The news from South Africa is grim. As the government’s deadline for voluntary departure of undocumented migrants approaches, machete-wielding gangs are taking matters into their own hands. This is not merely a failure of policy; it is a symptom of a deeper, more troubling decadence. We are witnessing the collapse of the state’s monopoly on violence, a hallmark of civilised society since the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, we see a reversion to primal tribalism, where the mob rules and the law is silent.
One cannot help but draw parallels to the waning days of the Roman Empire, when barbarian incursions and internal decay led to the rise of vigilante justice. The Bagaudae of Gaul, those bands of desperate peasants and brigands who terrorised the countryside, come to mind. Today’s machete-wielding gangs are their spiritual descendants, acting out a grotesque parody of state authority.
Yet we must not mistake the symptom for the cause. The root of this violence lies in the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the elite. For decades, South African leaders have mouthed platitudes about unity while fostering ethnic and national divisions. They have failed to integrate migrants, failed to secure borders, and failed to provide a coherent vision of nationhood. Now, the bill has come due, and the poorest are paying the price.
What we are seeing is a crisis of legitimacy. When the state no longer commands respect, when its laws are flouted and its enforcers are absent, the vacuum is filled by the strong and the ruthless. The intellectuals may wring their hands, but they have only themselves to blame. They have spent years denouncing patriotism as xenophobia, upholding a sterile cosmopolitanism that has no roots in any soil. Now the soil exacts its revenge.
The expulsion deadline is a desperate measure, a confession of failure. But as deadlines loom, the true test will be whether the state can reassert its authority. If not, we may be witnessing the birth of a new Dark Age, where the sword, not the law, decides who belongs and who must flee.
This is not a call for nativism or violence; it is a call for clear-eyed realism. A state that cannot protect its citizens or enforce its laws is a state that has lost its reason to exist. South Africa stands at a precipice. The question is whether it will pull back from the brink or plunge into the chaos that has swallowed so many failed states before it.
