Terence McNamee is a senior fellow at the Montreal Institute for Global Security. A writer and consultant specializing in geopolitics, he divides his time between Canada and South Africa.

Every nation needs a story. Most nations are accidents of history: different groups of people thrown together by circumstance. Occupying the same territory, their lives and futures are linked. Founding stories – myths – help stitch them together by transmitting shared values and hopes. Without these stories, nations struggle to make sense of themselves.

The best stories have an enormous capacity to persuade and influence. They are never entirely rational. Origin myths, in particular, oversimplify history and mask contradictions. But if they are unique and compelling, evoke our deepest emotions, and even reveal something of the sacred, their power is almost limitless.

Why We Wrote This

As South Africa gets ready to host the first Group of 20 gathering on African soil, it is struggling to reclaim the world-inspiring ideals of its post-apartheid founding. In this essay, a longtime resident observer in Johannesburg traces what went wrong.

No country ended the previous century with a better story than South Africa. Its perilous leap from a racial oligarchy to a nonracial democracy in the 1990s captivated the world’s imagination. Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously described the new country that came into being as the “Rainbow Nation.”

United under the figure of Nelson Mandela, the country’s first freely elected president and leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, South Africa became a beacon for societies grappling with tensions and divisions. Its international clout soared.

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Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his wife, Leah, dance in Soweto, South Africa, after hearing Mr. Mandela would be released from prison, in 1990.

Sometime in the 2000s, this changed. Growing factionalism within the ANC put nation-building on the back burner. Politics became consumed by ideological clashes and scheming over state resources. Some of Mr. Mandela’s successors became disillusioned with the founding story. Others neglected it. Or even undermined it. Few saw it as especially useful in their bid for power. Soon, the story became buried in the avalanche of corruption and misrule that followed.

Today, South Africa is rudderless at home. According to an Ipsos “What Worries the World” study released in September, 8 in 10 South Africans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Serious analysts have labeled South Africa a “mafia state.” Water and energy infrastructure in Johannesburg, the country’s – and the continent’s – financial hub, is crumbling. The city’s politics have become farcical: nine mayors in the past six years.

Turmoil at home has eroded South Africa’s standing abroad, not least across Africa where it was once viewed as the “natural leader” owing to its economic might and exemplary democratic transition. The founding vision that human rights would be the light that guided South African foreign policy dimmed as ANC officials kowtowed to more and more repressive regimes. Their much-praised case against Israel at the International Court of Justice does not affirm South Africa’s moral stature inasmuch as it highlights how selective their condemnation of injustices worldwide has become.

As the world’s spotlight turns on South Africa as host of the upcoming Group of 20 nations summit, its government is attempting to repair the country’s battered reputation, fix its broken economy, and restore public trust. But these efforts are unlikely to succeed unless tethered to the same unifying vision that helped South Africa avoid the abyss in the early 1990s.

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In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela peer through the bars of Mr. Mandela’s former prison cell on Robben Island, where he had been jailed for 18 of the 27 total years he was incarcerated.

A national dialogue “to reflect on the state of our country”

In June of this year, South Africa’s president and ANC leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced the establishment of the National Dialogue. It was billed as the most important conversation on the future of the nation since the end of apartheid. It would be, Mr. Ramaphosa declared, a historic opportunity for South Africans “from all walks of life to come together ... to reflect on the state of our country.”

The National Dialogue’s opening convention in August was a chance to show the world its best face. Instead, it exposed the country’s broken heart. Key civil society organizations withdrew from the event, citing ANC efforts to control the agenda. No other major political party participated.

Mr. Ramaphosa’s intent was laudable, but his call to “reimagine” the country’s future was misplaced. South Africans don’t need a new story. They need to know why the best one they will ever have was squandered.

South Africa’s transition was a triumph of the liberal international order created in the aftermath of World War II with the ideology of promoting democracy worldwide and expanding prosperity. In meaning and impact, only the collapse of the Berlin Wall was comparable. The Rainbow Nation seemed to affirm the central tenet of the West: The arc of history was turning away from autocracy toward freedom and inclusivity.

That postwar order is beginning to fragment. It might already be dead. It is against this backdrop that a battle for the soul of South Africa is being waged.

“I am an African” and the idea of nonracialism

The current crop of leaders in South Africa came of age when the country weighed more heavily on the world’s conscience than any other nation. No policy of any state provoked more condemnation from the international community than apartheid – the system of racial segregation that deprived the country’s Black majority of equal opportunities and services – during the latter part of the 20th century. The Black uprising in South Africa’s townships was the global media event of the 1980s.

