Once again, we witness the unedifying spectacle of a nation evacuating its citizens from a supposedly friendly neighbour. Nigeria has begun pulling its nationals out of South Africa, where anti-migrant violence has surged to alarming levels. British nationals, meanwhile, have been advised to remain cautious. One might ask: what does this say about the state of modern statecraft? The answer, I suspect, is nothing good.
Let us not mince words. The violence in South Africa is a symptom of a deeper rot: the collapse of civic trust and the rise of nativist sentiment. It echoes the darkest days of the Victorian era, when xenophobia was a respectable political position and riots were a common form of social communication. But we are meant to be more enlightened now. Are we? Perhaps not. The mob does not care for enlightenment. It cares for bread, for safety, for the comforting lie that the outsider is to blame.
Nigeria’s response is understandable. No sovereign state can stand by while its citizens are attacked. But the evacuation is also an admission of failure: a failure of South African authorities to maintain order, a failure of regional diplomacy, and a failure of the idea that African nations can transcend ethnic and national divisions. The continent, for all its promise, remains trapped in cycles of violence that recall not Rome’s fall but something earlier, more tribal, more visceral.
And what of Britain’s advice to its nationals? It is prudent, no doubt. But it also reveals our own detachment. We observe these events from a distance, comforted by the thought that such chaos belongs to other places. Yet history teaches us that no society is immune. The Victorian era was rife with anti-immigrant riots in London, the Gordon Riots pale echoes of something worse. The difference is that we have forgotten our own capacity for barbarism.
The real crisis here is intellectual. We have replaced a robust sense of national identity with a thin gruel of multicultural pieties. South Africans feel their nation slipping away, so they lash out at foreigners. Nigerians feel abandoned, so they retreat into national solidarity. Neither response is admirable, but both are understandable. And neither will solve the underlying problem: the failure of modern states to provide meaning, security, and prosperity for their people.
We should not be surprised. The arc of history bends towards entropy. Empires fall. Nations decay. Intellectual decadence is the first sign, the signal that a civilisation has lost its nerve. And what could be more decadent than the idea that we can solve everything with statements, with evacuations, with mere advice? We need something harder: a recovery of purpose, a reassertion of the values that make a nation worth belonging to. But that would require effort, and effort is unfashionable.
So we watch. We evacuate. We advise. And we pretend that this is enough. It is not. But then, we have been pretending for a long time.
