The Rainbow Cracked

South Africa’s Rainbow Nation inspired generations across Africa with its promise of unity in diversity. Three decades later, its greatest lesson may be that coexistence alone is not enough.

By Carl Manlan, African development practitioner and thought leader

This year, the wave of xenophobic rejection felt higher and more sustained than ever before. Yet many of us owe something of who we are today to this country, rooted in a shared African history.

As a student at the University of Cape Town, I often wondered what the idea of the “Rainbow Nation” meant for someone like me – an African, yet still a foreigner. Which colour did I really represent within it? Identity through the lens of colour was a new question for someone raised in Côte d’Ivoire, a relatively homogeneous society in West Africa, where race and colour had not shaped my sense of identity in the same way.

The rainbow was intended as a metaphor for managing diversity. Enshrining eleven official languages in the Constitution seemed to promise a place for everyone within that spectrum, at least on paper.

Yet, where did we stand if we did not speak any of the other 10 languages and were still learning English? Geography, too, was rarely reciprocal: I often had to explain where my country was – an ignorance than ran across the rainbow, not just toward it.

South Africa also gave me a unique foundation for understanding the continent’s political economy. Here, economics was taught through the lens of solving for the majority.

When the rainbow’s colours never truly met

My professional career brought me back to South Africa in 2015, working to support Africa’s Ebola response in West Africa and witnessing the important role the South African private sector played. There was an understanding that what affected one per cent of Africa’s GDP ultimately affected us all.

That instinct reflected a generation of leaders who still carried a living memory of Africa’s support for the ANC during its years in exile. There remained an appreciation that South Africa’s future could never be separated from the continent. The rainbow emerged after the storm.

However, as I reflected on the idea of the Rainbow Nation and South Africa’s transformation, I found myself looking at the metaphor differently. There is something embedded in its physics that no longer holds true: a rainbow’s colours stand side by side, distinct; they never actually mix. Their parallel existence became the mirage of a diversity that was never fully realised.

As Africans, we have not yet fully recognised that the continent’s transformation depends on overcoming the divisions inherited from our shared colonial past. As Carlos Lopes, former Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, argued in his 2015 address to the African Union, our African identities were fragmented through ethnic classification and physical anthropology that dehumanised diversity.

It is in understanding the melody beneath the words that we extend our humanity. I remember my late mother-in-law asking me, at her family table, whether I was intelligent. On the surface, the question was offensive. But with humility and discernment, I came to understand what she was really asking: could I fulfil the promise that came with loving her daughter? Could I care for her as well as, or better than, she had? (For context, my wife is South African.)

Beyond coexistence

If South Africa’s rainbow have largely represented coexistence rather than truly mixing, then many of us who came here from elsewhere on the continent have had to navigate a country in constant flux. At times, we have experienced remarkable generosity and inclusion.

I recall a professor not marking me down for the quality of my English in my final year. He gave me an A+ but encouraged me to improve it. At other times, I found myself outside the rainbow’s value proposition altogether, trying to understand what it meant to be “a good black person” – a definition demanding both acceptance and denial – acceptance of a particular identity while denying parts of who I was.

It took a fellow student to open her family home to me and introduce me to her parents and grandparents. We spoke about the loneliness of being new to a country and the challenge of finding a sense of belonging. I was “adopted” by my father’s peer. His home became a quarterly haven for a home cooked meal. This kind of generosity, makes belonging possible.

Rejection of the “other” is not unique to South Africa. Across the continent, political contestation and economic uncertainty often amplify perceptions of scarcity, where fear of what we might lose outweighs the humanity we owe one another.

The symptoms of Afrophobia are like the charcoal keeping a braai alive at a low burn. It takes very little for the fire to flare up when social or economic pressures intensify.

Different African countries have experienced their own waves of rejection directed at fellow Africans. South Africa holds up a mirror to the continent, revealing what happens when the gap between a nation’s aspirations and the everyday realities widens.

This challenge belongs to us all. It is not simply about migration or borders. It is about our collective ability to manage diversity, foster belonging, and build societies in which difference is not perceived as competition.

From diversity to belonging

Africa’s greatest asset is its youth. They have an opportunity to overcome these challenges, while my generation carries a responsibility to strengthen the foundations for the next generation.

Europe’s Erasmus programme offers an important lesson. Sustained youth mobility has enabled generations of young Europeans to cross borders, study together, and experience one another through shared humanity rather than nationality.

My own studies in Zimbabwe and South Africa took me across different countries and institutions. Recruiters were curious about a West African who had studied in Southern Africa. That curiosity opened doors, but it also revealed the fragmented landscape of our continent to us and to others watching us.

Africa’s own history provides a precedent. Long before mobility programmes were conceived, continental solidarity enabled the ANC’s leadership in exile to find refuge across the Frontline States. Those countries understood that South Africa’s freedom was inseparable from Africa’s future.

That instinct deserves to be renewed, not simply as solidarity, but as deliberate public policy. If Europe institutionalised mobility through Erasmus, Africa should weave its own vision of belonging.

I would call such an initiative the Baobab Mobility Programme, Africa’s Sankofa response to its youth. Like the baobab, whose deep roots sustain life across generations, it would encourage young Africans to reach back to move forward through a shared root system across distinct nations, cultures, and identities.

Building Africa’s next chapter

There has never been a more important time to turn that aspiration into reality.We must make it easier for them to move across the continent. We must choose to leave those divisions behind.

Knowing one another requires more than open borders or digital connections. It requires shared experiences that allow us to see one another as fellow Africans before foreigners. Just as Erasmus succeeded because young people crossed borders knowing that the adults had already done the hard work of removing them, Africa’s leaders owe their youth the same opportunity.

Mobility alone is not enough. It must be matched by opportunity. African industrialisation expands possibilities for young people by strengthening the ecosystem around them: universities, finance, digital infrastructure, innovation and regional markets.

Africa’s future prosperity will depend on interconnected value chains serving a continental market of more than 1.4 billion people, creating opportunities transcending national borders.

A different rainbow

When the next rainbow rises across Africa, it should represent something more ambitious than the one we inherited.a continent whose diversity of skills strengthens healthcare systems so that the next Ebola outbreak is contained faster, whose innovation transforms agriculture so that fewer children go to bed hungry, and where borders no longer define the limits of opportunity or belonging.

South Africa deserves credit for attempting something that few societies had ever tried before. The Rainbow Nation gave the world a powerful language for imagining unity in diversity. Its imperfections do not diminish that achievement; rather, they offer lessons for the rest of us.

The real work now lies ahead: moving beyond coexistence towards genuine connection and forgiveness, replacing inherited divisions with shared purpose, and building institutions and opportunities enabling young Africans not merely to tolerate one another, but to know one another.

Children born today, like those born in 1994, deserve a story that says we transformed Africa despite its challenges.

Because we chose to face them together.

https://www.news24.com/opinions/analysis/essay-afrophobia-holds-a-mirror-to-africa-and-the-rainbow-cant-hide-it-20260814-0816
Back To All

---