The political transformation that followed was so swift and improbable that even sober analysts dubbed it a “miracle.” Two men were at the heart of it. One was white: F.W. de Klerk, who spent his career upholding apartheid, which dehumanized millions of people. The other was Black: Mr. Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for opposing it.

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President-elect Nelson Mandela stands with President F.W. de Klerk (right) and deputy president-elect Thabo Mbeki (left) as they listen to the country’s two national anthems outside Parliament in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1994.

In 1993, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Through gritted teeth, they and their respective negotiators forged mutual trust and made parlous compromises that helped steer the country away from a violent catastrophe. In the end, white people would relinquish political control to the Black majority in return for retaining most of their preexisting economic power.

What was achieved collectively in the 1990s during a period of immense fear and uncertainty became South Africa’s greatest export. The country’s new multicolored flag and new multilingual anthem ignited imaginations everywhere with the possibility that no societal divides were unbridgeable. Mr. Mandela’s inauguration in 1994 bore testimony to this fact. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in 50 years.

The work of nation-building continued with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated widespread human rights violations during the apartheid era and sought to promote rapprochement. The TRC set a global precedent for dealing with complex legacies of mass violence and systemic injustice, influencing many such commissions worldwide. The adoption of its new constitution, rooted in the nonracial vision of South African society first set out in the 1955 multiparty Freedom Charter, was another key milestone. It was lauded globally as one of the most progressive ever written.

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Nohle Mohapi, the first witness before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is sworn in at the first hearing in 1996. The chair of the commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in red, sits in the center of the panel.

In a speech in 1996, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki hailed the constitution as “an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender or historical origins. It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” His “I am an African” speech stirred a sense of belonging and common purpose.

It was “a time of almost limitless hope and possibility,” recalls Palesa Morudu, a Washington, D.C.-based writer and former activist who grew up in a township outside Pretoria. No longer teetering on the edge, “South Africa was bursting with creativity across all spheres of society, including music, fashion, the arts. Mr. Mbeki’s speech was a crystallization of that confident new nation looking into the future.”

The Rainbow Nation narrative was crafted and driven by the country’s elite. But it drew in the whole of society, offering hope and dignity after decades of systematic oppression. Political analyst Lukhona Mnguni remembers his small town of Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape province as “abuzz with excitement” after 1994. However abstract and aspirational the Rainbow Nation might have been in his remote rural community, he recalls that “everyone had buy-in” and wanted to participate in this story.

South Africa’s hard-earned moral authority enabled it to recover from its political and economic isolation. Tackling its profound structural challenges would take time. Wealth remained overwhelmingly concentrated within the white population. Vast inequalities persisted.

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South African student protesters in Soweto use cars as roadblocks during unrest in 1976.

Diplomatic gains were more immediate and pronounced. Under Mr. Mandela, South Africa built up an enormous reserve of political capital, promoting the transition story to enhance its role around the globe. In 1999, it became a founding member of and the only African country within the G20, which comprises the world’s largest economies.

The new government also leveraged in its diplomacy the dismantlement of the apartheid regime’s secret nuclear weapons arsenal. Portraying itself as an exemplary convert to the nonnuclear club after years as one of the world’s worst offenders, South Africa became a leading voice on nonproliferation and was instrumental in the successful continent-wide negotiations on declaring Africa a nuclear weapons-free zone.

By the time Mr. Mandela left office in 1999 and was replaced by his deputy, Mr. Mbeki, South Africa’s founding story had proved its worth in advancing reconciliation and rewiring the state. “Every country has an underlying story about the ‘why’ of its existence, and that legitimizes its social and political contract,” Martin Kimani, CEO of The Africa Center and formerly Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, explains. “In this regard, the psychic, political, and financial value of the South African story was simply incalculable.”

Mr. Mandela knew better than anyone that the work had only just begun. “Rainbowism” was not a panacea for resolving the deep-rooted legacies of apartheid. But powerful myths and images could shift mindsets, enabling substantive reforms. “Appearances constitute reality,” Mr. Mandela once told Richard Stengel, the ghostwriter of his book “Long Walk to Freedom.”

Economic inequality: a challenge to nonracial ideals

Under Mr. Mbeki’s watch, the rhetoric gradually shifted from idealistic unity to a recognition that old fault lines were beginning to widen again. Gross inequalities could turn the Rainbow Nation into “two nations,” warned Mr. Mbeki, “one black and poor, one white and well off.”

