South Africa’s Warmth Of Collectivism

The real contrast is not between cold individualism and warm collectivism. It is between systems that treat people as moral agents and systems that treat them as units in a plan.

Photo by Filip Živaljić on Unsplash

New York’s new Mayor Zohran Mamdani chose his words carefully at the moment of highest political symbolism, his inaugural address. These speeches are typically less to outline policy detail than to define a governing philosophy. And Mamdani told New York that his administration would seek to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”. This should not have come as any surprise. He campaigned on establishing community grocery stores, implementing rent control — a policy that has failed everywhere it has been tried, from New York to Stockholm — and has been proudly open about his socialism.

And in our connected world these remarks reached the sunnier shores of South African social media and public debate instantly. But here, the quote landed very differently. We have lived through collectivism’s warmth before. It burned.

Mamdani’s comment was not uttered in ignorance. He is not an American naïf stumbling into a new ideological fashion. He is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, one of Africa’s most influential postcolonial scholars, whose work on citizen and subject, indirect rule, and the colonial roots of African authoritarianism has shaped generations of African intellectuals. His mother, Mira Nair, is a globally celebrated filmmaker whose work is steeped in questions of identity, belonging, and moral community. Zohran Mamdani himself is Ugandan-born, politically conscious, and well acquainted with African history including South Africa’s.

That is precisely why his embrace of collectivism should unsettle us.

South Africa’s burning collectivism

Collectivism, in theory, promises solidarity. In practice, it requires an organising principle. A definition of the “we” that precedes the individual. That definition is never neutral. It is always enforced by power. South Africa’s modern history is, in many ways, a catalogue of what happens when collectivist abstractions are allowed to trump individual dignity.

Apartheid was not merely a system of racial domination but a form of white Afrikaner collectivism. The individual white South African mattered less than the survival and flourishing of “the volk.” Law, space, education, labour, and movement were all subordinated to a collective racial project. The system’s architects spoke the language of order, belonging, and civilisational duty. The warmth was reserved for insiders. For the rest of South Africa the collectivism was ice-cold.

And it is tempting to dismiss apartheid as a grotesque outlier where collectivism had gone wrong because it was racist. But that misses the deeper lesson. The problem was not simply who was included in the collective. The problem was the very idea that the collective may rightfully override the individual as a moral starting point.

Post-1994 South Africa tried again, this time under the more mainstream accepted banner of Ubuntu — “I am because we are” — which was offered as the moral glue of a new nation. It sounded humane, conciliatory, and deeply African in its philosophical roots.

But over time, Ubuntu was just the corporatised version of a broader ideology of transformationism, in which outcomes mattered more than rules, and collective redress outweighed individual rights. The state increasingly justified its actions — or inaction — in the name of the collective good: demographic representivity, historical correction, social cohesion. Once again, individuals became instruments of a moral project rather than bearers of inherent dignity. So although Ubuntu was never meant to justify bureaucratic failure, it has become a remarkably flexible moral alibi.

Thirty-one years into South Africa’s transformationist project the results are now undeniable. South Africa is poorer, more unequal, and less functional than it was a generation ago. Public institutions have collapsed under the weight of cadre deployment — a quintessentially collectivist idea that loyalty to the movement matters more than competence or accountability. Education has failed millions of children in the name of “equal outcomes.” Infrastructure has decayed because responsibility is diffuse and blame is collective. When everyone is responsible, the practical reality is that no one is.

Black Economic Empowerment was sold as collective redress but too often degenerated into a patronage system, enriching a small circle of politically connected beneficiaries while the state hollowed out around them. The warmth of collectivism, once again, was reserved for those closest to power. For ordinary South Africans, it meant queues, decay, and dependency. The theory of collecticist like Mamdanu is abstract but the experience is not. It is the slow normalisation of generators, water tanks, and backup plans which leads to a private resilience economy quietly replacing the public one, as seen in South Africa.

Conclusion

This is why Mamdani’s line is both funny and frightening. Funny, because South Africans have heard this sermon before, often from leaders who could not keep the lights on, literally. Frightening, because it reveals how little the global Left has learned from African experience. Mamdani’s type of collectivism always promises warmth but it has an uncanny habit of producing hierarchies it insists do not exist.

What makes the argument so persistent is a false dichotomy. That the alternative to collectivism is a society of isolated, atomised individuals, bound only by market transactions and indifference. And consequently the attraction of collectivism is not hard to diagnose. Modern life is atomising. Families are smaller, institutions weaker, and communities thinner. And the question is not whether this loss is real, but whether the state is capable of repairing it without making matters worse. Societies require trust, cooperation, and mutual obligation. But those virtues emerge organically when individuals are secure in their rights and responsibilities. They cannot be engineered by the state without distortion.

The real contrast is not between cold individualism and warm collectivism. It is between systems that treat people as moral agents and systems that treat them as units in a plan. South Africa’s tragedy is that, twice in one century, it chose the latter — first in the name of race, then in the name of social justice.

The enduring appeal of collectivism lies less in its policies than in its promise that social fracture (like that seen in both South Africa, New York and elsewhere in the West) can be repaired from above, and that belonging can be administered. But history suggests that when the state assumes responsibility for meaning, community, and moral purpose, it rarely delivers warmth.

Daniël is a South African attorney who gives legal advice by day and unsolicited opinions by night. Writes about law, liberty, and what keeps society decent.