirations and ideals, subscribing to the same communal values, having its own ethos and moving in a moral and ethical direction.

They have proclaimed the nation to hold to a collective conception of justice – and finally, in a supreme display of enthusiasm for this venerable, monolithic nation, regard it having a soul of its own.

Devoid of substance

Yet, the Court’s passions are devoid of substance. It originates, as historian Hugh Seton-Watson once stated, from the belief that every state is a nation, or that all sovereign states are national states. This obscured a clear understanding of political realities, because as Seton-Watson observed:

“A state is a legal and political organisation, with the power to acquire obedience and loyalty from its citizens. A nation is a community of people, whose members are bound together with a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness. Yet in the common usage of English and of other languages, these two distinct relationships are frequently confused.” (This is a shortcoming numerous languages such as Afrikaans and Dutch that have the word “volk”, do not suffer from.)

The now increasingly fragile South African state is, in essence, a product of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British imperialism. It is not a nation-state; it is a multi-nation state. If there is to be South African nation, it will necessarily be a highly artificial concoction, fabricated in the image of the state.

Such a project entails that a nation be created for the sake and in the image of the state, of Leviathan. That is to say, the actual nations within the boundaries of the state must be sacrificed for the new South African nation which the Constitutional Court so elatedly imagined.

In accordance with this thinking – a phenomenon that eminent political scientist, Carl Friedrich once highlighted – the typical chronology was that the state – Leviathan – was created first, whereafter the nation was forged within the political framework of the state.

This attempted forging was especially true for the erstwhile colonial territories of Africa, including South Africa, where imperial powers demarcated state frontiers without sufficiently considering national realities.

So-called nation-building in this context therefore brings about an assault upon linguistic and ethnic communities, or, as Walker Connor, expert in the study of nationalism, concluded, not nation-building but: “nation-destroying.”

Samora Machel, the first President of Mozambique, was one among a variety of leftist politicians and ideologues, who echoed this sentiment in chilling terms, stating that for the nation to live, the tribe must die.

Close association

Owing to its close association with Soviet communism, the African National Congress (ANC) subscribes to nation-building ideology in the form of the so-called national democratic revolution (transformationism), destined to create the essentially homogenous and egalitarian national democratic society, which embodies its conception of the South African nation.

No clearly defined community with distinctive precious linguistic, cultural, and civilizational assets and with a common historical consciousness can sacrifice itself for the sake of an artificially created nation sponsored by some state Leviathan in hot pursuit of something in the nature of the so-called national democratic society.

Such nation-destroying demands for the sake of some artificially contrived nation are just far too onerous.

It is, moreover, flagrantly incongruent with the tenets of democracy – with the values of free expression – to require any individual or community to sacrifice its own identity in favour of such fabricated entity as Leviathan’s nation.

Fortunately, the nation-building endeavours of the oligarchic South African state, under the watch of the neo-primitivist ANC with its pandemic of crime and rotten governance, are manifestly unappealing and unpopular. On the contrary, communities now prefer more self-reliance and self-government and opting out of state dependency to identifying with state-sponsored “nation-building” campaigns.

We are not a South African nation, and we should not squander time and energy embarking on social manipulation for fabricating one. That only implies destroying actual nations and communities.

We, the citizenry of South Africa, should better endeavour to achieve a peaceful and stable multiple dispensation marked by self-reliant and mutually respecting communities. Instead of nation-building schemes, we should better, as Stellenbosch political philosopher, Johan Degenaar advocated for, work for a democratic society which allows all of us, including all our communities, to be free and to flourish, and for communities, in the same way as for individuals, to give full expression to themselves. That is what the tenets of a free and democratic society demand.