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At face value, the case is too bizarre to reconcile. An Afrikaans kid associated with the Bittereinders, a right-wing Afrikaner nationalist grouping, is alleged to have assisted Kémi Séba, a black nationalist influencer from Benin, known for anti-Western activism and links to radical black nationalist organisations abroad. These are individuals who, under normal political conditions, would not share platforms, let alone co-operate.

That contradiction is what gives the story its significance.

There are grounds to suspect that both individuals may have links to the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet Union's KGB, and to figures associated with the Wagner Group, which has pursued Russian strategic objectives in Africa.

What that all suggests is that a degree of the extremist political activity that occurs in South Africa may not be organic in either origin or motivation.

Rumours have long circulated that a second white right-wing group in South Africa, the Suidlanders, has its own links to intelligence networks and has been positioned to sow internal discord for political purposes. Similar ideas have circulated about other extremist entities on both the left and the right.

One of South Africa’s greatest strengths is the common set of values shared across its people, something this newspaper has stressed consistently since its inception. To break the country’s democracy, and thereby open its economy fully to looting and for its institutions to collapse, that shared ground would first need to be fractured and then destroyed.

The central method of wrecking that unity would be the malign use of information to sow distrust and division among South Africans. This includes the spread of false claims, such as that the country has made no progress since 1994, that there have been 30 years of jobless growth, that service delivery has failed in every major respect, that the whites wish to return to apartheid and the blacks to drive the whites into the sea, and that South Africans therefore have no inclination, let alone desire, to work together to build a better future.

But it can also include something more subtle.

True information can be deployed in distorted form, stripped of context, exaggerated, or selectively presented so that it misleads rather than informs and leads policymakers towards ideas that will fail in securing an economic recovery. The idea of white monopoly capital, that expropriation is needed to secure social stability, that South Africa’s economy will progress best if it turns off its coal-fired power stations, that merit is not that important in appointment processes, are all examples of ideas that originated from actual social or economic problems but were then allowed to mutate and be turned to nefarious ends.

Closely related is the deliberate amplification of negative but factual material. Real incidents or data points of racial or ideological animus are pushed over and over again into the public domain to maintain visibility and emotional intensity. Over time, this creates a skewed perception of reality, reinforcing division and distrust even where the underlying facts are not in dispute.

This is not only a South African problem. It is likely that extremist movements across Europe and the United States may also be influenced by foreign intelligence efforts seeking to deepen division and weaken social cohesion – from elements of the Black Lives Matter movement to elements of the post-liberal woke right.

The Bittereinders case may therefore turn out to be a rare thing not just for South Africa but for the world – a live public drawing-back of the curtain on the dark web of actors seeking to peddle narratives of hate, division, doom, and failure to an unsuspecting public in the hope of fomenting the kind of internal turmoil that could lay once-stable societies open to looting and political collapse.