DZ

[DZ @zdaison]

@Sweet_nectar1 47

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[Hopewell Chin’ono @daddyhope]

This video and many others of a South African woman spreading hate and tribalism reminded me of many lessons I have learned over the years from both black and white Zimbabwean and South African businesspeople. In life, we get what we give.

I remember Samora Machel saying that for a nation to rise, the tribe must die. He made this statement around 1983 when he was visiting Zimbabwe after independence from colonial rule.
Samora Machel was uncompromising in his rejection of tribalism, which he saw as a weapon used by colonialism and reactionary African elites to divide Africans and prevent genuine national unity. One of his most cited lines captures this clearly, “For the nation to live, the tribe must die.”

By this, Machel did not mean the destruction of culture, language, or identity. He meant the death of tribal loyalty as a political organising principle. He argued that when people define themselves first by tribe rather than by shared citizenship, they weaken the nation, make themselves easier to manipulate, and sabotage collective national progress.

Machel believed tribalism survives because it serves power. That is why political thieves, looters of public funds, and corruption godfathers across Africa rely on tribal mobilisation. Colonial administrations ruled by fragmenting societies along ethnic lines, and post-independence elites often continued the same tactic to maintain control. In Machel’s view, tribalism distracts people from the real struggle, which is against exploitation, inequality, and bad governance. Instead of holding leaders accountable, people are mobilised to defend “one of their own,” even when that leader is corrupt or incompetent and working against their interests.

For a nation to rise, Machel argued, citizens must see themselves as equals bound by common interests, shared sacrifices, and a collective future for the nation not a tribe or ethnic group. National consciousness must replace tribal or ethnic consciousness. Without that mental shift, development stalls, institutions rot, and liberation remains incomplete as people cling to tribal affiliations to defend useless and corrupt political elites.

When white people are building businesses, regardless of the historical advantages they accumulated over centuries, they focus on building their lives and their communities. Apartheid helped whites not just Afrikaners or the English or Germans in South Africa, they rose together.

Yet here we are, more than 30 years after South Africa’s independence, with black people preoccupied with what language someone speaks, whether they can speak a particular vernacular, and then defining them on that basis rather than on the content of their character, weaponising that information for political mobilisation.

This is why certain communities succeed and others do not. This is why certain groups create wealth and others remain trapped in abject and painful poverty. Focus determines outcomes.

I often ask myself what white people from KwaZulu-Natal, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and white farmers from Limpopo talk about when they meet. Do they talk about business opportunities? Do they talk about how to navigate the economic system? Do they talk about how policies such as BEE affect or enhance their enterprises? Or do they sit around inventing slurs for one another based on accents and geography? They do not do that, they do the former.

That alone should tell us something about why many of our people remain trapped in useless tribal political discourse and poverty. A white South African from KwaZulu-Natal does not tell a white South African from Limpopo not to come and work there, and vice versa, they work together that is why they prosper together.

A white South African in the Western Cape will defend, to the hilt, a white person from Britain who is being attacked in Limpopo by people of another race. The mere fact of shared whiteness unites them instinctively.
What we see today, however, is that some black people in South Africaare often unable, or unwilling, to grasp the simple truth that they must stand together if they are to rise together, all because they are blinded by hate. When they allow themselves to be divided, they scatter, weaken themselves, and make it easier for others to dominate, exploit, and rule over them economically.

I juxtapose this with what we have witnessed this week, where black people are projecting self-hate onto one another. There is no foreigner involved here, so let us not hide behind the foreigner opportunistic argument in defence of tribalism. This is about black South Africans from different regions and ethnic groups insulting fellow black South Africans because they may not speak a particular vernacular language.

White people enter these same spaces speaking English and it is never an issue. Indian South Africans do the same and it is never an issue. Mixed-race South Africans, known in South Africa as coloureds, do the same and it is never an issue. But when a black South African from Limpopo comes to KwaZulu-Natal and speaks English, a derogatory label, kwerekwere, is reserved for them and used publicly. That contradiction should trouble any rational South African.

Again, there is no foreign national involved. These are black South Africans, born in South Africa, projecting hatred onto themselves. Do not insult our intelligence by pretending this is about illegal immigration. It is straightforward tribalism.

