South Africa has been the same since its formation 114 years ago, and there's no reason to believe it's about to change.
[Thread] From its creation, South Africa was one of the most divided nations. The Blacks were completely segregated from the Europeans, the Indians never mixed with the Africans or the Europeans, while the Coloureds were rejected by the Europeans, but still looked down on the Africans.

In 1959, a year after Ghana became the first African nation to gain independence, the CIA created a dedicated Africa Division. This division aimed to, by any means necessary, secure and enforce American domination across the entire continent🧵🧵 The CIA had been present on the continent since its creation in 1947. However, as African nations prepared to gain freedom from European colonial powers, the United States became concerned with controlling African nuclear material, public opinion, and governments.

White South Africans colloquially refer to themselves as “taxpayers”. However, what they don’t mention is that they practically did not have to pay much tax for 150 years until 1994. Let’s take a trip down memory lane🧵🧵 When the British annexed KwaZulu to create the Natal colony, the colony was desperate for funds to finance the colonial project. Britain was disinterested in offering financial support, and the only sources of tax revenue were old indirect taxes like customs, levies and duties.

Capitalism and democracy are incompatible; in fact, capitalism impairs and undermines democracy. The two are opposites, contradict and undermine each other. I'll show you how🧵 First, the idea behind democracy is that ordinary people should have a meaningful say on how their society is organised on health care matters, food, housing, education, taxation, welfare, etc. to ensure that everyone is served adequately.

The average height difference between White and Black South African men in 1900 was 6cm. By the 1980s, the difference had increased to 9cm. Research shows that the difference could be explained by land expropriation and other segregationist policies.

[Thread] First, stature in adulthood is a sensitive indicator of childhood well-being because individuals cannot realise their potential for physical growth when encumbered by poor nutrition, exposure to disease or undue physical labour.

In 1920, South African politicians agreed that
1. The government could never leave the public welfare to supply and demand.
2. The private sector had failed.
3. Expropriation of property was necessary.
4. Property rights could never come before human lives🧵🧵 In 1919, South Africa had a dire shortage of decent housing. So the Government passed the Housing Act, which created a fund from which municipalities could borrow to construct houses at lower interest rates than other funding sources.

Some of the reasons Nelson Mandela became a worldwide hero while Robert Mugabe became a universal villain have to do with their actions in Zaire/DRC in the 1990s🧵 When Rwanda invaded Zaire in 1996 with the AFDL to topple Mobutu, South Africa provided the Rwandans with arms and ammunition. The reason for this, Mandela’s government claimed, was that Rwanda had the right to chase those who committed the “Rwandan genocide” and fled into Zaire.

Intergenerational trauma is the concept that parents who went through traumatic events like Apartheid transfer their unprocessed trauma to their children. Zelda Knight from the University of Johannesburg published a paper on this. Here’s a summary: Intergenerational trauma implies that children, as inheritors of their parents’ ignored trauma, continue to unconsciously experience life in the shadows of their parents’ unprocessed pain and loss relating to the trauma.

In 1958, Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana hosted the All African People’s Conference (AAPC)—the first time Africans had assembled on the continent.

[Thread] Kwame Nkrumah believed in creating a United States of Africa with states that would serve each other with “all the necessary economic conditions of labour, of skills, of capital, of minerals, of energy reserves—to provide a self-contained economy”.

In a paper titled “Make Afrikaners Great Again!” Danelle van Zyl-Hermann details how Boers are undermining and sabotaging Black majority rule using civil society🧵🧵 First, according to Wessel Visser from the University of Stellenbosch, the end of minority rule in 1994 was “nothing less than traumatic” for White South Africans because it confronted Whites with Africanism and racial redress policies in the public service for the first time.

Kelly Hoffman, Vice President of Quantitative Behavioral Research at JP Morgan and her associates conducted a study on the super-humanisation of Black people—or the phenomenon of seeing Blacks as super-human🧵 According to Hoffman, there's a long history of the super-humanisation of Blacks going back to slavery, with doctors in the 1800s characterising Blacks as having super-natural bodies able to withstand pain and surgical procedures without anaesthesia.

The 2016 book A Citizen's Guide to Crime Trends in South Africa revealed that when White people answered a survey about the crimes they’d experienced, their responses contradicted what they’d reported at police stations.

[Thread] White South Africans reported hijackings to the police at double the rate they reported house break-ins, but they told pollsters they had experienced break-ins twice as often as they had been hijacked. What's going on?

Let’s talk about Boer victim mentality and how it’s being weaponised to restore White dominance in South Africa🧵🧵 Historically, Dutch (or Boer) settlers in southern Africa constructed their identity in opposition to Africans and English-speaking colonists. Boers were classified as “almost White” relative to British colonialists and English-speaking settlers. This is very important‼️

The new Liberian president Joseph Boakai is a US-backed project🧵 In 2021, Liberia's opposition parties launched a lobbying and public relations campaign in the United States. They formed the Liberia Renaissance Office Inc. (LIROI), ostensibly to “promote good governance and rule of law in Liberia”.

South Africa is still a colonial society. At the same time, South Africa is a democratic society. How is this possible? How is colonialism living on under democracy?🧵🧵 According to Peter Hudson, senior lecturer at Wits University, colonialism did not disappear in 1994 but was “repressed” and continues to structure society by inserting itself into democracy through capitalism. Capitalism has taken the place of colonialism and its powers.

Some reasons why Western Cape secession is a foolish and dangerous idea🧵🧵 Section 41(1)(a) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa states, “All spheres of government and all organs of state within each sphere must preserve the peace, national unity and the INDIVISIBILITY of the Republic.”

For as long as there have been countries and governments, the wealthy have always had one goal: influencing and controlling those with political authority, i.e. capturing the state.

[Thread] Whenever those with money capture those with political power, they always ensure that laws are created and a judiciary is formed to ensure capitalism flourishes without the need to offer continuous direct bribes to officials.

How did France rebuild its economy after liberation from German occupation and the devastation of World War II? They nationalised all critical sectors of the economy🧵🧵 Five months after France was liberated from German occupation in 1945, the French National Assembly voted for nationalising the central bank, the four largest commercial banks, public utilities, coal mines, and leading insurance companies.

Section 1 of South Africa’s constitution specifies “non-racialism” as one of the country’s “founding values”. However, the good book does not explain what “non-racialism” is, let alone where the idea came from or why it’s supposed to be a good thing. So, I’ll explain🧵🧵 The term “non-racialism” originated in the British Cape Colony in the mid-1800s and was later adopted by the Whites-only Communist Party of South Africa in the 1920s, who, in turn, imported it into the ANC in the 1950s, where it was popularised.

Even though we live in one of the most unequal societies in history, people still don’t advocate for better redistribution of resources, and many actively oppose it.

This is because people see themselves not as part of the lower class they are, but as millionaires-in-waiting🧵🧵 On one hand, there are the beneficiaries of entrenched and inherited inequality who have convinced themselves and others that the world's inequalities are not only justified but also natural. That they deserve everything they have because they worked for it.

Black people on average spend 30% more on luxury goods and brands than White people in the same income group. Why? Because wearing designer and luxury brands is necessary for affluent Blacks to gain respect and status in the White world🧵 According to an Ipsos study, Affluent Blacks use clothes as a “readily processed indicator of class outweighing race.” The point of designer brands is beyond the clothes. The clothes are used to get the respect that is only conditionally granted by the White-dominated society.