Every nation needs a story. Most nations are accidents of history: different groups of people thrown together by circumstance. Occupying the same territory, their lives and futures are linked. Founding stories – myths – help stitch them together by transmitting shared values and hopes. Without these stories, nations struggle to make sense of themselves.
The best stories have an enormous capacity to persuade and influence. They are never entirely rational. Origin myths, in particular, oversimplify history and mask contradictions. But if they are unique and compelling, evoke our deepest emotions, and even reveal something of the sacred, their power is almost limitless.
No country ended the previous century with a better story than South Africa. Its perilous leap from a racial oligarchy to a nonracial democracy in the 1990s captivated the world’s imagination. Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously described the new country that came into being as the “Rainbow Nation”.
United under the saintly figure of Nelson Mandela, South Africa became a beacon for societies grappling with tensions and divisions. Its international clout soared.
In the 2000s this changed. Growing factionalism within the ANC put nation-building on the back burner. Politics became consumed by ideological clashes and scheming over state resources. Some in Mandela’s party became disillusioned with the founding story. Others neglected it. Or even undermined it. Few saw it as especially useful in their bid for power.
Soon, the story became buried in the avalanche of corruption and misrule that followed.
Adrift at home and abroad
Today, South Africa is rudderless at home. According to an Ipsos “What Worries the World” study released in September, eight in 10 South Africans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Three months of testimony at the Madlanga Commission have fortified characterisations of South Africa as a “mafia state”. Just over a week ago, former president Thabo Mbeki despaired: “I don’t know where South Africa will be tomorrow.”
What more needs be said of Johannesburg? Water and energy infrastructure in the city is crumbling. Its politics – 10 mayoral changes in six years – are farcical. This would be scandalous for any major city. But for a country’s – and the continent’s – financial and economic hub, it is near inexplicable.
Turmoil at home has eroded South Africa’s standing abroad, not least across Africa where it was once viewed as the “natural leader” owing to its economic might and exemplary democratic transition. Today, Pretoria is irrelevant in places on the continent where it should be making a difference – Tanzania, Sudan, central Africa.
Globally, the founding vision that human rights would be the light that guided South African foreign policy eventually dimmed as ANC officials kowtowed to more and more repressive regimes. Their much-praised case against Israel at the International Court of Justice does not affirm South Africa’s moral stature inasmuch as it highlights how selective their condemnation of injustices worldwide has become.
South Africans don’t need a new story
In June 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the establishment of the National Dialogue. It was billed as the most important conversation about the future of the nation since the end of apartheid. It would be, Ramaphosa declared, a historic opportunity for South Africans “from all walks of life to come together... to reflect on the state of our country”.
The National Dialogue’s opening convention in August was a chance to show South Africans and the world its best face. The withdrawal of key civil society organisations from the event and the boycott of all major political parties other than the ANC revealed something else.
However hard the government tries to repair the country’s battered reputation, fix its broken economy and restore public trust, unless these efforts are tethered to the same unifying vision that helped South Africa avoid the abyss in the early 1990s, they are unlikely to succeed.
What was achieved collectively in the 1990s during a period of immense fear and uncertainty became South Africa’s greatest export.
Ramaphosa’s call in June to “reimagine” the country’s future was laudable but misplaced. South Africans don’t need a new story. They need to know why the best one they will ever have was squandered.
South Africa’s transition was a triumph of the liberal international order created in the aftermath of World War 2 with the ideology of promoting democracy worldwide and expanding prosperity. In meaning and impact, only the collapse of the Berlin Wall was comparable. The Rainbow Nation seemed to affirm the central tenet of the West: The arc of history was turning away from autocracy towards freedom and inclusivity.
That postwar order is beginning to fragment. It might already be dead. It is against this backdrop that a battle for the soul of South Africa is being waged.
