I am rereading The Odyssey sixty years after my first teenage reading of it, now with the excitement, perspective, and insights that come from six additional decades of life experience.
And so, Spoiler Alert!
There is one part of the story-poem in which its hero, Odysseus, is told by the sorceress Circe that he must journey to the Underworld, where the dead reside, and consult with the blind prophet Tiresias (a possible symbolic stand-in for Homer, the traditionally described blind poet-author?) in order to successfully complete his journey home.
After performing the proper rituals that allow the dead to speak with him, Odysseus is able to meet and converse with his mother and other cherished souls who have departed from this world.
That scene made me wonder:
What if I could travel to another world and speak with Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela?
What would they say about the terrible acts of anti-African solidarity and disunity presently on display in South Africa—ironically, a nation whose own liberation struggle benefited enormously from the sacrifices, advocacy, material support, political pressure, and moral solidarity of Africans continent-wide and of the worldwide Pan-African community?
I suspect those two great advocates for the freedom and dignity of African people everywhere would offer weeping words of disappointment:
“Is this what we worked so hard, sacrificed so much, and suffered for?”
Reading the horrific recent news reports coming out of South Africa concerning African immigrants from many different nations being threatened, intimidated, denied access to public services, targeted by vigilante organizations, and subjected to demands that they leave the country is deeply disturbing.
Anti-immigrant organizations and movements have increasingly portrayed African “foreigners”—particularly undocumented migrants—as people who are stealing jobs, overwhelming public services, committing crimes, and depriving native-born South Africans of economic opportunities.
The ugliness of that political strategy should be painfully familiar to anyone paying attention to what is happening elsewhere in the world—including in our own nation.
Call it the Make South Africa Great Again—MSAGA—strategy.
The great political lie promoted by movements like MSAGA—and by politicians anywhere who find scapegoating more convenient than governing—is that if we can just punch down hard enough on some politically and culturally despised “other,” our gullible followers will believe that their lives will get better.
So, let’s go after:
Immigrants.
Refugees.
Muslims.
LGBTQ people.
Black women playing in the WNBA.
Whoever today’s designated “hated and despised other” happens to be.
The formula is ancient and always fails:
Identify an economically, politically, racially, religiously, or culturally vulnerable population. Blame them for complicated national problems they did not create. Direct the people’s legitimate anger downward instead of upward toward the governmental institutions and ineffectual leaders who are actually responsible for solving those problems.
But scapegoating has never been a good economic-development plan.
Just ask Germany how that 1930s-and-1940s experiment in national purification worked out for them.
South Africa certainly has legitimate immigration challenges. Every sovereign nation has both the right and responsibility to control its borders, enforce its immigration and labor laws, and establish lawful standards governing who may enter, reside, and work within the country.
But immigration enforcement is the responsibility of a lawful government—not citizen mobs.
And there is an enormous moral, constitutional, and political difference between enforcing immigration laws and unleashing—or tolerating—a social climate in which African people are treated as less human because they were born on the other side of an African border—borders themselves that were exploitatively and fraudulently drawn by European colonial powers. But that’s another lesson for another day.
South Africa’s own government has publicly acknowledged this distinction, condemning violence, intimidation, xenophobia, Afrophobia, and the blocking of foreign nationals from clinics, hospitals, schools, and other public services.
Yet those official condemnations have not been followed by the full and effective force of governmental power necessary to stop these abuses. And proclamations alone do not relieve the nation’s political leadership of its larger responsibility to protect foreign nationals residing within its borders and to uphold the international human-rights obligations to which South Africa has committed itself.
There is also an irony here that is impossible to avoid.
The South African government correctly joined many other nations around the world—and, in fact, assumed a significant international leadership role, in condemning Israel’s apartheid practices and genocidal treatment of the Palestinian people.
That moral position makes South Africa’s responsibility at home even more consequential.
A government cannot persuasively demand that the world recognize the humanity, dignity, legal rights, and physical safety of vulnerable people elsewhere while failing to use the full force of its own lawful governmental authority to protect vulnerable people within its own borders.
Political leaders must understand that words have powerful consequences. And bad actions—or governmental inaction in response to bad behavior—can weaken the moral power of your words even when those words, as in the case of the Palestinian people, are expressing a great moral truth.
