South Africa is Slop

When thinking about South Africa, it’s useful to distinguish between the country’s natural landscape and the economic/political entity that was formed in 1910. The mountains, rivers, oceans and beaches existed long before the Union of South Africa was created.

The primary reason for its formation was resource extraction. Gold and other minerals needed to move efficiently from the interior to the ports for export. The state was structured around that purpose. It was extractive in nature and economic in function, effectively an economic bloc built to facilitate the extraction of resources. Nothing more.

It is for this reason that South Africa is slop. When an extractive economy becomes the foundation of the system, then beauty, order and cleanliness are treated as unimportant. Who cares what things look like as long as I can make money? If the primary objective is to extract resources from the land and from people, then the condition of public spaces becomes secondary, and so we get the slop.

Littered roadsides, unmanaged waste and deteriorating urban environments are not accidental failures. They are symptoms of a structure that was designed for extraction, or as some say, “the economy.” People are blank slates to be moved around like pieces on a chess board. The idea of us being “blank slates” is obviously false. We are actually part of a group as the saying goes, “birds of a feather flock together.”

South Africa is not defined by its scenery or by its different people groups. It’s defined, rather, by a political and economic system that is extractive and immoral. The foundation of that system is the love of money, and the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil including slop.

Money itself is not inherently evil. It is a tool. But when the love of money becomes the organising principle of a country, it shapes everything. South Africa was built on that foundation and the consequences of that foundation are visible throughout the system today. It’s called “slop.”

What is the solution?

The better way forward, the better future we should be moving toward, is a new and sustainable dispensation for South Africa, where decision-making happens close to local communities. Power should sit nearer to the people who are directly affected by it, not far away in distant political and economic centres.

The Cape Indy newspaper forms part of a growing movement working in that direction, alongside figures such as Ernst Roets from Lex Libertas. The aim is to build something different from the system that has existed since 1910, to move beyond the slop that is South Africa.

People lived on this land long before 1910, and people will live here long after the current political construct is gone. South Africa is not the land itself, it’s not the sea, the mountains, or the different communities who call it home. It is a political and economic arrangement that is immorally extractive in nature.