The past opened the wound; the present refuses to clean it. Acknowledging history is maturity. Hiding behind it is cowardice.
The hard choice is what separates the two – and it is critical for us to stop avoiding it, and step up and face the danger. The bull came first – a wounded, heaving mass of muscle pacing inside the kraal. You heard it before you saw it: hooves scraping, breath slicing through the dust, the air tightening with a danger no boy could outrun.
I grew up understanding danger long before I could define it. And that day has never left me. Everyone gathered at the fence.
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Everyone could see the danger. Everyone knew someone had to step in. But no one wanted to be the one to hold the bull still.
We whispered, we watched, we hoped – because denial felt safer than courage, even when the consequences were guaranteed. South Africa today feels exactly like that kraal. We are circling a wounded nation, pretending the danger is not real, waiting for someone else to face the horn.
But here is what every farm boy knows: a wounded bull is at its most dangerous when you try to help it. And yet, that is exactly when help is most needed. South Africa has perfected the art of circling the kraal.
Every crisis triggers the same choreography: a panel, a task team, an inquiry, a report nobody implements, a press conference where everyone speaks but nobody decides. Day 1 of the parliamentary hearings into KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s testimony revealed this with painful clarity. Before substance could surface, Parliament drowned itself in procedural games – objections, microphones cutting out, adjournments that solved nothing.
It wasn’t incompetence; it was fear. When truth feels more threatening than collapse, delay becomes a governing strategy. We do not suffer from a lack of insight – we suffer from a lack of courage.
Committees multiply because conviction does not. The hearing is not the crisis – it is the mirror. And what it reflects is a country caught between knowledge and nerve.
In a previous piece, I wrote thatfatherlessness in South Africa is both history and choice– shaped by design, sustained by decision. The same is true of our democracy. Apartheid wounded the bull.
But we keep choosing to circle it. The hard choice is what separates the two. We also learned something else about a wounded bull: it is unpredictable.
It can gore the very person trying to save it. Pain confuses loyalty. Fear distorts intention. That is why stepping into the kraal was never only about bravery – it was about accepting that danger and duty often coexist.
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