Johannesburg, a city that once promised a post-apartheid utopia, now resembles a Mad Max fever dream directed by a traumatised travel agent. South Africa, in a move that has stunned absolutely nobody with a functional sense of smell, has deployed the army to quell anti-migrant riots. The trigger, as ever, is a lamentable shortage of scapegoats and a surplus of rage. Locals, driven to fury by an economy that treats them like a particularly disappointing lottery ticket, have decided to take their frustrations out on the nearest available foreigners. It’s a time-honoured tradition, really; the Romans did it with Christians, the Germans did it with Jews, and now the South Africans are doing it with Zimbabweans and Somalis. Progress, of a sort.
The scenes are visceral: burning tyres, smashed shopfronts, and the haunting sound of a nation arguing with itself in the street. The army, looking as though they’d rather be anywhere else, have set up checkpoints and are attempting to project an air of authority that their equipment, much of it older than the soldiers wielding it, cannot hope to sustain. Meanwhile, British firms, those harbingers of fiscal virtue, have issued wan warnings about ‘instability’. One can almost hear the champagne corks popping in Canary Wharf as risk analysts update their spreadsheets. Because nothing says ‘compassionate capitalism’ quite like being worried about your supply chain while people are being chased with pangas.
The root cause, of course, is a system so monumentally broken that it makes British rail privatisation look like a triumph of engineering. The unemployment rate in South Africa is a staggering statistic that economists prefer to whisper about behind closed doors last they be forced to confront the reality that austerity is a euphemism for ‘making the poor poorer’. And so the politicians, those masters of deflection, point fingers at the foreigner. It’s a narrative as old as time: the stranger, the other, the one who doesn’t quite belong. It’s easier to blame them than to fix the leaky roof of the state.
I stand here, a man of 40% gin and 60% righteous indignation, watching the smoke rise. I think of the immigrants I’ve met: the Congolese taxi driver who knew the works of Shakespeare better than most Oxford dons, the Nigerian tailor who could spin gold from polyester. They are not the problem. They are the symptom of a global order that shunts people around like checkers pieces on a board designed by madmen. The real problem sits in air-conditioned boardrooms and parliamentary chambers, wearing suits that cost more than the annual GDP of a small village.
But let us not despair entirely. In the midst of this chaos, there are still heroes. They are the community leaders, the church groups, the ordinary citizens who offer shelter and food. They are the ones who remember that Ubuntu isn’t just a software platform, but a philosophy: ‘I am because we are.’ They are the hope, the tiny flicker of humanity in a sea of burning petrol. The army might deploy, the warnings might flash, but the spirit of those who refuse to hate will endure. For now, though, I need another drink. The world is too loud, and the gin is too quiet.