When Indian South Africans meet, they discuss business, even though they come from different religious sects. When white South Africans meet, they discuss business, even though they come from different ethnic backgrounds. They do not waste time manufacturing insults for one another. That is why they succeed as communities. They focus on what matters, not on what divides them.

I know this from lived experience. I have worked in newsrooms with white South Africans. I got my first television job from the great Debora Patta. I have sat at dinner tables with white South Africans, Indian South Africans, and mixed-race South Africans. The conversations are about growth, opportunity, and collective advancement, not about tearing one another down from within.

You will always find one or two outliers, but it is not systematic or the norm. There is no organised culture of internal humiliation based on accent, region, or language within these groups of people in the way we saw tribalism this week.

Many white South Africans came from Zimbabwe, a fact rarely discussed. Immigration discourse in South Africa is almost exclusively racialised against black people. There are white illegal immigrants in South Africa, many of them, but illegality is policed through black skin, not white skin. We all know why. It is about resources and the psychological damage of centuries of divide and rule.

There are brilliant journalists and broadcasters from Zimbabwe, like Peter Ndoro at the SABC, who are attacked daily on this social media app using xenophobic slurs simply because they come from Zimbabwe. Yet their white counterparts, such as Simon Parkinson, are never insulted on that basis. Both are in South Africa legally. Ndoro is a South African citizen. Parkinson is also legal. Yet it is Ndoro who bears the brunt of xenophobia from fellow black South Africans.

That is not accidental at all. Some people relate to whiteness through a learned hierarchy where white people are placed above black people. Ndoro becomes a target because he is black and perceived as safe to attack without any societal consequences.

White Zimbabweans who came to South Africa were often assisted by white South Africans. They were helped to settle, to find work, and to build businesses. There is cooperation and mutual assistance. Yet when black Africans live in South Africa legally, they are labelled kwerekwere and told to go home. That difference is not random. It is rooted in colonial conditioning and driven by opportunistic politicians.

In black communities, competition for scarce resources exists, but this problem goes far deeper than that. This time it is not about foreign nationals. It is about locals. It is about a Pedi South African being called kwerekwere by a Zulu South African. It is about a Venda South African being insulted by a fellow citizen. It is national self-destruction, often exploited by opportunistic politicians who misdirect genuine frustrations like unemployment into ethnic hatred.

There are no serious discussions about economic upliftment by these opportunists. There are no discussions about opening economic gates for all. There are endless discussions about difference, accents, dialects, and ethnicity, weaponised for insult and exclusion.

I know there is a silent majority that thinks deeply, and a loud, empty-headed minority that dominates social media with abuse. This message is for the silent majority. You cannot remain silent forever. You must make certain behaviours unacceptable. This is not about foreign nationals. It is about black South Africans hating each other as we saw this week.

What I mean can be illustrated by Britain’s experience with drink-driving. It was once socially acceptable. People celebrated beating the system. Over time, society decided it was no longer acceptable. Families condemned it. Friends intervened. Social norms changed.

That is where black South African society must get to. Tribal slurs, tribalism, and political mobilisation around ethnicity must become socially unacceptable. Until then, opportunists will continue to use tribe as their only political currency, exactly as Samora Machel warned.

Colonialism and apartheid were designed to divide. In Zimbabwe, Ian Smith deliberately elevated and denigrated groups, setting the Ndebele and Shona against each other. It was engineered deliberately. We saw the same colonial logic produce genocide in Rwanda. These divisions were deliberate.

That is why even today I live legally in South Africa and I am still called kwerekwere by fellow black South Africans. This behaviour is learned and politically weaponised.

I also live legally in Britain. I have never been labelled a foreigner by either black or white Britons. Racism exists, yes, but immigration is not weaponised in the same way where a white Englishman questions the legitimacy of my existence in Britain when I am there legally. Across Europe and Britain, lineage is not used to delegitimise citizenship. Politicians with roots in Poland, Spain, or Germany are accepted as citizens, full stop.