South Africa emerges as beacon for the world
The current crop of leaders in South Africa came of age when the country weighed more heavily on the world’s conscience than any other nation. No policy of any state provoked more condemnation from the international community than apartheid – the system of racial segregation that deprived the country’s Black majority of equal opportunities and services – during the latter part of the 20th century. The Black uprising in South Africa’s townships was the global media event of the 1980s.
The political transformation that followed was so swift and improbable that even sober analysts dubbed it a “miracle”. Two men were at the heart of it. One was white: FW de Klerk, who spent his career upholding apartheid, which dehumanised millions of people. The other was Black: Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for opposing it.
In 1993, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Through gritted teeth, they and their respective negotiators forged mutual trust and made parlous compromises that helped steer the country away from a violent catastrophe. In the end, white people would relinquish political control to the Black majority in return for retaining most of their economic power.
What was achieved collectively in the 1990s during a period of immense fear and uncertainty became South Africa’s greatest export. The country’s new multicoloured flag and new multilingual anthem ignited imaginations everywhere with the possibility that no societal divides were unbridgeable. Mandela’s inauguration in 1994 bore testimony to this fact. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in 50 years.
The work of nation-building continued with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated widespread human rights violations during the apartheid era and sought to promote rapprochement. The TRC set a global precedent for dealing with complex legacies of mass violence and systemic injustice, influencing many such commissions worldwide. The adoption of its new Constitution, rooted in the nonracial vision of South African society first set out in the 1955 multiparty Freedom Charter, was another key milestone. It was lauded globally as one of the most progressive written to date.
Mandela knew better than anyone that the work had only just begun... powerful myths and images could shift mindsets, enabling substantive reforms.
In a speech in 1996, the then deputy president, Mbeki, hailed the Constitution as “an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender or historical origins. It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” His lyrical “I am an African” speech stirred a sense of belonging and common purpose.
It was “a time of almost limitless hope and possibility”, recalls Palesa Morudu, a Washington, DC-based writer and former activist who grew up in a township outside Pretoria. No longer teetering on the edge, “South Africa was bursting with creativity across all spheres of society, including music, fashion, the arts. Mr Mbeki’s speech was a crystallisation of that confident new nation looking into the future.”
The Rainbow Nation narrative was crafted and driven by the country’s elite. But it drew in the whole of society, offering hope and dignity after decades of systematic oppression. Political analyst Lukhona Mnguni remembers his small town of Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape as “abuzz with excitement” after 1994. However abstract and aspirational the Rainbow Nation might have been in his remote rural community, he recalls that “everyone had buy-in” and wanted to participate in this story.
South Africa’s hard-earned moral authority enabled it to recover from its political and economic isolation. Tackling its profound structural challenges would take time. Wealth remained overwhelmingly concentrated within the white population. Vast inequalities persisted.
Diplomatic gains were more immediate and pronounced. Under Mandela, South Africa built up an enormous reserve of political capital, promoting the transition story to enhance its role around the globe. In 1999, it became a founding member of and the only African country within the G20.
The new government also leveraged in its diplomacy the apartheid regime’s dismantlement of its secret nuclear weapons arsenal. Portraying itself as an exemplary convert to the non-nuclear club after years as one of the world’s worst offenders, South Africa became a leading voice on nonproliferation and was instrumental in the successful continent-wide negotiations on declaring Africa a nuclear weapons-free zone.
The Rainbow Nation was always an illusion, a phantasm that could never be sustained.
By the time Mandela left office in 1999 and was replaced by Mbeki, South Africa’s founding story had proved its worth in advancing reconciliation and rewiring the state. “Every country has an underlying story about the ‘why’ of its existence, and that legitimises its social and political contract,” Martin Kimani, CEO of The Africa Center and formerly Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, explains. “In this regard, the psychic, political and financial value of the South African story was simply incalculable.”
Mandela knew better than anyone that the work had only just begun. “Rainbowism” was not a panacea for resolving the deep-rooted legacies of apartheid. But powerful myths and images could shift mindsets, enabling substantive reforms. “Appearances constitute reality,” Mandela once told Richard Stengel, the ghostwriter of his book Long Walk to Freedom.