After Mr. Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, president from 2009 to 2018, positioned himself as a defender of marginalized Black people and fanned historical grievances – mostly as cover for his administration and cronies to steal huge sums of public funds. Mr. Zuma and his core supporters viewed the founding story as an obstacle in their way. Most of the ANC went along with him.

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Former South African President Jacob Zuma (center), accused of corruption, consults with his legal team at the High Court in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 2022.

Predictably, the economy tanked. The story of South Africa began to be contested. Within months of Mr. Mandela’s passing, his legacy was being reappraised by younger Black iconoclasts and graduates with little prospect of finding work. They were joined by ANC breakaway groups, such as the Economic Freedom Fighters. Their version of the negotiated settlement with the white regime framed it as a defeat, courtesy of Black sellouts.

When Mr. Ramaphosa came to power in 2018, a wave of optimism swept the country. As a favorite of Mr. Mandela and chief negotiator for the ANC during the transition, he had been a pivotal figure in discussions with the apartheid regime. Yet, since becoming president, he hasn’t championed the Rainbow Nation narrative, either.

Opinions vary on why the story became toxic in the ANC. “The Rainbow Nation was always an illusion, a phantasm that could never be sustained,” ventured Stuart Doran, an Australian historian who has written extensively about neighboring Zimbabwe’s descent into autocracy. “Today’s South Africa leaves a lingering sense that most of the lauded artifacts of the transition were faux, not real. They continue to be lionized by those who don’t live by them, and they are scorned by those who see no need for the pretense.”

It can be costly for Black leaders to trumpet the Rainbow Nation story. White business, which played its own part in the corruption that made South Africans lose faith in the direction of the country, still holds most of the key economic levers.

“Most people intuitively know that we also need white South Africans to participate in developing the country,” explains Kuben Naidoo, a former South African Reserve Bank deputy governor, whose family was close to the Mandelas. “The problem is that saying this too loudly reinforces a narrative that whites are superior, and without them, Blacks can’t succeed, which is an unhelpful stereotype in resolving South Africa’s deep disparities,” he says.

Prior to 2024, the ANC had won thumping majorities in every national election since apartheid ended. When the party lost its majority for the first time last year, falling to 40% of the vote, the country was on tenterhooks. Many doubted that the ANC would accept the result, let alone strike an agreement with its fiercest political foe, the white-led opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. By them putting aside their mutual antipathy for the good of the country, the new Government of National Unity appeared to breathe new life into the wilting spirit of 1994.

It didn’t last. Unlike in 1994, there was no story to fortify the idea of national unity. Today, both parties portray it as a pragmatic necessity to ensure stable governance, nothing more. They remain openly contemptuous of one another.

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Residents walk down paths between informal dwellings, known as shanties, in Diepsloot, South Africa, in 2013.

In the days before Mr. Ramaphosa’s much-anticipated Oval Office date with U.S. President Donald Trump in May, the South African media framed the meeting as a chance to lift the public mood, a chance to reset the country’s image, not just in the eyes of Washington but in those of the world.

But when Mr. Ramaphosa was ambushed with “evidence” of a “white genocide” he knew to be bogus – pictures of thousands of crosses, each supposedly marking the systematic killing of a farmer – he failed to push back. President Trump was taking dead aim at South Africa’s founding ideals of reconciliation and nonracialism. Mr. Ramaphosa could have defended them, even while accepting that his country has a severe crime problem.

Ethnic nationalism: another challenge to nonracial ideals

The danger in not telling your own story is, of course, that someone else will. This helps explain the surge of revanchism in South Africa. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” warns Lerato Ngobeni, national spokesperson for ActionSA, an opposition party in Parliament. “If the Rainbow Nation ideal is no longer being articulated, or worse, [is] viewed cynically as empty symbolism, in its place we see competing, often exclusionary, narratives gaining ground.”

In the Western Cape, South Africa’s best-run province, according to Ratings Afrika, an independent governance assessment organization, polling by independence activists suggests that more than half of the population wants a referendum on secession.

Nationally, two populist ethnicity-based parties, the Patriotic Alliance and the Zulu nationalist MK Party, led by former President Zuma, collectively won about 16.5% of the vote in 2024 despite never having any previous success. The Black nationalist and communist party Economic Freedom Fighters, which won around 10%, along with the MK Party and a chunk of the ANC, wants to nationalize the economy and redistribute white-owned land.

