South Africa has entered yet another season in which truth and lies are locked in dialectical confrontation. Across the republic, the word “lie” has become the refrain of every quarrel. Senior officials and politicians accuse one another of deceit. Security chiefs and factionalists brand their rivals conspirators. Journalists are denounced as propagandists. Former comrades unmask each another as traitors. Lies have become a partisan slogan. The contest is no longer about policy — it is about the very meaning of truth itself.
The security cluster sits at the heart of this storm. Its members wield leaks and affidavits as weapons. Each camp claims moral authority, insisting that a higher purpose justifies its deception. Exposure is treated as betrayal. The spectacle has turned the language of governance into a battle over what is real and who profits from the lie. Déjà vu; another act in the theatre of national suspicion.
This quarrel with truth is not new. It is the recurrence of an old condition — a nation addicted to invention. This began long before the present crisis. Our country has lived by its fictions, from civilisation and racial peril to reconciliation and moral exceptionalism.
Recently, a peculiar fiction has returned to the national arena: the story of “white genocide”. It moves through talk radio, tabloids, memes and conspiracy networks. It claims that white South Africans are victims of a silent extermination. A prominent head of state cites it as proof of postcolonial vengeance, while local opportunists use it for sympathy and fear of transformation. Yet beneath its hysteria lies an old structure. It is inheritance — the colonial imagination’s deceit repurposed by fragile men trying to recover meaning in a democracy.
The genius of South African lying has always been its adaptability within absurdity. The colonial order justified itself through the fiction of civilisation and the lie of an empty land; the apartheid state through the paranoia of racism; and the democratic epoch through a myth of moral exceptionalism. Each age needs its lie, yet the structure remains, a class in crisis disguising power by inventing threats. The “white genocide” panic — like the swartgevaar before it — serves the same function. It inflames identity to obscure material contradiction.
In The Decay of Lying, from where the title of this article is drawn, Oscar Wilde wrote that art improves upon nature through invention. Later, Louis Kronenberger warned that civilisations can become conceited, with cleverness mistaken for insight and vanity for virtue. Between Wilde’s artifice and Kronenberger’s conceit lies the moral arc of our politics. We have mastered invention yet lost sincerity.
In democratic South Africa, we imagined moral exceptionalism would spare us the malice that haunts other post-colonies. That confidence became a national vanity; the belief that we could transcend history by declaring ourselves truly democratic and non-racial.
In democratic South Africa, we imagined moral exceptionalism would spare us the malice that haunts other post-colonies. That confidence became a national vanity; the belief that we could transcend history by declaring ourselves truly democratic and non-racial.
Ours has become a world where lies are vulgar facts, not noble sounds. Truth-telling has been reduced to a transaction. The desire to sell it in patriotic slogans and moral rhetoric matches the hunger for deceit. We no longer exchange truths. We barter illusions. Faith in renewal has decayed into performance.
Our lies are structural. They sustain the state. South Africa — that great experiment in confession and rebirth — has turned lying into a civic form, the superstructure of our disorder. There is, of course, a lie about lying itself: the belief that those who govern must not lie. History disproves it. Politicians and officials, here and elsewhere, lie for a living, not as a moral failure but as an occupational reflex. Power demands deceit as oxygen. Lying is not an exception but a rule, the lifeblood of governance.
Over three decades, public life has been built upon well-curated falsehoods, repeated until they hardened into truths. These are not petty evasions but grand ideological fictions. The first was permanence; the belief that domination, whether colonial, apartheid or democratic, could endure without consequence. The second was progress, in which 1994 itself was a cure and prize while the economic base and ownership remained untouched. The third was inevitability, that corruption was an accident, not a design, a deviation rather than the outcome of a system where office became a route to accumulation.
Then came exceptionalism, our opium. We told ourselves we were different, proof that forgiveness could replace justice, that moral symbolism could replace material repair. It served the new elite while pacifying the masses with the spectacle of moral victory. Exceptionalism numbed the pain and convinced us that the system, by virtue of its Constitution, could not fail.
To this list add the lie of the patriotic bourgeoisie. We were told a new class of African capitalists would rise to build a just economy guided by solidarity. Frantz Fanon warned about a bourgeoisie that consumes rather than produces, a parasitic class confusing private luxury with national destiny. The postcolonial elite inherits the coloniser’s privileges and preserves the machine of oppression.
In a democracy built atop colonial exclusions, why believe the newly-rich would prove more patriotic than their predecessors? The democratic edifice was built not upon solidarity but spectacle, accumulation as proof of arrival. Its gods were not comradeship or purpose but luxury vehicles, light-skinned girls, gated estates and offshore accounts. The patriotic bourgeois never arrived. He was invented to moralise indifference. Conspicuous consumption was made to stand for transformation. What emerged was a comprador class, fluent in democracy’s language yet devoted to extraction. Flaunting became empowerment’s symbol. In truth, it revealed fragility, a class desperate for recognition, mistaking visibility for freedom. Like its colonial predecessor, it measured worth not in production or public good but in possessions.
Most poisonous of all was the swartgevaar, a grotesque invention of apartheid imagination. Born as ruling-class hysteria, it divided the working class and justified oppression. Lies, if they endure, seek revenge. As the post-apartheid order slid into factionalism, patronage and violence, the old falsehood began to resemble truth. Not because it became true but because failure made it believable. A myth forged in the old state was resurrected by despair in the new. Yesterday’s fear of black uprising became today’s lament of white dispossession. The lie survives by changing costume. Some senior white liberals live by it still; black people have always been suspects, as Oswald Mtshali writes in Always a Suspect.
Robert Shiller writes that narratives behave like viruses. They spread by contagion, repetition, anxiety and hunger for explanation. In an economy where growth falters and trust erodes, a story — however absurd — can harden into truth. South Africa offers perfect conditions for narrative infection. Service delivery fails. Governance collapses. Rolling blackouts. Exhaustion of belief. Into that wound old fictions return with new virulence. The myth of white genocide, like its ancestor swartgevaar, gains traction not because people accept its racial logic but because it gives form to despair. Lies work not by persuasion but by contagion.
Lies repeated over decades become glue. They dull perception and numb outrage. Stagnation masquerades as stability. Those who expose deception are dismissed as bitter. Even the language of reform becomes a commodity, while decay continues beneath banners of renewal.
Lying masks a class project and feeds upon collapse. Yet disbelief also spreads by contagion. When the base of power shows through the superstructure’s veneer, the spell weakens. Citizens begin to doubt again. Doubt is a civic resource willing to test narrative against concrete reality.
The task is neither a naïve return to truth nor a cynical acceptance that everything is performance. It is to rebuild a narrative where words bind, and institutions redeem. Material repair must precede moral symbolism, or at least walk beside it. Without that alignment the next lie will arrive on schedule in a new dress with old instincts.
Politics unburdened by deceit may be impossible. Power wants darkness. Markets want theatre. The media wants frenzy. Let us name the lies, trace their genealogy, watch them mutate under pressure. We must ask, what interests do they serve? Can we build counter-narratives disciplined by fact and sharpened by philosophy?
The only history worth writing now is the history of our lies. In tracing it we might sketch the conditions for modest politics, which are less theatrical, more material and comparably honest. Whether such politics can be achieved is another matter. But every civilisation begins to die the day its lies cease to be believed.
Prof Ngcaweni is based at the Centre for Public Policy, University of Johannesburg
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