When desperately poor and unemployed citizens are repeatedly encouraged to see migrants as the principal explanation for their suffering, lawful immigration enforcement can easily become entangled with something much uglier: the political legitimization of the immigrant as national enemy.
And that is where the moral leadership test begins.
I have to believe that South Africa’s government ministries, universities, economic institutions, and policy organizations have access to highly qualified economists capable of providing detailed, data-based explanations of the country’s economic problems.
Those economists can surely explain that foreign-owned businesses can create jobs; that immigrant workers and families pay rent, purchase food, clothing, transportation, and other goods and services; that legal migrants contribute economically; and that removing migrants cannot magically repair failing municipalities, reopen factories, eliminate corruption, improve public education, rebuild infrastructure, or create millions of sustainable jobs.
Indeed, South Africa’s present circumstances make the scapegoating argument particularly difficult to defend.
After intensified immigration enforcement and large-scale deportations, South Africa’s official unemployment rate did not miraculously collapse.
It rose—from 32.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026 to 33.6 percent in the second quarter.
Of course, that does not prove that deportations caused unemployment to rise.
But it does demonstrate something politically important:
Removing immigrants is not an economic-development policy.
You cannot deport your way to national prosperity.
You cannot intimidate your way to industrialization.
You cannot mob-rule your way to technological advancement.
And you cannot blame African migrants into creating millions of well-paying jobs for native South Africans.
At some point, the citizens of South Africa must be permitted to ask the people actually governing them:
Where is our nation’s economic-development plan that does not require expulsion marching mobs?
That question becomes especially urgent after decades of post-apartheid governance.
South Africa inherited grotesque racial inequality, deliberately engineered educational deprivation, massive wealth disparities, severe spatial segregation, and an economy constructed under colonialism and apartheid to benefit a white racial minority. No serious analysis should pretend that those structural inheritances disappeared when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison or when Black South Africans finally entered the voting booth as free citizens.
But historical explanation cannot become a permanent exemption from present-day governmental accountability.
There eventually comes a time when liberation movements that become governing parties must be evaluated not simply by the heroism of the struggle they once led, but by the quality of the society they subsequently build.
And that is where the ANC must face some extremely uncomfortable questions.
How many decades of political power must pass before corruption, governmental incompetence, inadequate economic growth, deteriorating infrastructure, unemployment, failing public services, and profound inequality can no longer be explained primarily by pointing backward?
At what point must a liberation movement transform itself into a governing institution that accepts full responsibility for governing?
Because blaming African immigrants for South Africa’s economic problems begins to resemble the oldest colonial political playbook—only now with a disturbing Black-on-Black African, neo-apartheid twist.
Divide people who should recognize their shared interests.
Encourage one struggling group to blame another struggling group.
Redirect anger away from concentrations of wealth and governmental failure.
Turn neighbors into unethical and unfriendly zero-sum game combatants.
Turn people suffering from poverty against other people suffering in poverty.
And most importantly:
Keep the collectively exploited people engaged in horizontal conflicts so that they “Don’t Look Up” (a great movie) vertically to identify the real source of their problems.
That is colonialism’s ancient political magic exploitation trick.
And African leaders should know better.
Which brings me to the place where, if you follow my writings over the years, you probably already knew I was going.
The Real Long-Term Economic Liberation Strategy—Education
The key to building substantial and sustained economic development for South Africa—and for its continental neighbors—is not chasing fraternal Africans across borders.
It is to strategically build African human capacity through major national educational initiatives.
That means investing massively in free, universal, rigorous, high-quality K–12 education and preparing young people not merely for yesterday’s occupations, including fields that artificial intelligence and automation may rapidly transform or eliminate, but for the emerging economy they will actually inherit.
That means dramatically expanding high-quality Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs in areas such as advanced manufacturing, electrical technology, construction technology, renewable-energy systems, automotive and electric-vehicle technology, aviation maintenance, robotics, mechatronics, cybersecurity, computer networking, telecommunications, plumbing, HVAC, welding, precision machining, agricultural technology, food science, logistics and supply-chain management, medical technology, and other skilled professions essential to a modern national economy.
And simultaneously, African nations must make enormous investments in STEM education—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Build the educational pipelines that produce physicians, nurses, pharmacists, medical researchers, engineers, architects, computer scientists, mathematicians, biotechnology researchers, artificial-intelligence specialists, cybersecurity professionals, renewable-energy engineers, agricultural scientists, and other professionals essential to national development.