Yet in South Africa, a man born in Soweto, whose father came from Zimbabwe and whose mother was South African, was viciously attacked when he became mayor of Johannesburg. His legitimacy was questioned. Meanwhile, Helen Zille, whose parents came from Germany, faced no such racialised hostility when she became mayor of Cape Town, and faces none now as she seeks office again as mayor of Johannesburg. That contrast exposes the self-hate we refuse to confront.

There are South Africans whose families have lived for generations in Limpopo and others rooted in KwaZulu-Natal. Is it not tragic that such people insult each other as kwerekwere? It is heartbreaking to watch black people degrade one another over language.

It hurts me as a black person and as an African to see my people reduce themselves this way. People whose ancestors lived side by side for centuries now define their relationships through ethnic insults because one cannot speak another region’s vernacular.

I call upon South African thinkers, public intellectuals, community leaders, church leaders, and traditional leaders to intervene. Societies decide what is unacceptable. Black South African society must do the same. If it does not, opportunistic politicians will exploit tribalism and drive wedges between communities.

Phil Craig is an Englishman, a British-born political activist, and the leader of the Cape Independence Advocates Group and the Referendum Party. He has lived in South Africa for many years and has been publicly advocating for a referendum on Western Cape independence and secession from the rest of South Africa.

This is a man openly campaigning to divide South Africa, to fragment the country, and to turn the Western Cape into a separate state. We all understand what underpins this project. It is about the protection of white economic and political interests.

And yet, the same tribalists and xenophobes who relentlessly attack black people are silent about this. A British man is in their country openly challenging the sovereignty of South Africa, attacking its unitary status, and calling for secession, yet they do not have the courage or conviction to confront him the way they attack black Africans who live in South Africa legally. They do not mobilise against him. They do not denounce him as they do innocent black Africans living legally in South Africa.

Instead, they focus on soft targets. They direct their anger at black foreigners who live in South Africa legally, like Peter Ndoro and others, and at black South Africans who are deemed not South African enough because they do not belong to tribal or ethnic groupings.

That contrast exposes how deep this rot has gone. This is not about patriotism. It is not about sovereignty. It is about race, hierarchy, and the selective deployment of hatred against those who are seen as safe to attack.

History has already shown us where that road leads.

[DZ @zdaison]

@MacBelts Jah huyai ndikudzidzisei anaconda lock,munenge mapedza masports

[DZ @zdaison]

@stanleymakazhe @nickmangwana Until someone like Machakaire reveals the real truth

[DZ @zdaison]

@nickmangwana Hanzii naVaMachakaire

[DZ @zdaison]

@lilomatic @HonMachakaire Vaudze Linda kuti wakambozvitaura izvi.havateereri.

[DZ @zdaison]

@christo51046306 @daddyhope But mapinduriro azoitwa naNormara kunge arumwa netsikidzi😂😂

[DZ @zdaison]

@Ndihumphery @daddyhope 😂😂😂hazvisi zvebhora izvi.ihasha dziri muvanhu maererano nemamiriro ekunze

[DZ @zdaison]

@EmdakaKa @daddyhope Which ground, he is being emotional for a senior man like him by now he should understand what journalism is and how to handle it

[DZ @zdaison]

@daddyhope Hasha idzi handisi dzebhora chete.nyika haina kumira mushe 😂😂😂😂😂

[DZ @zdaison]

@daddyhope Errŕrrrrŕ

[DZ @zdaison]

@lilomatic Usatinyangadza kuruma uchifuridzira pane nyaya unopaziva,usanyepera kudzungaira

[DZ @zdaison]

@lilomatic Calculate the number of cars donated and compare that to the entire hospitals and clinics budget of the whole country.Why is the government failing to do that

[DZ @zdaison]

@daddyhope @PetersonTengen2 Dai zvangodaro ndoda kuona that size 14 dinner🤣🤣🤣

[DZ @zdaison]

@daddyhope Zikomo

[DZ @zdaison]

@killerzivhu1 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[DZ @zdaison]

@eilardkajume They also have eaten the morsel

[DZ @zdaison]

@TechMagZW @JMafume All this attention for a building that is not even worthy more than Prophet Makandiwa's church.

[DZ @zdaison]

@ali_naka He has eaten the morsel