The challenge to South Africa’s founding story that has attracted the most attention this year comes from the Afrikaners. Descendants of mainly Dutch settlers, who conceived apartheid, make up roughly 4% of South Africa’s total population. A well-organized and outspoken minority of Afrikaners now cast themselves as victims of the democratic dispensation. They want to relitigate the 1994 deal and win special rights. “The end game is freedom,” the Afrikaner nationalists’ most recognized leader globally, Ernst Roets, wrote recently on the social platform X. “Freedom for the Afrikaner people, but also freedom for other communities.”

The Trump administration’s focus on the Afrikaner community’s “plight” shot to prominence globally when dozens arrived in the United States as refugees in May. Exactly why the Trump administration has so readily embraced their cause is much debated. Some put it down to the U.S. culture wars: the supposed victimization of white people in South Africa plays seamlessly into narratives that are gaining ground on American soil. Others cite the influence of key figures close to the administration who grew up in the country, such as Elon Musk, who have convinced Mr. Trump that Pretoria’s race-based policies only perpetuate crime and corruption.

Whichever, it’s clear that the Afrikaner nationalists’ story is landing in Washington and, increasingly, within their own wider community. In mid-August, they broke ground on construction of a new Afrikaans-language university outside Pretoria, one of the largest private sector investments in South Africa in years. But it represents more than just a university for Afrikaner nationalists. In effect, they are trying to build a parallel country.

They base their new claims for self-determination in the failure of the Rainbow Nation to educate, protect, and provide for all communities. Many doubt that this segment of white people ever believed in nonracialism. But their criticisms about state dysfunction and economic regress are echoed across society. A sense of shared destiny is hard when half of young people can’t find work – or when only a fraction of the roughly 70 homicides recorded each day countrywide ever results in a conviction.

Over time, this gap between promise and reality has bred deep cynicism and eroded trust in the story.

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People chat as they have their cars washed at the Moja car wash in Soweto township in Johannesburg in 2017.

That it has not died owes much to the document that codifies the story: South Africa’s Constitution. South Africans can organize as they wish, confront their leaders publicly, and hold them accountable. No country in Africa has a freer press.

South Africa’s Constitution is transformational, explicitly allowing “legislative and other measures” to protect or advance groups that have faced discrimination – essentially a protection of affirmative action. It is a profoundly liberal tract.

This fact has always sat uneasily with how South Africa projects itself in the world. Officially, South Africa maintains a nonaligned foreign policy. The values enshrined in its constitution are said to be its fulcrum. Mr. Mandela famously wrote in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article that “human rights will be the light that guides our foreign affairs” and that “only true democracy can guarantee rights.” South Africa’s avid support for a Palestinian state is frequently cited as evidence.

During Mr. Zuma’s presidency, the African philosophy of ubuntu – “I am because we are” – was introduced in policy documents to provide an “African” basis for the country’s foreign policy approach. It placed strong emphasis on Pan-Africanism and solidarity with other countries in what is sometimes called the Global South, affirming a shared humanity.

In practice, South Africa’s diplomacy is hobbled by contradictions and incoherence. Its anti-Western rhetoric, fealty to Moscow, and strong alignment with China suggest that the constitution does not amply inform Pretoria’s worldview. But neither does ubuntu. It has gained some traction as a nation-branding exercise.

Yet for all its lofty idealism, ubuntu is a fuzzy concept, erratically applied and mostly divorced from lived reality in large parts of society, where xenophobia against migrants is a deeply entrenched phenomenon.

Rebuilding a sense of a shared future

It is no wonder that defining South Africa’s identity increasingly feels as if one is operating in an ideological war zone – torn between liberalism and statism, ubuntu and tribalism.

“We seem most comfortable in the trenches,” observes Kalim Rajab, chair of one of the country’s leading democracy and human rights organizations. “Perversely, it is the place our aspirations in the early ’90s sought to transcend.” He points to South African “tenacity” as the dominant motif of the past 15 years rather than a coalescing Rainbow Nation. Frustratingly, he adds, “while it is a theme at which we excel, [tenacity] is hardly a long-term strategy.”

South Africans also excel at what are disparagingly known as “talk shops,” shorthand for frequent seminars or conferences in which the nation’s myriad problems are laid bare. Yet many believe these gatherings do nothing to increase state capacity, grow the economy, or, since the TRC, promote shared understanding of their painful and tangled past.

These efforts could become more meaningful if, heeding the advice of U.S. conservative intellectual Wilfred McClay, their organizers don’t try “to edit out those foundational stories’ strange moral complexity, because it is there for a reason,” he says. “It is precisely our encounter with the surprise of their strangeness that reminds us of how much we have yet to learn from them.”

