It’s Never Too Late for Letter Bombs
South Africa survives because ordinary people perform small acts of anti-collapse.
Written By: Jessica Bothma
I sometimes think what we miss most in modern politics is not civility but honesty. At least when people hated you in the old days, they were fully committed. Now our change-makers rely on projection, performance, skincare routines, and a therapised trauma-informed vocabulary.
The new South Africa is remarkable. I am a product of its rainbow-infused nationalism, sans the critical thinking that was quietly eaten by the borer somewhere in our education reforms, between outcomes-based optimism and whatever administrative fatigue followed.
We have somehow managed to become both deeply progressive and spectacularly unequal, which feels like a magic trick. Some say South Africans had more fifteen years ago. That we are regressing, not transforming. We speak the language of healing while living behind electric fences, and discuss land justice from artisanal bakeries, a contradiction I practise more than I care to admit.
Everyone knows the right words now. People say holding space. People say lived experience. People say centering marginalised voices, often at impressive volume. It is difficult to explain the peculiar violence of being politically correct while materially unchanged.
My generation is terrified of being labelled racist or phobic in some new and creative way, so we perform equality rather than enact it. Posting and postulating do not put people on buses or keep them warm while they flee in fear.
It is like repainting our home whose foundation is sinking into the earth. Very tasteful paint, though. Earth tones. Sustainable.
I think privilege in South Africa did not disappear; it simply went into therapy. Or perhaps it just learned camouflage. It learned emotional literacy. It stopped saying offensive things at dinner. It now feels enormous guilt, but only within a fifteen-kilometre radius of Woolworths.
Guilt is such an interesting luxury. It requires safety. Reflection. Bandwidth.
Most people do not have time for ideological self-curation. They are trying to survive load shedding, unemployment, crime, rising food costs, and the low-grade psychic violence of just being South African.
And then there is xenophobia, our favourite national contradiction. Nothing says postcolonial healing quite like blaming Zimbabweans for municipal collapse. I always find xenophobia strangely intimate. We reserve our deepest rage not for the architects of structural failure, nor for the engineers of corruption and theft, but for the person selling tomatoes beside us.
It is easier to hate proximity than systems. Systems do not have faces. Migrants do.
And scarcity complicates morality in ugly ways. It means something when a South African mother cannot get her child into a school because there are no spaces left, or when a clinic turns people away because capacity has collapsed. These grievances are not always born from hatred. Sometimes they are born from desperation, from the humiliation of needing a state that has already abandoned you.
I am also wary of the ease with which privileged South Africans chant “Africa for Africans,” as though solidarity costs nothing when your child is privately educated and your medical aid is paid. Pan-Africanism sounds noblest from behind electric fences.
And yes, migration is complicated. Borders matter. Resources are finite. But I remain puzzled by exactly what vigilante cruelty solves. Dragging a family from their home in the middle of the night feels less like justice and more like brutality, threat, and theatre.
The state fails, everything is up for sale, and somehow the poor are tasked with punishing the poorer. We will do this again in ten years if nothing structural changes.
I am watching us become small. Desperation is tribal. Poverty shrinks our capacity for compassion.
Even so, our selective outrage remains almost artistic. A billionaire can hollow out a state-owned enterprise, but dare a Mozambican mechanic fix a car too efficiently and suddenly democracy is under threat.
In fairness, South Africans have always had unusual political instincts. The new South Africa is wonderful, but there are not enough letter bombs. I do not mean this literally. Mostly. I miss ideological honesty. At least the old monsters occasionally announced themselves.
Now everything feels murkier. Violence has sponsors. Exploitation has funding streams. Outrage has campaign strategy.
I sometimes think our politicians like to dress up as Ozymandias, leaving the rest of us to look upon their works and despair.
I often wonder how much of our anger is organic and how much is fertilised, watered by foreign money, populist ambition, and the ancient political science of giving desperate men a target.
Oppression no longer arrives wearing boots. Sometimes it arrives with a megaphone, a hashtag, and matching T-shirts. We march in the streets and bring entire economic nodes to a halt, as if collapse were a bargaining chip we can still afford to play. It fascinates me that we can collectively engineer shutdowns costing millions, while individually not having enough change for the car guard.
What troubles me is moral vanity. The performance of goodness. The way compassion becomes social currency. The way progressive language can function like expensive perfume, masking something decomposing underneath.
Still, I am suspicious of cynicism too. Human beings remain miraculous in irritating ways. Even in this absurd country, especially in this absurd country, people continue helping each other. Despite all this hate, I still undeservedly get called “my love” by the cashier at Spar.
This country survives not because of policy, slogans, hashtags, panel discussions, or mob mentality. It survives because ordinary people perform small acts of anti-collapse. Which is perhaps the least glamorous form of love.
No manifesto. No branding. No applause. No marching. Just mercy, because it is really quite taxing to be South African.
Beautifully taxing.
Jessica Bothma is a South African artist, sculptor, and writer currently pursuing a PhD at the Hochschule für Künste (HfK) Bremen, Germany. She holds a Master of Fine Art with distinction from the Durban University of Technology. Her interdisciplinary practice explores materiality, transience, memory, identity and transformation through sculpture and writing, often employing humour as a critical tool to unsettle, question, and reframe familiar narratives.