BE PROUD, WALK TALL

South Africa has done extraordinary things. On both sides of history. The question is whether we remember — and whether we intend to do so again.

South Africa has four Nobel Peace Prize laureates. It produced the world’s first human heart transplant, one of the world’s most innovative energy utilities, a freight rail system that punched well above the weight of a middle-income economy, and a negotiated political transition that the entire world expected to end in bloodshed and didn’t. It also produced, in the decade after that transition, one of the most admired constitutions on earth and a model for transitional justice that no country had attempted at that scale.

At what point did we decide that was sufficient — and who, exactly, gave us permission to stop? It is time for us to be proud, walk tall and invest in a national renewal.

What We Built

On 3 December 1967, Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. Louis Washkansky lived for eighteen days. The second patient, Philip Blaiberg, lived for nearly two years. The surgery was not luck or accident — it was the product of a surgical tradition shaped in part by the extraordinary volume and severity of trauma cases processed at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, now Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital, still the largest hospital in the southern hemisphere. Registrars trained there developed clinical competence under pressure that no textbook could replicate. Necessity, as so often in South Africa’s story, produced excellence.

That same necessity drove Sasol. Faced with sanctions and the threat of fuel supply collapse, South Africa developed coal-to-liquids technology that remains, decades later, among the most sophisticated in the world and is now licensed internationally. The dolos — the interlocking concrete harbour block designed by Eric Merrifield in East London in 1963 — is now used on coastlines on every continent. Pratley Putty, developed in Krugersdorp, flew to the moon on Apollo 9. The G5 and G6 artillery systems were, at the time of their development, among the most technically advanced in the world and remain in service in multiple countries. SAFARI-1, the research reactor at Pelindaba that has been operating since 1965, produces radioisotopes used in cancer diagnosis and treatment in hospitals worldwide. And South Africa was, by the early 2000s, developing the world’s most advanced small nuclear reactor — the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor — ahead of China, ahead of the United States, ahead of everyone.

Two state enterprises deserve specific mention because their stories illuminate, with particular clarity, what was built and what was subsequently done to it. In December 2001, Eskom was named Power Company of the Year at the Financial Times Global Energy Awards in New York. The judges praised its technical excellence, its maintenance standards, and its ability to provide affordable electricity while operating at scale. At that moment, Eskom was the fourth-largest power utility in the world, its 78 generating units were all in good working condition, and it was producing some of the cheapest electricity on earth. Transnet’s heavy haul coal and iron ore export lines — the Sishen-Saldanha iron ore corridor and the Mpumalanga-Richards Bay coal line — were world-class engineering achievements, moving extraordinary volumes of bulk commodity over long distances with a reliability that supported the entire export economy. These were not modest accomplishments for a mid-sized developing country operating under international sanctions for much of their development.

What We Negotiated

The other side of South Africa’s record of achievement is not technical but moral and political, and it is no less remarkable. The liberation struggle that produced Albert Luthuli — the ANC president awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960 — was, at its best, a principled resistance to a system the rest of the world eventually recognised as a crime against humanity. Archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel in 1984. What followed in the early 1990s was something the world had genuinely not expected: a negotiated transition, conducted under conditions of acute political violence, that produced a democratic settlement rather than a bloodbath. Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for what they had done together to make that possible.

The Constitution of 1996 is, by any fair assessment, among the finest national constitutions ever written. It enshrines rights that many older democracies have never formally codified, including socioeconomic rights, environmental rights, and one of the world’s most comprehensive equality clauses. The Constitutional Court, housed in a building deliberately constructed on the site of the old Fort Prison in Johannesburg, has maintained a record of genuine independence that is the envy of countries far older and wealthier than ours. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was imperfect — no instrument for processing that scale of historical trauma could have been otherwise — but it was a genuine innovation in transitional justice, studied and partially replicated by post-conflict societies from Rwanda to Colombia.

This is a country that, within the span of a single generation, produced both a nuclear weapons programme and its own voluntary dismantlement; both the architects of apartheid and the Constitution that replaced it; both the engineers of Eskom at its peak and the judges who have consistently held the state to account when it failed. The range of what South Africa has been capable of — across science, engineering, medicine, law, and political imagination — is not the record of an also-ran. It is the record of a country that, when it chose to, punched well above its weight.

