South Africa’s greatest source of resilience is the shared set of values that continues to unite its people even as politics and headlines seek to suggest the opposite. A responsible media would do more to highlight that fact.

If culture is the set of values that a group of people have in common, then on issues ranging from school choice to taxation, empowerment, state intervention, free speech, religion, democracy, property rights, foreign policy, and what parents want for their children, South Africans demonstrate such a vast well of common ground that the argument might easily be sustained that whilst South Africa is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society, it is not a multi-cultural one.

In as far as that statement is true, it is very important because whilst multi-cultural societies are notoriously prone to conflict and instability, multi-ethnic and racial ones are not.

What then to make of the repeated daily headlines and alarmism that South Africa is a country divided against itself, where different groups would wish for nothing more than to chase the other into the sea? Maybe bad news and fear mongering sells. Perhaps the instinct for self-sabotage and mischief making is so deeply ingrained that some newsrooms just cannot help themselves. Perhaps there are more malevolent motives at work. Of course, South Africa might be a country of hateful racial nationalists pitted against each other in what will later degenerate into a bloody and destructive final conflict.

However, the evidence points elsewhere. South Africans, remarkably for their history, are, in the main, good and decent people who harbour mutual respect and are invested in their mutual success across historical lines of race, creed, ethnicity, religion, politics, ideology, and socio-economic status.

As long as shared values remain strong, South Africa’s prospects are bright. The country’s best hope lies in maintaining that common ground, as nations anchored in shared values are rarely undone by adversity. Through the lens of recent headlines and the lens of long-term evidence, it is clear that South Africa’s unity endures.