READER LETTER | SA, drop the exceptionalism

It has become a comforting national pastime in SA to look across our borders and declare:“Foreigners must go back home and fix their countries.” We wrap ourselves in an arrogant, “devil-may-care” exceptionalism, acting as though we’re self-made, superior, and need no one. It is time for a brutal, calm reality check: we’re fooling ourselves. Let us be honest about what apartheid was.

It was not a temporary mistake; it was a meticulously engineered machine designed to build prosperity for a white minority by systematically underdeveloping the black majority. It cultivated generational turmoil through spatial segregation, economic disenfranchisement, and artificial divisions. A system like that is not defeated by casting a vote every five years, singing freedom songs, or shouting“Viva Mandela!”A system can only be defeated by an aggressive counter-system designed to dismantle its foundations.

Did that counter-system get built in 1994? Look at our cities and townships today and answer honestly. We did not reverse apartheid spatial planning; we integrated into it.

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Townships remained labour reserves, wealth remained concentrated, and the economic machinery built to privilege the few was left intact… we simply swapped the faces at the top and called it freedom. To justify our current arrogance towards the rest of Africa, we have also constructed a convenient myth: that SA defeated apartheid all on its own.

Not a single decisive battle was fought on home soil, where the regime raised a white flag of surrender to domestic forces alone. Apartheid collapsed under global pressure, economic isolation and, crucially, the blood and resources spilled by neighboring African nations. Frontline states like Angola, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe paid in lives, infrastructure, and economic ruin to shelter our freedom fighters.

Yet today, we treat their citizens with contempt. When South Africans channel their economic anger into xenophobia and tribalism, it is not a display of strength but a symptom of deep-seated self-loathing. Stop the singing, drop the exceptionalism, and fix the system. − Khotso KD Moleko, Mangaung

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