When the nation loses its shared kraal: On legacy media and the thinning of SA’s shared civic life

I was eight years old in a school hall in Pietermaritzburg the day South Africa believed in itself out loud, together, in one room.

It was 2 September 1993. Peace Day. The country was bleeding – hundreds dead each month in our province alone – and yet that morning, every child at Alston Primary was handed a white T-shirt with two doves in a blue circle. Black, Coloured and Indian pupils stood in single file, peace ribbons pinned to our chests, and we walked into the hall like disciplined statesmen. The sun outside felt freshly minted. The country, against all evidence, was trying to imagine itself whole.

I want to start there, because what I am about to mourn is not nostalgia for a newspaper. It is something far older and far more African than newsprint.

There was a time when South Africans still argued around the same table.

Not because we agreed. Far from it. We fought. We accused. We protested. We exposed. We wrote furious letters. We slammed newspapers onto kitchen counters and debated headlines in taxis, campuses, shebeens, lounges, churches and Parliament itself. But even in our disagreements, there remained a fragile national space where the country still encountered itself together.

On Sunday mornings, copies of City Press moved from hand to hand after church services. In taxis, strangers debated front pages as if the nation itself sat squeezed between them. Students carried newspapers across campuses like intellectual armour. Editors, journalists, politicians, pastors, activists and ordinary citizens all participated in one broad and often chaotic national conversation.

That table is slowly disappearing. But the deeper word for what we are losing is older than newsprint, older than democracy itself – and it lives in the rural memory of every South African.

The visible struggles facing legacy media institutions like City Press, alongside the financial strain facing publications such as the Mail & Guardian, are not merely business stories. They are warnings about the thinning of South Africa’s shared civic life.

Growing up in Nkabini Village in rural KwaZulu-Natal, I learnt early that a herd survives because of the kraal.

Each morning I would lead our cattle outside the 1.8m-high fence that surrounded the village, up into the mountains to graze. The cattle were never just one person’s. They belonged to the homestead. They were our shared wealth, our shared responsibility, our shared inheritance. After sunset, I would herd them back to the kraal to keep them safe from thieves and predators. The most feared predators were hyenas and jackals which, we were told, roamed at night to prey on livestock. I came to understand the cattle. Each one had a name. I mastered, in my small way, the art of reading them.

A newsroom is a kraal.

When the walls collapse, the hyenas do not need to attack the herd. The herd simply scatters, and the predators pick off the strays.

For decades, City Press helped shape the imagination of the black middle class. It became more than a publication – a cultural mirror. Families read it after church. Politicians feared it. Students quoted it. Professionals carried it into airports and boardrooms as evidence that black intellectual life in South Africa possessed seriousness, confidence and ambition. The Mail & Guardian cultivated investigative depth, dissent and institutional scrutiny. It trained the country to interrogate power carefully rather than merely react emotionally.

These institutions were imperfect. Sometimes biased. Sometimes blind. Sometimes captured by ideological fashions of their own. Yet even in their failures, they helped sustain a national conversation larger than any tribe, algorithm or faction.

Now the walls are coming down.

South Africans increasingly no longer wake up in the same country. We used to share a front page; now we share an algorithm – and the algorithm sorts us before we have had our coffee.

One citizen wakes up inside a country collapsing under immigrants. Another inside a country where race still explains everything. A third inside permanent outrage – against white monopoly capital, against transformation, against State Capture – depending on which feed loaded first. A fourth inside influencer commentary that calls itself journalism. None of them is waking up in the same country.

The danger is not simply misinformation. The deeper danger is the death of shared imagination.

A nation cannot survive indefinitely without places where strangers still meet under commonly recognised rules of truth, verification and public accountability. Democracies survive through institutions that teach strangers how to reason together. Newspapers once helped perform that work.

Social media does not reward that kind of formation. It rewards speed over depth and performance over verification. The old newsroom model was slow, expensive, frustrating and deeply imperfect, but it contained friction. Editors challenged reporters. Lawyers reviewed investigations. Sources were verified. Facts were interrogated before publication. Credibility took years to build and minutes to destroy.

Today virality outruns verification. A 30-second clip travels further than a six-month investigation.

There is something my grandmother taught me as a boy that I keep returning to as I watch our public square fragment.

Each season, Gogo and I would mix Ubulongwe – cattle dung – with mud in a bucket, and plaster the walls of our hut with the clay. Ubulongwe kept the floors warm in winter and cool in summer. It killed bacteria. It kept out mosquitoes, scorpions and centipedes. In bad seasons, when there was no firewood, it could even be burned in the fire. Apartheid sought to strip my Gogo of her dignity, but it could not strip her of her sense of Ubuntu, and it could not strip her of her Ubulongwe.

Nobody romanticises Ubulongwe. It smells. It is humble work. But it is what holds the walls up.

Civic infrastructure is made of unglamorous things. Subeditors. Fact-checkers. Copy subs. Media lawyers. Defamation insurance. Travel budgets for reporters chasing stories that may never trend. Patient editors who say “not yet” to a story that wants to go to print before it has been verified. These are the Ubulongwe of a democracy. The moment a society starts thinking it is too sophisticated for them is the moment the walls begin to crack – not loudly, but slowly, in the corners where nobody looks.

We are now a country whose walls are cracking in the corners.

Trust is collapsing faster than replacement institutions can form. Citizens distrust politicians. Politicians distrust courts. Communities distrust police. Young people distrust universities. The public distrusts journalists. In our villages, when a dispute could not be settled inside a household, it was carried to the induna under the tree. Today every household has crowned itself induna. Nobody is left to chair the imbizo.

A society without trusted arbiters eventually struggles to distinguish truth from noise. And once a nation loses its shared kraal, it becomes difficult to remain a nation at all.

What replaces shared civic life is usually one of two things: tribalism or personality. That is why strong personalities flourish when institutions weaken. Influencers replace editors. Viral clips replace long-form argument. Charismatic figures become more trusted than organisations. Even journalism itself slowly shifts from reporting to performance.

This is not only a South African problem. It is global. But South Africa faces unique vulnerabilities because ours is already a deeply fractured society – economically unequal, racially wounded, spatially divided and historically traumatised. Shared institutions matter even more in fragile societies, because they provide the thin threads holding strangers together.

When those threads weaken, suspicion expands.

So what do we do?

We do not need another lecture about the death of newspapers. We need to remember that the kraal was never built by one person, and the walls were never plastered with anything glamorous. They were plastered with whatever the household could mix together in a bucket before sunset.

Rebuilding shared civic life in South Africa will look less like saving newspapers and more like the slow, unromantic work of mixing Ubulongwe again. It will look like a school newsroom in Soweto. A community radio station in Mthatha. A church newsletter in Khayelitsha. A book club in Polokwane that reads one long-form investigation every month and argues about it. A pastor who holds the Sunday paper in one hand and the Scriptures in the other, applying biblical truth to what the country is actually facing on Monday morning. A taxi driver with Isolezwe folded on the dashboard and the Mail & Guardian in the door pocket. A father who hands his daughter a Sunday paper and says, “Tell me what you think”.

None of this trends. None of it will save a balance sheet. But this is how walls are plastered. This is how a herd learns to come home at sunset.

A republic survives not when its citizens agree, but when strangers still believe they belong inside the same fence – visible to one another at the dangerous hour, arguing under the same sky, watched over by Gogos who never stopped being the glue.

Once that kraal disappears, the hyenas do not need to come for us.

We scatter on our own. DM