What We Then Did to It

The Eskom that won the Financial Times award in 2001 began its formal decline almost immediately afterwards. The government’s indecision over privatisation had already prevented the utility from building new capacity through the late 1990s; by 2007, load shedding had begun. The PBMR was cancelled in 2010 and replaced, in political ambition if not reality, by a Rosatom deal structured more for state capture than electricity. Transnet’s locomotive procurement, announced in 2014, escalated from R50 billion to over R54 billion through deliberate fraud documented in forensic detail by the Zondo Commission. The Gupta network extracted value from both entities with the assistance of executives who owed their appointments to political loyalty rather than competence. What had been built by engineers and managers over decades was dismantled by cadre deployment and looting in less than one.

This is the honest version of the story, and it requires both halves to be told simultaneously. South Africa’s problem is not that it lacks capability. It is that it has consistently failed to protect the capability it builds. The pattern repeats across sectors and across the pre- and post-1994 divide: something is constructed through determination, ingenuity, and hard work; it reaches a point of genuine excellence; and then a combination of political interference, short-term thinking and, in the post-Mandela era, systematic corruption hollows it out from within. The Eskom story and the PBMR story are not separate phenomena. They are expressions of the same underlying failure: the failure to treat what we have built as worth defending.

What others have done from worse positions

Crime is now the constraint that race once was — not in the sense that race no longer matters, but in the sense that violence and the fear of violence have become the primary filter through which investment decisions, residential choices, and economic participation are made. South Africa’s murder rate places it consistently among the most violent peacetime societies on earth. The cost is not only human, though the human cost alone should be disqualifying. It is economic: businesses that do not locate here, skills that emigrate, tourists who choose elsewhere, the compounding drag of a population living behind walls and razor wire rather than in open civic engagement.

It is worth knowing that this is not an irreversible condition, because the evidence suggests it is not. Bogotá in the 1990s had a murder rate that made South African cities look manageable; under mayors Mockus and Peñalosa, a combination of urban investment, cultural intervention, and the radical proposition that citizens owed each other civic dignity produced a 70% reduction in homicides over roughly a decade. Medellín — the city that gave the world Pablo Escobar — transformed itself through cable cars into hillside comunas, library parks in forgotten neighbourhoods, and the deliberate assertion that excluded communities were part of the city rather than problems to be managed at its edges. The insight in both cases was identical: violence is not a fixed cultural characteristic. It is a response to exclusion, hopelessness, and the absence of legitimate economic opportunity. Change those conditions, and the violence responds.

That insight connects directly to the budget, to energy security, to investment and employment. The social conditions that produce violence are not separate from the economic conditions that produce unemployment. They are the same conditions, expressed differently. A country that chooses to invest in the foundations of economic growth — reliable energy, functional logistics, an educated workforce, a safe enough environment to attract capital — is also, with a lag of years rather than decades, choosing to reduce the pool of young people for whom crime is the most rational available option. It is a long journey. But it begins with the same decision.

A National Renewal

The practice days are over. The Choice that remains is a national renewal or the collapse of South Africa. We have the history. We have the proof. We have seen what other countries built from worse starting points. What we have not yet summoned is the collective decision to stop explaining why we can’t, and start doing what we demonstrably can.

South Africa is not a failing state that never had the capability to succeed. It is a country with a documented record of exceptional achievement that has, over the past two decades, made a series of choices — about what to protect, what to prioritise, and what to allow to be destroyed — that have produced measurably worse outcomes than the capabilities it possesses would warrant. That distinction matters enormously, because the remedies for a country that never had the capability are different from the remedies for a country that had it and squandered it.

The articles in this series are attempts to name specific choices: the energy investment that was cancelled, the welfare bill that substitutes for the economic growth that was forgone, the budget lines that reveal what we actually value when sentiment is set aside. Each is a case study in the same underlying question. South Africa has four Nobel Peace laureates, the world’s first heart transplant, a Constitution of genuine distinction, and a history of engineering innovation that countries many times our size have not matched. We also have 32.9% unemployment, a murder rate that shames us internationally, and load shedding that has cost the economy R2.8 trillion in lost output.

Both halves of this record are true simultaneously — the extraordinary achievement and the squandered potential — and the tension between them is not a paradox. It is a choice. The question “Walk Tall” puts to us is not whether we have reason to be proud. We demonstrably do. The question is whether we are prepared to make the decisions — about energy, about investment, about crime, about what we fund and what we protect — that would allow that pride to be something more than historical.

We used to punch above our weight. The weight hasn’t changed. Have we? Have we forgotten how to Stand Proud and Walk Tall?

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This article opens the Walk Tall series on shelleychilds.co.za — Think about it…