The Story becomes toxic
Under Mbeki’s watch, the rhetoric gradually shifted from idealistic unity to a recognition that old fault lines were beginning to widen again. Gross inequalities could turn the Rainbow Nation into “two nations”, warned Mbeki, “one black and poor, one white and well off.”
His nemesis, Jacob Zuma, positioned himself as a defender of marginalised Black people after he rose to power in 2009. He proved adept at fanning historical grievances – mostly as cover for his administration and cronies to steal huge sums of public funds. Zuma and his core supporters viewed the founding story as an obstacle in their way. Most of the ANC went along with him.
Predictably, the economy tanked. The story of South Africa began to be contested. Within months of Mandela’s death in 2013, his legacy was being reappraised by younger Black iconoclasts and graduates with little prospect of finding work. They were joined by ANC breakaway groups, such as the Economic Freedom Fighters. Their version of the negotiated settlement with the white regime framed it as a defeat, courtesy of Black sellouts.
When Ramaphosa came to power in 2018, a wave of optimism swept the country. As a favourite of Mandela and chief negotiator for the ANC during the transition, he had been a pivotal figure in discussions with the apartheid regime. Yet, since becoming President, he hasn’t championed the Rainbow Nation narrative either.
Opinions vary on why the story became toxic in the ANC.
The GNU is still holding but both parties portray it as a pragmatic necessity to ensure stable governance, nothing more.
“The Rainbow Nation was always an illusion, a phantasm that could never be sustained,” ventures Stuart Doran, an Australian historian who has written extensively about neighboring Zimbabwe’s descent into autocracy. “Today’s South Africa leaves a lingering sense that most of the lauded artefacts of the transition were faux, not real. They continue to be lionised by those who don’t live by them, and they are scorned by those who see no need for the pretence.”
Scarcely anyone in positions of power talks about the Rainbow Nation story anymore. Black leaders seem especially reticent. Perhaps, some have argued, because it can be more costly for them to trumpet the story given that white business – which played its part in the corruption that took South Africa to the brink – still holds most of the key economic levers.
“Most people intuitively know that we also need white South Africans to participate in developing the country,” explains a former South African central banker. “The problem is that saying this too loudly reinforces a narrative that whites are superior, and without them, Blacks can’t succeed, which is an unhelpful stereotype in resolving South Africa’s deep disparities,” he says.
Fragile GNU unity
Before 2024, the ANC had won thumping majorities in every national election since apartheid ended. When the party lost its majority for the first time in 2024, falling to 40% of the vote, the country was on tenterhooks. Many doubted that the ANC would accept the result, let alone strike an agreement with its fiercest political foe, the white-led Democratic Alliance. By putting aside their mutual antipathy for the good of the country, the new Government of National Unity (GNU) appeared to breathe new life into the wilting spirit of 1994.
It didn’t last. Unlike in 1994, there was no story to fortify the idea of national unity. The GNU is still holding but both parties portray it as a pragmatic necessity to ensure stable governance, nothing more. They remain openly contemptuous of one another.
Things will only get nastier in 2026, as campaigning in local elections fires up. The DA’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille, will excoriate its GNU partner every chance she gets. She has already declared that her mission is to rescue the city from ANC corruption, brokenness and criminal mafia control. How GNU unity holds in the face of Zille’s rhetorical floggings is anyone’s guess.
The Oval Office and competing stories
In the days before Ramaphosa’s much-anticipated Oval Office date with US President Donald Trump in May, the South African media framed the meeting as a chance to lift the public mood, a chance to reset the country’s image, not just in the eyes of Washington but in those of the world.
