SA must go feudal now or it will die

I recently watched a YouTube video titled Tourism in South Africa – The De-Developing State by the British creator Britannica. As a South African, it was painfully embarrassing. It holds up a mirror to the enclaved lives we lead and the steady degradation of what used to be functional public spaces.

Yet we keep repeating the same hopeful mantras: free elections, the world’s most progressive constitution, Mandela magic, rainbow nation, Rugby World Cup glory, etc. The reality is that since 1994 South Africa has been de-developing: infrastructure is crumbling, policing has collapsed, industry is shrinking, and our cities are decaying. (For proof of how badly our cities have deteriorated, check out Johannesburg in the 1970s, when it was a functional paradise compared to today.)

What makes this especially awkward for liberals is how neatly the decline tracks the replacement of whites and other competent minorities in institutional leadership and in the country as a whole. Here’s what they should teach in development studies: hang on to your skilled minorities or watch your institutions rot and your country collapse into post-colonial chaos.

This is not comforting talk for our black political elite, who prefer the narrative of racial pride, anti-racist dogma, and historical grievance about the destruction of their tribal arcadia. Meanwhile, western ideology enables South Africa’s destruction by rejecting the “let skilled minorities help you” approach in favour of the “you are failing because of racism” excuse. To understand how this dangerous inversion took hold, we need to go back to the beginning.

Human societies scaled up from small bands of hunter-gatherers to modern democracies through distinct stages. But they all started with tribalism — the default setting of political organisation in pre-literate societies. Tribes are held together by kinship, language, shared blood, and personal loyalty. Chiefs, elders, or “big men” rise through charisma, military success and ritual authority. Power is personal, fluid, and contingent. It rests on consensus and reciprocity, not formal institutions.

Sound familiar? This is African politics: “big men” in suits wearing Rolexes and driving BMWs as they navigate the shifting currents of tribal loyalty, patronage, and personal favour rather than rules or institutions.

But a big man is not a lord; tribes are not feudal orders. Tribalism precedes feudalism in the development of political order. Feudalism replaces the fluid kinship loyalty of tribalism with structured hierarchy and contractual relationships, as seen in history’s most important feudal societies — medieval Europe (c. 9th–15th centuries), feudal Japan (c. 12th–19th centuries), and China’s Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE).

A lord grants land (fiefs) and protection in exchange for military service and farm labour. Unlike tribalism, feudalism is class-based and literate. It prefigures the modern state with crucial innovations such as secure property rights, contractual obligations, clear hierarchies of authority, and written legal customs. These features created greater stability, allowed power to scale beyond personal loyalty, and laid the groundwork for individual rights, the rule of law, and eventually capitalism.

As Francis Fukuyama noted, once a feudal lord’s rights were legally recognised, they were no longer subject to endless renegotiation by kin groups. No wonder European colonial administrators were frustrated by African tribal chiefs, whom they mistook for feudal lords, believing they could “buy” land from a chief who had no permanent right to sell it. White South Africans made the same mistake in 1994. Even a constitution that gave the black liberation movement virtually everything it wanted is now treated as negotiable by Africanists who — it seems — cannot even wait to boil the frog (as President Ramaphosa famously described his strategy for dealing with the whites). This is the deep frustration of liberal whites who still believe they are living in a modern state, only to discover they are actually living in tribal Africa, where agreements are constantly reopened according to the shifting moods of the tribe.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of state failure many people still cling to the fantasy of a successful, black-run modern democracy in South Africa. We must dismantle this fantasy if we are to come to terms with the reality of living in Africa. Here is my shot at doing so.

Pre-literate tribes are not held together by political ideology, monotheism, or philosophy but by blood ties, kinship, shared ancestry and raw personal loyalty. This is why Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau fetishised the “noble savage” as a pure innocent, uncorrupted by bourgeois civilisation. Marx drew inspiration from the romantic currents in early French socialism, itself rooted in Rousseau’s noble savage myth. Friedrich Engels, heavily influenced by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, later portrayed pre-literate tribes as a classless, egalitarian golden age in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

This romantic yearning for a simpler, pre-modern existence remains at the emotional core of leftism — and even spills into New Age spiritual movements with their sweat lodges, plant medicine quests and “warrior weekends”. In 2026, this highly emotive ideology has fused with anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and anti-westernism into a perfect storm of luxury beliefs. Comfortable, upper-middle-class people can afford to romanticise the tribe while sipping oat milk lattes served to them by an illegal immigrant. Not so the African masses who must suffer under tribal elites who cannot build functioning institutions, as my Zimbabwean Uber drivers often remind me.

In 1994, liberal and centrist whites hoped for a modern, non-racial nation state to replace the capable but morally ugly white supremacist one. Instead, we got tribalism, emboldened by a delusional left-wing ideology that cast Mandela as the noble savage who would redeem racist South Africa. In terms of political order, this country took a huge step backwards in 1994. With every passing year, a return to genuine state-building and national coherence looks less likely.

The state is being tribalised, which weakens it over time. But even a weakened state can wield dangerous power against its perceived enemies. In this reality, feudal thinking is not romantic nostalgia. It is survival. South Africa is not moving forward into a bright, non-racial future. It is sliding backward into older, more primitive forms of political order. The smart play is to stop hoping and start fortifying. For minorities it is rational to build “feudal” enclaves of gated communities. But more importantly, we need to adopt a feudal mindset — replacing the state as our highest political value with a sacred hierarchy of blood, kin, community, loyalty and duty. Unlike fluid tribalism, feudalism sanctifies order itself: a structured, almost religious chain of obligation and authority that gives life meaning and resilience far beyond the failing state.

Thankfully, a determined fightback fraternity is already leading the way. Organisations such as the Solidarity Movement, Sakeliga, Lex Libertas and the Cape independence movement are building the parallel structures, legal defences, and institutions that will be essential for minority survival and self-reliance. They deserve our full support.