Pali Lehohla and Nomvula Mabuza of IDS compare young South Africans with their Kenyan counterparts as the East Africans confront a cannibalistic state
What do you do when you get asked a million-dollar question? Obviously, you answer… but suddenly the discourse uncovers more than you sought to answer. A relevant million-dollar question concerns Kenya and South Africa, which represent two settler colonial experiences, and an unfolding crisis of existence, one with deep Apartheid structures, the other cutting not as deep.
To try to answer, the immediate obvious is about the necessary intervention that government has put in place to avert cannibalism as explicated in the Indlulamithi Scenarios as a Vulture State. This perhaps is what the national dialogue should be about but, necessary as it is, the intervention tends to be a palliative consisting of grants and the like.
In Kenya the assistive government system is far lower than in South Africa. This to an extent exposes the youth of Kenya to the immediacy of their challenge, whereas in South Africa that immediacy is muted by R350 per month and an Apartheid infrastructure that has kept the native populations hidden far from power centres.These centres of power are occupied by populations largely from the continent, Asia and South Africa’s middle-class, and as such they act as a buffer relative to the in-your-face experiences of Kenya.
So here is the metaphor for the situation represented by a dog and a hyena that meet one day. The hyena admires the fur of the dog. Asking the dog why, when times are so tough, the dog’s fur is so smooth and not scrubby like that of the hyena, the dog replies that its master feeds and takes care of it, and it even has a house. Impressed, the hyena wants to join the dog at its master’s place, until it notices a ring around the neck that looks unnatural and where the fur has disappeared. The hyena asks the dog about the collar. The dog replies, master keeps me on a leash. That’s it, the hyena says, no leash for me. Freedom is what I need.
So it looks like the R350 and other programmes are these multiple leashes. The contemplative polemic buried in your question, Mabuza tells me, addresses the form and palliative nature of these multiple leashes that lull the nerves of the youth who often sit with heads in their hands, eyes fixated on an empty future. And, she adds, each of your columns seek to undo the links of these chains. The deliberative polemic brought even more clarity as Mabuza began to plough into my metaphor: “Your parable of the dog and the hyena so elegantly captures the psychological and structural trade-offs that we’ve normalised in South Africa: the appearance of care, comfort and protection masking a deeper restraint on agency, imagination and action. That collar—soft but constraining—is precisely what so many of our young people wear. Not visible, yet profoundly shaping posture, movement and, ultimately, destiny.
“What struck me most in your reply was the idea that the R350 and other social grants, while vital in a context of deep deprivation, have inadvertently become part of a broader architecture of containment. They soothe but do not solve. They stabilise but do not transform. And, as you rightly point out, they lull the nerves while futures remain locked behind structural bars.
“Your framing also challenged me to reflect more critically on what I’ve been trying to do through my columns. You’ve helped me see that what I am writing is not just analysis—it is an attempt to unhook the leash, one link at a time. Not to attack the dog or romanticise the hyena, but to ask a more fundamental question: what kind of freedom are we prepared to fight for, and what are we willing to give up to claim it?”
This perhaps is what the national dialogue should be about.
Pali Lehohla and Nomvula Mabuza
*This article originally featured on TimesLIVE and is published with permission.
