One cannot help but wonder, with a heart heavy with disbelief and a mind sharpened by raw frustration, if the architects of the new South Africa ever imagined their descendants would so closely mirror the very tyrants they overthrew.
History tells us of the Bourbon monarchs of France, a dynasty that returned to power after the revolution, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Today, as smoke billows from foreign-owned shops and the crack of the sjambok echoes through the streets of Pretoria, one is forced to ask whether the Rainbow Nation has reached its own Bourbon moment.
It is deeply unsettling that a people who endured the whip of the oppressor for decades have seemingly learned nothing about the sanctity of human dignity and forgotten everything about the continental brotherhood that acted as their lifeline during the dark years of exile.
This is a staggering betrayal and a barbaric regression that dresses itself in the robes of patriotism while performing the same dance of exclusion and violence that once defined the apartheid state.
The barbaric acts currently being unleashed on the streets are a haunting echo of that past. We see mobs of self-proclaimed patriots going door to door, cornering traders, and demanding passports in a sick parody of the old pass laws.
The cruelty is personal and devastating. Consider the harrowing testimony of a Congolese man in Durban who has lived in South Africa for over a decade.
Despite being married to a South African woman and building a life within the community, he watched in horror as his own neighbors, the same people he shared meals with, vandalized his shops and looted his property.
To them, his years of contribution and his marital ties meant nothing; he was reduced to a target simply because of his place of birth.
This is the reality of the current crisis: Ghanaian traders are confronted in broad daylight and told to fix their own countries, while Nigerian residents in Gauteng report being hunted in their homes.
In Pretoria and the Eastern Cape, mobs carrying sjamboks have forced foreign shop owners to shutter their businesses under the threat of death. These are not acts of frustrated citizens; they are criminal assaults intended to humiliate and dehumanize.
The current generation of South Africans must be reminded that their freedom was not a solo performance; it was a continental symphony of sacrifice.
To behave like the Bourbons, blind to the history that put the crown of democracy on their heads, is dangerous arrogance.
This history is written in the bold risks taken by African leaders who prioritized South African liberation over their own national stability.
We must look back to 1971 to understand the gravity of this debt. While President Milton Obote of Uganda was in Singapore at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting delivering a powerful, defiant speech against the British sale of arms to the apartheid regime, the dark forces of that very regime were busy back home.
It is a haunting historical fact that while Obote stood on the global stage to defend the humanity of Black South Africans, apartheid emissaries and their Western allies were supporting Idi Amin to overthrow his government.
Obote lost his presidency and his country’s stability because he refused to stop fighting for your right to be human. This was the price of solidarity: African leaders were deposed, and African economies were sabotaged, all to ensure that the light of freedom could finally reach the tip of the continent.
The hypocrisy of the present moment is blinding. Only recently, the world stood in awe as South Africa took a righteous stand against Israeli occupation and genocide at the International Court of Justice.
We praised South Africa as the moral conscience of the world, a nation that knew the pain of dispossession and refused to stay silent while others were being crushed.
Yet, before the ink on those legal briefs has even dried, the contradiction is laid bare. How can a nation argue for the dignity of Palestinians in The Hague while stripping the dignity of Congolese, Ghanaians, and Zimbabweans at home? You cannot be the champion of human rights on the global stage while allowing mobs to lynch traders in your own backyard.
It is moral schizophrenia that threatens to erase every ounce of international goodwill South Africa has earned.
The arguments often presented to justify this violence, suggesting that frustrated citizens are simply filling a vacuum left by the state’s failure, are hollow.
As highlighted by the April 2026 commentary in Modern Ghana, the law is unambiguous. Under the Immigration Act of 2002, the power to arrest, detain, and deport belongs exclusively to the state inspectorate.
When private citizens take it upon themselves to conduct raids or expel foreign nationals, they are not acting as patriots; they are criminals committing assault, public violence, and intimidation.
There is no clause in the South African Constitution that says human dignity is a privilege reserved only for those with a local ID. Section 10 of that sacred document declares that everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have that dignity protected.
Our legal history, including the landmark S v Makwanyane ruling, reminds us that these rights are not conditional upon nationality. To strip a person of their dignity because of their accent is to tear a page out of the very Constitution that ended the nightmare of apartheid. We must also confront the structural failures that have led us here.
South Africa is trapped in an internal economic hostility loop. With unemployment at 33.8 percent and youth unemployment nearing 50 percent, the frustration is real.
However, this is a failure of domestic governance, not the fault of the Congolese barber or the Malawian laborer. By directing rage toward the other, this generation falls for a tactic borrowed directly from the apartheid handbook: divide and rule.
The Pan-African community must rise in a single voice to condemn this betrayal. We must remind South Africa that Ubuntu is not a marketing slogan; it is a philosophy of interconnectedness that is currently being set on fire.
We call upon the African Union to intervene, for you cannot champion the AfCFTA by day and allow mobs to lynch traders by night.
This betrayal is a stain on the memory of every martyr who fell for the cause of a free Africa. It is a disgusting desecration of the sacrifices made by nations like Uganda and Nigeria, who faced coups and economic ruin so that South Africans could be fed in exile.
To hunt your brother today because he speaks a different tongue is to spit on the grave of Oliver Tambo and to mock the legacy of Nelson Mandela.
South Africa, your freedom was a gift from the continent, yet you repay that gift with the sjambok and the torch. This is a call to every Pan-Africanist: we must not be silent.
We must condemn this Bourbon-like arrogance that forgets the blood spilled for its sake. Shame on every hand that rises against a fellow African, and shame on every leader who watches in silence as the dream of a united continent is burned to the ground.
You are better than this, but if you do not stop this madness, you will find yourselves alone in a prison of your own making, having traded your soul and your history for a handful of bitter ash.
The continent is watching, and the continent is weeping. South Africa does not prove the skeptics right. Do not become the very thing you once died to destroy.
Twiine Mansio Charles, CEO and Founder of The ThirdEye Consults U Ltd
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