Only the rich can afford to be woke

By that yardstick, nothing should refute First World Problems more than Third World conditions. In the Third World, the obvious answer to the problematising of haircare regimes is: “Look out your bloody window”. Who needs micro aggressions when you have macro? Consider the woman begging for scraps at the traffic lights and vomit up your rainbow of intersectional identities.

Yet just as Rambo once became a hero to kids in Angola, so too the West is exporting its culture wars to places it barely understands. This is the emerging story at the heart of Helen Zille’s new book Stay Woke Go Broke: Why South Africa won’t survive America’s culture wars (And what you can do about it).

Zille has dominated South African opposition politics for nearly two decades. Once, she was the crusading liberal journalist who broke the scandal of Steve Biko’s murder in police custody. More recently, she has racked up eight years as leader of the Official Opposition — the Democratic Alliance — and a decade as Premier of the Western Cape. She is also a pugnacious Twitter power user, with over a million followers, and has, the reader senses, swallowed the site’s obsessions more than most.

The book’s extensive subtitle alludes to where the South African state of play is right now: it’s a primer, for an audience who are lucky enough never to have heard of James Lindsay or Robin DiAngelo. Despite the homogenising power of the internet, South Africa has remained insulated from the full depth of the culture wars, by both the deep reality of its problems, and by its standing start. There has never been a culture of “political correctness”. While the racial fault lines are obvious and vast, the conversations around them have always been suitably robust. The gentility and euphemism that characterise First World conversations just don’t exist. It’s much harder to talk of “systemic racism” being invisible yet everywhere, as the Intersectional Social Justice movement does, in a country where only 30 years ago there was a literal system of apartheid.

But as in the West, in South Africa it’s university campuses — and particularly the importation of Critical Theory sub-genres like Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory — that have provided the initial incubator to wokeness. In 2015, the University of Cape Town held an early dry run, with the Rhodes Must Fall protests. Initially focused on a prominent statue of the man who built the campus, soon the protests’ literature began to include phrases like: “the fall of ‘Rhodes’ is symbolic for the inevitable fall of white supremacy and privilege at our campus”. Before long, Critical Theory had usurped the entire movement, to the point where the university hosted a “Science Must Fall” meeting that rejected the white devilry of Newtonian physics, in favour of a suitably decolonised alternative: essentially an African witchcraft theory of causality.