Western Cape secession is plain bigotry

South Africa’s Western Cape has become the crucible of a perilous mutation in which urban secessionism masquerades as emancipation from ANC misrule. Yet, in truth, it is a toxic resurrection of apartheid’s separatist logic. What is being sold as independence is not the noble pursuit of self-determination but the cynical recycling of exclusionary populism.

At its core, this rhetoric is not about liberation, but about retreat into racialised enclaves and economic fortresses that echo the Bantustan imagination of apartheid. The Cape Independence Advocacy Group (CIAG) and its satellites have weaponised disillusionment with the ANC, converting legitimate anger at corruption and collapse into a dangerous separatist fantasy. Their slogans of ‘freedom from Pretoria’ are not new; they are borrowed from the global far right playbook, from Brexit’s insular nationalism to Catalonia’s parochialism to US separatism’s toxic libertarianism.

This is not innovation but imitation, a provincial mimicry of reactionary global currents imported into Africa’s fragile democratic experiment. What is emerging in the Western Cape is not a project of renewal but one of regression, a dangerous precedent that threatens to fracture South Africa’s unity and by extension, Africa’s continental cohesion. This secessionist impulse is the illegitimate child of liberation’s collapse, filling the vacuum left by movements that squandered their moral authority.

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It is a counterfeit revolution that cloaks exclusion in the language of liberty and risks dragging Africa back into the shadows of colonial fragmentation. At the centre of this separatist agitation stands CIAG, the loudest lobby for an independence referendum, its ideological DNA traceable to apartheid’s far-right currents. CIAG does not emerge from a vacuum; it is the inheritor of a tradition that sought to fracture South Africa into racial enclaves, now repackaged in the language of autonomy and liberty.

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