From Laager to Enclave

In Fighting for the Dream (2019), the liberal commentator RW Johnson—hardly a friend of Afrikaner nationalism—gives the white ruling class from 1910 to 1994 its due. They built, he writes, “a formidable infrastructure, a developed economy and a series of powerful and efficient institutions — the Armed Forces, Eskom, Transnet (including a large railway and port system), the civil service, a strong police force, a highly developed water distribution system and much else besides,” all while subordinating sectional interests to a coherent sense of national purpose.

He contrasts this with the ANC, “a political elite that is a mass of conflicting interests, [with] no solidaristic sense of itself and, as night follows day, little or no sense of the national interest”—a leadership willing, in his view, to sell the country to a family of criminal Indian immigrants.

What Johnson calls the ANC’s fragmentation, I have described as “tribalism”: power that is personal, fluid and contingent, centred on personalities who channel the collective without imposing institutional discipline. White observers struggle to grasp it because our own societies left tribalism behind centuries ago—passing through feudalism into the nation-state. Tribalism can look democratic and inclusive (flat, participatory, emotionally humanistic), yet it is also horde-like and resistant to sustained order and progress.

Of South Africa’s post-1994 presidents, Thabo Mbeki came closest to breaking the tribal pattern. He had a clear vision and tried to impose it from the centre. All things considered he did not do badly—but only a tyrant in the mould of Paul Kagame could have crushed the factionalism and kinship networks to put the bureaucracy and party in service of a genuinely successful black-run state. Mandela stood above the tribe through moral authority, yet he always insisted he remained a loyal ANC member guided by collective decisions. In other words, the tribe remained sovereign in his moral universe. Ramaphosa talks a good game, but he is no less captured by family interests, factional politics and Africanist ideology than Zuma was.

RW Johnson has been predicting doom since the 1970s, yet he still lives here in relative peace and comfort as do many of us. This is South Africa’s great paradox: no matter how badly the centre decays, middle-class life remains tolerably decent … so long as you are not murdered in your bed.

Political analyst Frans Cronje explains it best when he notes that the strength of private enclaves rises in direct proportion to the weakness of the state.1 A slightly weak state produces slightly strong enclaves; a very weak state produces very strong ones. Should the state collapse entirely (which Cronje does not expect), the enclaves would simply become entirely strong.

Johnson’s pessimism is justified if one measures South Africa against the original liberal, African-nationalist or communist dream of a black-run industrial powerhouse that would shatter stereotypes about Africa. From the narrower perspective of liveability, however, the middle class has mastered the art of enclaving—a modern form of laagering that keeps the disorder out and functional order in. It is not idealistic, but it is sustainable. The state will lurch between dysfunction and competence; citizens will pragmatically seize responsibility where it retreats and defend themselves where it turns predatory.

This reality is already priced into “South Africa Inc.” Ramaphosa can be replaced by someone worse (Mashatile), who can ally with worse still (Zuma, Malema). Each downgrade weakens the state further, making enclaves stronger and bolder. As conditions deteriorate, ordinary citizens may also rethink their voting patterns and recognise their dependence on non-state institutions—many of them white-run. That dependence may even encourage moderation.

The data backs Cronje: four times more private security officers than police, and the explosive growth of solar power bypassing Eskom. Modern technology—cheap localised generation, satellite internet, online echo chambers—makes enclaving easier and more viable than at any time in history.

Johnson’s bleak verdict (state failure equals national failure) and Cronje’s more sanguine one (state decline equals enclave rise) frame the deeper question: what does South Africa’s trajectory mean for the world?

Johnson himself puts it sharply: for any liberal, communist, African nationalist or democrat, “the awful possibility now exists that majority rule – the goal so long fought for – will go down in history as a sad failure. That would not only give the verdict to the white right but it would also seem to invalidate, or at least to mock, the popular struggles of the whole century.”

The Struggle, Mandela and the Rainbow Nation were cruel jokes—not on the “hateful racists,” but on liberals and democrats. African nationalists and communists will never get the joke; they will deny reality to their last breath.

At some point the failure of South Africa—the last, best African hope of equalling the developed world—will lend credence to uncomfortable ideas about hereditary cultural patterns. The intellectual contortions required to avoid these thoughts are becoming impractical, exhausting and self-defeating. They do little to help the very people one claims to protect.

My heart breaks for decent Africans—the Zimbabwean Uber drivers who see their children only once a year because opportunity has vanished at home. The taboo must be faced. South Africa’s troubles will soon look modest beside broader continental state failure and the growing pressure of millions of ordinary, often Christian, Africans seeking refuge in functioning societies. The enclaves may hold for now, but the question will not go away.