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A member of the public recently wrote to The Common Sense to ask if it could answer the question of whether there is any worthwhile future for white South Africans in the country, given what a small minority whites are becoming and how corrupt the government is. In its response below, the newspaper says the answer lies in two realities: the first is that South Africans share far more common ground than the public or government policy suggests; the second is that the country is rapidly evolving away from the “union” it once was, and families who wish for a prosperous future will need to embrace its emerging enclave reality.

White people are, of course, not alone in asking that kind of question. Many middle-class black South Africans look at political rhetoric, and debates around nationalising healthcare, crime, economic weakness, and state decline, and ask whether they still have a place in the country. You only have to look at where the country’s top Ivy League school matriculants choose to study to know that the middle classes share the same fears.

But the question was asked about white people specifically, so we will answer it in terms of white people specifically.

The answer begins with something that is often lost in the noise: South Africa is not a country where black people hate white people. Politicians often present it that way, and the establishment media goes out of its way to play up hate and division and fear. The business community feeds that sense of hostile divisions by so carefully auditing the economy into black-versus-white camps, thereby giving such great legitimacy to government policies that seek expressly to do the same. But the cold evidence suggests a different reality.

Polling by The Common Sense and the Social Research Foundation shows that South Africans across racial lines share a lot of common ground on values and want a future together.

Take something like support for black economic empowerment, the country’s most important policy and one that is explicitly crafted to sustain the idea of the economy as a racial battlefield. Into that framing, a few months ago, the Democratic Alliance (DA) proposed an alternative to that policy, explicitly rejecting the use of race as the basis of empowerment policy, and saying that people should benefit from empowerment policies because they are poor, not because of the colour of their skins.

This newspaper polled South Africans on what they thought of that, and the answers are set out on the graphic below:

The data stand as a remarkable contradiction to how many politicians, journalists, and business leaders present the country.

The Common Sense also polled something close to the question our correspondent sent us and explicitly asked South Africans whether they thought it might be better if the white people all left.

Those answers are set out on the chart below:

The same kind of storyline appears around the question of political cooperation.

When asked whether the African National Congress and DA should cooperate in municipalities where neither party has a majority, close to seven out of ten respondents supported such an arrangement. That is set out on the chart below:

There are a lot of other data that could be shown to support the same broad idea, which is that while politicians are often hostile towards whites, while government policy is explicitly hostile, while the establishment media thrives on similar hostility, and while the business community does South Africa no favours by framing the economy as a black-versus-white fight over resources (rather than what it should be seen as – as a collective effort to get the growth rate up and knock the unemployment rate down), ordinary people at ground level do not, on balance, have any fundamental problem with white people in South Africa.

The second part of the answer is that South Africa itself is evolving towards what is described on these pages every week as an enclave future. As state capacity weakens in certain areas, communities, businesses, and private institutions are increasingly stepping in to provide functions that the state once delivered. This can already be seen in private security, electricity generation, water systems, education, healthcare, and community infrastructure.

In this newspaper’s scenarios for South Africa to 2034, the enclave future stands out as by far the most likely outcome for the country. This does not mean the country disappears or that the government becomes irrelevant. It means that families who want to thrive will increasingly need to build resilience around themselves.

Some advice on how to build that resilience has been published before, and in a special report to be published next week, The Common Sense provides its most detailed advice yet on what a South African family needs to do to thrive in such a future. That advice goes into real detail on everything from your investment and wealth planning decisions to the kind of career you choose, where you intend to live, the importance of the option of offshore residence, and what you need to do to position your children correctly. The future will belong to those who create options.

The upshot of it all is that if a middle-class family follows that advice and adopts it as a family strategy, then they have very good odds of sustaining the standard of living they wish to have deep into any conceivable future. As that report goes on to say, it would take quite a series of domestic, global, and technological upheavals to sink a family following the advice. But if you do not know what you need to know about how South Africa is changing, or are naïve, or listen to poor-quality advice and analysis, and do not get moving with urgency on what an enclave future requires, then they could get wiped out by the decisions that some future South African government, driven by racial animus, may yet take. That advice applies equally to the black middle class as it does to the white middle class. And the bulk of the ensuing enclaves will be completely multi-racial, each little rainbow nation only with guards with guns at the gates to wave you, and your Cabinet minister neighbour, home when you return from the Wild West outside those gates.

But thinking narrowly in terms of whites, the answer is therefore a qualified yes: if you have the best information on what is really happening in South Africa, how that is causing the country to change, and what the implications are, and then take the right decisions, you can position yourself to have a long, happy, and peaceful life as a white person in South Africa.