But when Ramaphosa was ambushed with “evidence” of a “white genocide” he knew to be bogus – pictures of thousands of crosses, each supposedly marking the systematic killing of a farmer – he and his team seemed grossly unprepared. Their pushback was feeble. Whatever his intention, Trump was taking dead aim at South Africa’s founding ideals of reconciliation and nonracialism. Ramaphosa could have robustly defended them, even while accepting that his country has a severe crime problem.
The danger in not telling your own story is, of course, that someone else will.
A sense of shared destiny is hard when half of young people can’t find work.
This helps explain the surge of revanchism in South Africa. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” warns Lerato Ngobeni, national spokesperson for ActionSA. “If the Rainbow Nation ideal is no longer being articulated, or worse, [is] viewed cynically as empty symbolism, in its place we see competing, often exclusionary, narratives gaining ground.”
In the Western Cape, polling by independence activists suggests that more than half of the population wants a referendum on secession.
Nationally, two populist ethnicity-based parties, the Patriotic Alliance and the Zulu nationalist MK party, led by former president Zuma, collectively won about 16.5% of the vote in 2024. The EFF, which won about 10%, along with MK and a chunk of the ANC, are the main champions for nationalisation and the redistribution of white-owned land.
The challenge to South Africa’s founding story that has attracted the most attention this year comes from the Afrikaners, which make up roughly 4% of South Africa’s total population. A well-organised and outspoken minority of Afrikaners now cast themselves as victims of the democratic dispensation. They want to relitigate the 1994 deal and win special rights. “The end game is freedom,” the Afrikaner nationalists’ most recognised leader globally, Ernst Roets, wrote recently on X. “Freedom for the Afrikaner people, but also freedom for other communities.”
The Trump administration’s focus on the Afrikaner community’s “plight” shot to prominence globally when dozens arrived in the US as refugees in May. Its newly confirmed ambassador to Pretoria, Leo Brent Bozell III, has promised to advance Trump’s invitation to Afrikaners seeking to flee South Africa.
Exactly why the Trump administration has so readily embraced their cause is much debated. Some put it down to the US culture wars: the supposed victimisation of white people in South Africa plays seamlessly into narratives that are gaining ground on American soil. Others cite the influence of key figures close to the administration who grew up in the country, such as Elon Musk, who have convinced Trump that Pretoria’s race-based policies only perpetuate crime and corruption.
Whichever, it’s clear that the Afrikaner nationalists’ story is landing in Washington, though perhaps not as firmly as Ramaphosa asserts (if their selfies are a reliable guide, it is notable that they have yet to secure one with Trump or any other major figure in Washington).
In practice, South Africa’s diplomacy is hobbled by contradictions and incoherence.
What matters more to nation-building is what happens within their own community. In mid-August, they broke ground on construction of a new Afrikaans-language university outside Pretoria, one of the largest private-sector investments in South Africa in years. But it represents more than just a university for Afrikaner nationalists. In effect, they are trying to build a parallel country.
They base their new claims for self-determination in the failure of the Rainbow Nation to educate, protect and provide for all communities. Many doubt that this segment of white people ever believed in nonracialism. But their criticisms about state dysfunction and economic regress are echoed across society. A sense of shared destiny is hard when half of young people can’t find work – or when only a fraction of the roughly 70 homicides recorded each day countrywide ever results in a conviction.
Over time, this gap between promise and reality has bred deep cynicism and eroded trust in the story.
The Constitution and South African foreign policy
That it has not died owes much to the document that codifies the story: South Africa’s Constitution. South Africans can organise as they wish, confront their leaders publicly, and hold them accountable. No country in Africa has a freer press.
South Africa’s Constitution is transformational, explicitly allowing “legislative and other measures” to protect or advance groups that have faced discrimination – essentially a protection of affirmative action. It is a profoundly liberal tract, too.
This fact has always sat uneasily with how South Africa projects itself in the world. Officially, South Africa maintains a nonaligned foreign policy. The values enshrined in its Constitution are said to be its fulcrum. Mandela famously wrote in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article that “human rights will be the light that guides our foreign affairs” and that “only true democracy can guarantee rights”. South Africa’s avid support for a Palestinian state is frequently cited as evidence.