Few things are stranger and more charged than South Africa’s nuclear past. It is the only country to ever build, and then voluntarily give up, its nuclear arsenal. The weapons could have derailed the democratic transition had they not been secretly destroyed in 1991 under Mr. de Klerk’s orders. This chapter in South Africa’s recent history holds vital lessons for curbing proliferation threats around the world. Yet the story is almost completely unknown within South Africa. In my own research on the subject, I have been struck by current officials’ bald indifference to what they dismiss, sotto voce, as “a white story.”

One person sure to try to prevent the National Dialogue from becoming another talk shop is Siya Kolisi, a member of the dialogue’s “eminent persons group.” Mr. Kolisi is the first Black captain of South Africa’s national rugby squad, the Springboks, the reigning world champions. The Springboks were an icon of white supremacy and brutality during apartheid. Since then, the racially transformed team has become the most salient reference point for the country’s better angels, a visceral sign of the Rainbow Nation ideal. Mr. Kolisi often stresses the importance of national unity in his postmatch interviews. The team’s green jersey is worn by South Africans of all races on game days.

Kerry Marshall/AP

South African Springboks captain Siya Kolisi holds the Freedom Trophy aloft after defeating the New Zealand All Blacks in their Rugby Championship test match in Wellington, New Zealand, Sept. 13.

Today, white South Africans represent roughly 7% of the total population – about half the proportion they had in 1990. Black South Africans make up about 82%. Despite demographic changes, polling confirms that most South Africans believe that progress depends on all races working together – à la the Springboks. But that spirit will eventually fossilize if it can’t find expression beyond rugby.

A small but growing band of civic groups is trying to rebuild a sense of a shared future. Its pleas for active citizenship include campaigns pushing for constitutional accountability and anti-corruption reform. Of particular note is the “fix it ourselves” ethos emerging in local community networks. Ms. Ngobeni, the spokesperson for ActionSA, suggests that “this ethos has the potential to be reframed as a national story of resilience and agency, if it can be scaled, coordinated, and connected to a vision that cuts across race, class, and geography.”

Internationally, the task of rebuilding is no less daunting. Once an icon of the liberal international order, South Africa is now portrayed by many U.S. lawmakers as a pariah. President Trump said he will not attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg because of, in his words, the “bad things” happening in the country. He has called for South Africa to be booted out of the multinational organization. In the face of Washington’s growing antipathy, the South African government has looked increasingly exposed. The vast store of political capital it built up in the West could have provided some diplomatic cover during these tensions. But that has mostly dried up.

Most Western nations supported the ANC during apartheid and imposed sanctions on the white regime. Some helped establish new structures in the post-apartheid state and supported the drafting of its constitution. Their affinity for South Africa once ran deep despite policy differences. It doesn’t anymore.

South Africa’s tradition of national resilience

Within the country, amid seemingly never-ending crises, people are desperate for a way to convey their attachment to and hope for their nation. The respected pan-African pollster Afrobarometer paints a worrying picture of a nation lost and confused. Its 2025 survey shows that, while support for democracy is rising, half of South Africans polled would prefer military rule – up nearly double from its last study in 2022.

“I was effectively born into the Rainbow Nation,” says Thabiso Masigo, head of a nonprofit focused on child welfare and education in Soweto, the township in Johannesburg that was at the heart of the anti-apartheid struggle. “Growing up in Soweto, we lived under the belief that change was coming for everyone. But no one in government really talks about it anymore. Their priorities changed. Everything became about business and making money – for themselves and those connected to them.” He laments that so few South Africans openly “push the story now” but remains committed to “trying to make the country work for everyone.”

Mr. Masigo is part of one of the great political sagas of our time. The transition from apartheid to a free, nonracial society is as close to sacred as national stories can get.

Since the turn of the century, the Rainbow Nation myth has been increasingly portrayed as irrelevant to the business of running South Africa and renewing its promise. Yet, as writer Steve Vizard sagely observed, powerful national myths like that “don’t get in the way of the operation of the nation; they are the operation of the nation.”

Leaders like Mr. Mandela and Mr. Tutu understood that. They grasped the unique power of South Africa’s founding story to help it overcome the devastating legacies of the past. In trying to make the Rainbow Nation a reality, they changed their country for the better.

That fact is probably not lost on the determined South Africans trying to reboot the fragile nation-building project. They can draw on a rich tradition of national resilience and a defiance of the odds. Their success would be a win for humanity.