And then politically create integrity-driven, honest economic structures capable of giving those highly educated African youth compelling reasons to remain, work, prosper, and build up their own African homelands, rather than continuing to lose enormous portions of Africa’s intellectual capital to Europe, North America, and elsewhere.
Imagine if African nations approached economic development not merely as fifty-plus separate national projects, but as a continental undertaking.
Imagine an All-African Economic Union and Development Plan organized around cooperation, and the coordination of infrastructure, transportation, communication, energy, agriculture, defense, education, research, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, trade, and human-capital development.
Imagine:
African universities conducting joint applied and appropriate STEM research.
African engineers building transnational African infrastructure projects.
African physicians strengthening continental African healthcare systems.
African scientists solving African agricultural and environmental problems.
African entrepreneurs manufacturing products for African and international markets.
African nations trading more extensively with one another rather than continuing economic relationships shaped overwhelmingly by former colonial powers and external economic interests.
African countries uniting to implement a comprehensive strategy for recruiting and resettling highly skilled CTE/STEM educators and practitioners from the global African diaspora—particularly those who, regardless of their citizenship and professional status, are marginalized or treated as second-class citizens in their home countries.
That would be Pan-Africanism transformed from inspirational rhetoric into a strong, foundational, and sustainable economic architecture.
But that kind of enlightened national and continental vision requires governments genuinely committed to serving their people rather than exploiting them.
It requires leaders who understand that public office is a public trust—not a private family wealth-building enterprise.
It requires governments capable of designing meaningful, measurable, workable, long-term national economic-development plans rather than relying on frightened citizens, political scapegoats, racialized resentment, and mob anger to conceal failures of governance.
Most of all, it requires moral leadership.
Because South Africa occupies a unique place in the moral imagination of the African diaspora and the world.
Millions of people who never set foot in Johannesburg, Soweto, Durban, or Cape Town nevertheless believed that South Africa’s liberation struggle belonged partly to them. I am one of those individuals.
We marched.
We protested.
We organized boycotts.
We demanded divestment.
We raised money for liberation movements.
We even pressured our own governments to do the right disengagement thing in relation to South Africa.
And, in South Africa itself, many gave their lives or suffered long years in brutal prisons to uphold the principle that Black South Africans were human beings entitled to freedom, dignity, equality, and justice.
That history creates a special moral obligation on the ANC leadership.
A nation liberated through international solidarity should be extraordinarily reluctant to deny other people the right to exercise and experience the fullness of their own humanity.
And there is an especially painful historical irony here.
A people once subjected to passbooks should understand the danger of citizens demanding another African person’s papers.
A people once told where they could live, work, travel, study, and receive services should recoil when vulnerable human beings are threatened with exclusion from homes, workplaces, schools, clinics, hospitals, and communities.
A nation whose liberation movement asked the entire world to recognize the universal humanity of Black South Africans should be among the first nations to recognize that same humanity in vulnerable Africans who arrive at its borders.
Which brings me back to Odysseus and his journey into the land of the dead.
If somehow I could make that journey—if I could cross that impossible boundary and sit for just a few minutes with Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela—I think I know the question I would ask them:
“Is this the Africa you imagined?”
And I suspect there would be a long silence before either man answered.
Perhaps there would even be tears.
But I also suspect that eventually they would remind me that the African liberation project was never supposed to end when the colonial flag came down, when apartheid laws were repealed, or when Black leaders entered presidential offices.
Political liberation was supposed to create the conditions for something greater:
Human liberation.
Educational liberation.
Economic liberation.
Intellectual liberation.
Spiritual liberation.
And ultimately, the liberation of African people from the terrible colonial inheritance that taught us to see artificial borders more clearly than we see one another.
South Africa can—and must—do better.
All of Africa can—and must—do better.
The answer to vile colonialism cannot be neo-colonialism—changing the pigmentation of exploitation while keeping exploitative systems firmly in place, now operating under a new national flag and anthem.
And of course the answer to the historical evil of apartheid cannot be neo-apartheid—with other Africans cast in the role of the new despised and unwanted Black people.
That cannot be the destination of the All-African and Pan-African liberation journey. And I can’t believe that is what Messrs. Nkrumah and Mandela imagined.