During Zuma’s presidency, the African philosophy of ubuntu – “I am because we are” – was introduced in policy documents to provide an “African” basis for the country’s foreign policy approach. It placed strong emphasis on pan-Africanism and solidarity with other countries in what is sometimes called the Global South, affirming a shared humanity.
In practice, South Africa’s diplomacy is hobbled by contradictions and incoherence. Its anti-Western rhetoric, fealty to Moscow and strong alignment with China suggest that the Constitution does not amply inform Pretoria’s worldview. But neither does ubuntu (which is not mentioned in the Constitution), even if it has gained some traction as a nation-branding exercise.
For all its lofty idealism, ubuntu is a vague concept, not a story. Ask a foreigner in South Africa about ubuntu and they will say that it is, at best, erratically applied; and at worst, completely divorced from reality in a society where xenophobia against migrants is a deeply entrenched phenomenon.
Rebuilding a sense of a shared future
It is no wonder that defining South Africa’s identity increasingly feels as if one is operating in an ideological war zone – torn between liberalism and statism, ubuntu and tribalism, democracy and populism.
“We seem most comfortable in the trenches,” observes Kalim Rajab, chairperson of one of the country’s leading democracy and human rights organisations. “Perversely, it is the place our aspirations in the early Nineties sought to transcend.” He points to South African “tenacity” as the dominant motif of the past 15 years rather than a coalescing Rainbow Nation. Frustratingly, he adds, “while it is a theme at which we excel, [tenacity] is hardly a long-term strategy”.
South Africans also excel at “talk shops,” a pejorative term for seminars or conferences in which the nation’s myriad problems are laid bare. Typically, such gatherings do nothing to increase state capacity, grow the economy, or, since the TRC, promote shared understanding of their painful and tangled past.
These efforts could become more meaningful if their organisers borrowed from the wise counsel of US conservative intellectual Wilfred McClay. Leaders should not try “to edit out those foundational stories’ strange moral complexity, because it is there for a reason”, he says. “It is precisely our encounter with the surprise of their strangeness that reminds us of how much we have yet to learn from them.”
Few things are stranger than South Africa’s nuclear past. It is a tale of strategic absurdities, crippling paranoia and uncommon technological prowess. South Africa is the only country to ever build and then voluntarily give up its nuclear arsenal. The weapons could have derailed the democratic transition had they not been secretly destroyed in 1991 under De Klerk’s orders. This chapter in South Africa’s recent history holds vital lessons for curbing proliferation threats around the world. Yet the story is almost completely unknown within South Africa. In my own research on the subject, I have been struck by current officials’ bald indifference to what they dismiss, sotto voce, as “a white story”.
South Africa’s better angels
One person sure to try to prevent the National Dialogue from becoming another talk shop in 2026 is Siya Kolisi, a member of the dialogue’s “eminent persons group” and the first Black captain of the all-conquering Springboks. The team was an icon of white supremacy and brutality during apartheid. Since then, the racially transformed team has become the most salient reference point for the country’s better angels, a visceral sign of the Rainbow Nation ideal. Kolisi often stresses the importance of national unity in his post-match interviews. He has helped make the team’s green jersey one of its most potent symbols.
Today, white South Africans represent roughly 7% of the total population – about half the proportion they had in 1990. Black South Africans make up about 82%. Despite demographic changes, polling confirms that most South Africans believe that progress depends on all races working closely together – à la the Springboks. But that spirit will eventually fossilise if it can’t find expression beyond rugby.
As for South Africa’s partners in BRICS who are also members of the G20, they too appear unwilling to publicly confront the US over South Africa’s exclusion.
