By Ido Lekota
Rob Hersov’s recent podcast titled “Is Black Culture Holding South Africa Back” presents itself as a fearless interrogation of South Africa’s deepest challenges, yet it ultimately collapses into a tendentious exercise that acknowledges white privilege while simultaneously blaming those excluded from it for the country’s socio-economic failings.
The episode is a textbook case of what US feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh described in her 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” when she wrote that white people carry a knapsack filled with fifty examples of hidden benefits that shape everyday life.
Hersov appears to carry that knapsack, claims to acknowledge its contents, yet insists that the people legally excluded from those benefits are dragging the country backwards. This contradiction renders his analysis not only ahistorical but deeply dishonest in its political implications, even as the ANC’s own failures as a democratic government remain undeniable and must be confronted with equal rigour.
The podcast’s provocatively framed title invites listeners to expect a racial argument, yet Hersov explicitly states that he is not talking about race or theories of superiority and inferiority, calling such ideas rubbish. He insists the discussion concerns behaviours, institutions, incentives, and difficult questions politicians refuse to address.
He lists fatherlessness, failing schools, accountability, work ethic, community values, corruption, and a growing crisis of competence as the real problems. But when he directly answers his own question, declaring that Black culture is not holding South Africa back, he immediately pivots to blame broken schools, broken families, and broken policing as creations of the ANC.
This is where the tendentiousness becomes unmistakable. By attributing these systemic failures solely to post-1994 governance, Hersov erases the structural legacy of colonialism and apartheid that preceded the ANC’s election, yet this does not mean the ANC deserves exoneration.
The ANC has governed for thirty years and has failed to deliver on promises of economic transformation, has tolerated corruption that drained billions from public coffers, has allowed state institutions to collapse under mismanagement, and has cultivated a culture of dependency rather than empowerment. These failures are real, they are documentable, and they demand accountability.
The problem with Hersov’s analysis is not that he identifies governance failures but that he identifies them selectively while ignoring the historical context that makes those failures more consequential for Black citizens than for white citizens. Apartheid did not simply end in 1994; it left behind an economic architecture designed for racial extraction, massive wealth inequality, land dispossession that left eighty-seven per cent of land in white hands, and a Bantu Education system rigged to produce subservient workers rather than skilled professionals. The migrant labour system, forced removals, and the 1913 Natives Land Act destroyed Black family structures across generations.
When Hersov claims the ANC created broken schools, he ignores that the apartheid government spent approximately ten times more per white student than per black student by 1990. But this historical fact does not excuse the ANC’s failure to fix those schools over thirty years of governance. The ANC inherited broken schools and failed to repair them. That is a genuine failure that must be named.
Hersov does acknowledge that inherited assets helped, private schools helped, safe suburbs helped, and that these were massive benefits. He urges listeners to stop pretending outcomes are purely merit-based.
Yet this acknowledgment becomes hollow when he refuses to let it shape his analysis of why Black communities struggle. The knapsack McIntosh described carries unearned assets that shape life chances, yet Hersov treats post-1994 outcomes as if they emerge from a neutral starting point.
He acknowledges privilege while denying its explanatory power. This is the essence of tendentiousness: admitting the existence of the knapsack while insisting the person without it is failing because of culture, behaviour, or choice rather than because of the systematically unequal conditions that privilege created and the ANC’s failure to dismantle those conditions.
The contradiction becomes even sharper when Hersov projects himself as committed to building a better South Africa in which all citizens can express their God-given talents. This language of universal potential rings hollow when delivered by someone who benefited from a system that dehumanised Black people and granted him a knapsack of privileges that those same citizens were denied.
A genuine commitment to national improvement requires confronting both the historical material conditions that made inequality inevitable and the ANC’s failure to address those conditions over thirty years of democratic governance.
It requires recognising that three hundred and fifty years of colonialism, decades of apartheid, and continuing global power structures have embedded inequality in land, wealth, education, and economic sovereignty, while also recognising that the ANC has governed for thirty years and has not fixed these problems.
Hersov’s framing treats post-1994 governance as a free-floating variable unmoored from history—an ahistorical approach that allows the beneficiary of privilege to appear morally committed while deflecting responsibility for the system that produced that privilege.
For South Africans who are not beneficiaries of a knapsack full of different privileges, this is not merely rhetorical inconsistency. It is a political blind spot that reproduces the very dynamics McIntosh identified. The knapsack carrier acknowledges the package while blaming the excluded for the consequences of exclusion. That is tendentiousness, not truth.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Rob Hersov is best understood as a beneficiary of South Africa’s racial-capitalist order who now presents himself as a hard-edged critic of the post-1994 settlement, using that inherited business legitimacy to attack the ANC, BEE, and what he sees as state failure. Hersov frames Trump-style nationalism, property rights, anti-“woke” culture, and blunt executive power as the model South Africa should emulate. Given his background – of generational wealth acquired under apartheid – Hersov’s position comes from a deeply unequal social inheritance.
DISCLAIMER: Views expressed are that of the author.
