The psychiatrist’s office feels like a waiting room for parole. Shiny wooden desk. Charts piled like court evidence. Burglar bars on the windows.
The man across from me is bald, calm, deliberate. His red forehead dot stares at me like a warning light. I’m hunched forward, hands clasped, as if one good argument might win me my release.
“Doctor,” I ask, voice tight. “When will I be back to my old self? When will I be healed and off this medication?”
He exhales, as if the question is an old acquaintance.
“There’s more empathy for a broken bone,” he says, “than a broken brain.”
The sentence lands like a hammer. Suddenly I’m six years old in the village, clutching a hand no one believes is broken.
“Stop dodging chores,” they say. No bruising, no swelling, no proof — just pain. It takes an X-ray, days later, to convince them.
A fracture you can’t see still hurts.
And South Africa, I realise, is limping on a leg that we refuse to X-ray.
The limp we pretend isn’t there
We drag it into Parliament — the legislature meant to make our laws. Into court rooms — the judiciary meant to uphold them. Into the executive’s chambers, from Cabinet meetings to community imbizos. And into dinner tables where jokes about “them” pass without pushback.
Occasionally, a headline or scandal jars the bone, and we wince before pretending we’re fine.
The latest jolt came from Minister Gayton McKenzie.
In a viral podcast clip, hosts labelled coloured families “incestuous” and “crazy”. McKenzie’s outrage was swift – press statements, legal threats, demands for respect.
But like a second X-ray revealing a missed fracture, his own words resurfaced — old posts heavy with the K-word and anti-black slurs. The very injury he diagnosed in others was lodged untreated in his own record.
His “apology” included this: “I can never be guilty of racism… I did tweet some insensitive, stupid and hurtful things a decade or two ago… I was a troll & stupid.”
It’s the equivalent of setting a bone without touching it. To say “I can never be guilty of racism” while admitting to “hurtful” language sidesteps the wound.
Dismissing it as “trolling” isn’t mitigation. Trolling is the deliberate weaponising of words to wound and inflame – corrosive behaviour that should never be excused, least of all by a minister charged with reconciliation.
Accountability is not humiliation — it’s the first act of repair. Without it, the fracture may be acknowledged, but it will never be set.
The irony of the reconciliation portfolio
This matters more because of the ministry McKenzie now leads, Sports, Arts and Culture — historically one of South Africa’s most reconciliation-charged portfolios.
Under Nelson Mandela, sport became a scalpel for healing. Rugby in 1995 and soccer in 1996 weren’t just trophies — they were moments when black and white could cheer as one. Arts and culture were harnessed to tell a shared story, not deepen a fracture.
Today, that same portfolio is in McKenzie’s hands. But instead of stitching the wound, his record risks tearing the scar apart.
An old fracture, badly set
Apartheid didn’t just pit black against white. It built a ladder of worth into the nation’s bones. Africans were forced to the bottom rung. Above them, Indians and coloureds — each rung pretending it was closer to safety. Whites stood at the top, every law tilted in their favour.
It infected how we saw ourselves and measured others. You could be oppressed and still believe you were “better” than the rung below. By 1985, the fracture had become so deep that thousands queued for reclassification to a “higher” race group. Some bleached their accents; others married strategically. The government called it “administrative”. History remembers it as desperation made policy.
That’s why McKenzie’s slurs matter — they’re not just personal failings, they echo a fracture the nation has never reset.
And until that fracture is faced honestly — without denial, without selective outrage — every attempt at unity will be built on a crooked limb.
The infection that set in
If racism was apartheid’s fracture, toxic masculinity is the infection that set in while we ignored it. Step into most political rooms and you’ll see men. In spaces meant for reconciliation, too many are absent.
I’m not speaking against the kind of male leadership that protects, provides and serves with integrity. I’m speaking against the strain that refuses accountability, weaponises silence and shields wrongdoing.
And in South Africa, these fractures and infections feed each other — racial hierarchies defended by toxic patriarchal power, and patriarchy sustained by racial grievance.
The National Dialogue can’t heal if half the surgeons refuse to scrub in. Men need to show up differently — not to defend or lecture, but to listen until it burns. To say “I’m sorry” without the “but” lurking behind. To help set the bone they helped break.
The X-ray we cannot unsee
The proposed National Dialogue could be that X-ray — not the paper sort you file away, but the kind you can’t unsee: jagged lines on a black screen showing exactly where the nation’s bones have splintered.
We’re not the first to attempt this. Tunisia’s civil society “Quartet” pulled their country back from collapse in 2013, delivering a new constitution and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
In Burundi, Mandela’s mediation helped broker the Arusha Peace Accords. Kenya’s post-2008 truth commission stopped the bleeding after deadly election violence.
Not all succeed — Yemen’s collapse is a warning — but the lesson holds: when they’re inclusive, action-driven, and rooted in ordinary people’s voices, national dialogues can reset a nation’s broken bones.
From 15 to 17 August 2025, the National Dialogue Kickoff Convention will open this process, aiming to engage millions of South Africans through more than 13,000 ward-based and citizen-initiated dialogues.
I will be there, not as an observer, but as a participant — ready to listen, to speak and to be challenged — because the goal is simple but urgent: turn our conversations into binding Community Action Plans that drive real change in our economy, land reform, safety and beyond.
This will demand more than good intentions — it will demand that we let strangers probe the sorest parts of our national body, and that we hold still long enough for the splint to be set.
If done right, it will be uncomfortable. People like McKenzie — and people like me — will have to face our fractures in public. Communities will have to speak about wounds others tell them to “move on” from.
If done wrong, it will be like doctors walking away from a patient because hospital management planned poorly — abandoning healing before diagnosis even begins.
What healing really takes
When my childhood fracture was finally treated, the process was simple:
X-ray — bring hidden injuries into view.
Diagnosis — name them for what they are.
Cast — make concrete, enforceable commitments to protect healing.
Time — commit beyond the photo op and press release, knowing this process is set to culminate in a 30-year national plan. Healing isn’t a weekend exercise — it’s a generational commitment, and nations heal the same way, only slower. The more often the bone is broken and poorly set, the harder it becomes to fix.
The question that remains
Back in the psychiatrist’s office, I had pushed for an answer: “How long until I’m normal again?”
“For some,” he said, “a year. For others, three. For others, much longer. It depends on whether the injury is treated, or ignored.”
South Africa’s injury has been ignored for decades. The National Dialogue could be our first genuine treatment in years. But no X-ray heals a bone.
The real question is the one my doctor left hanging — not whether we are broken, but whether we will set the bone… or let it rot.
Because nations, like bodies, don’t get endless chances. A fracture left untreated long enough doesn’t just fail to heal — it becomes the shape you live with.
Because if we don’t set it now, we will hand our children not a healed limb, but a crippled nation, staggering into the same old potholes, bleeding from wounds we were too proud or too afraid to treat. DM