A small but growing band of civic groups is trying to rebuild a sense of a shared future. Its pleas for active citizenship include campaigns pushing for constitutional accountability and anti-corruption reform. Of particular note is the “fix it ourselves” ethos emerging in local community networks. Ngobeni suggests that “this ethos has the potential to be reframed as a national story of resilience and agency, if it can be scaled, coordinated and connected to a vision that cuts across race, class and geography.”
Internationally, the task of rebuilding is no less daunting. Once a poster child of the liberal international order, South Africa is now portrayed by many US legislators as a pariah. The administration’s unilateral decision to bar South Africa from participating in the 2026 G20 summit caused barely a whimper from either Democrats or Republicans.
This move aligns with the White House’s growing antipathy towards South Africa. In its bullying and faintly justifiable nature, South Africa’s expulsion says more about changes in US foreign policy direction and behaviour than anything Pretoria has done, including the ICJ case.
Yet South Africa’s government appears no less exposed for it.
The vast store of political capital it built up in the West could have provided some diplomatic cover during these tensions. But that has mostly dried up.
Most Western nations backed the ANC during apartheid – some earlier than others – and imposed sanctions on the white regime. Some helped establish new structures in the post-apartheid state and supported the drafting of its Constitution. Their affinity for South Africa once ran deep despite policy differences. It doesn’t anymore.
Perhaps this can be glimpsed in their tepid opposition to Trump’s G20 ban. Though no Western nation supports it, none seems willing to do much to stop it either. As for South Africa’s partners in BRICS who are also members of the G20, they too appear unwilling to publicly confront the US over South Africa’s exclusion.
Hope in resilience
Within the country, amid seemingly never-ending crises, people are desperate for a way to convey their attachment to and hope for their nation. The respected pan-African pollster Afrobarometer paints a worrying picture of a nation lost and confused, echoing Mbeki’s recent cri de coeur, “where are we going?”. Afrobarometer’s 2025 survey shows that, while support for democracy is rising, half of South Africans polled supported military rule – up nearly double from its last study in 2022.
“I was effectively born into the Rainbow Nation,” says Thabiso Masigo, head of a nonprofit focused on child welfare and education in Soweto, the township in Johannesburg that was at the heart of the anti-apartheid Struggle. “Growing up in Soweto, we lived under the belief that change was coming for everyone. But no one in government really talks about our founding story anymore. Their priorities changed. Everything became about business and making money – for themselves and those connected to them.” He laments that so few South Africans openly “push the story now” but remains committed to “trying to make the country work for everyone”.
South Africans need to be reminded: Masigo and his generation were born into one of the great political sagas of modern times. The transition from apartheid to a free, nonracial society is as close to sacred as national stories can get. As experienced and astute leaders like Kimani have observed from afar, its power is “simply incalculable”.
Since the turn of the century, the Rainbow Nation myth has been increasingly portrayed as irrelevant to the business of running South Africa and renewing its promise. Yet, as Steve Vizard deftly captures in his recent book Nation, Memory, Myth, powerful national myths “don’t get in the way of the operation of the nation; they are the operation of the nation”.
Leaders like Mandela and Tutu understood that. They grasped the unique power of South Africa’s founding story to help it overcome the devastating legacies of the past. In trying to make the Rainbow Nation a reality, they changed their country for the better.
That fact is probably not lost on the determined South Africans trying to reboot the fragile nation-building project in the absence of government will and action. It is they – the best of us – who are trying to organise what is, essentially, a performance of belonging.
In this, they can draw on a rich South African tradition of national resilience and a defiance of the odds. Their success would be a win not just for South Africa but humanity, too. DM
Terence McNamee is a senior fellow at the Montreal Institute for Global Security. A writer and consultant specialising in geopolitics, he divides his time between Canada and South Africa.
This article is based on the author’s cover story for the weekly US magazine, Christian Science Monitor, titled “South Africa aspired to be a nonracial democracy. Can it revive that goal?”, first published on 7 November 2025. It is published with the permission of the Christian Science Monitor.