It doesn’t mean it’s all wrong, but important to recognise the limitations of the source.

The police are dumb as rocks and totally lazy: look at the Boksburg tanker blast in December to see how they don’t GAF about doing their jobs.the public was standing around a burning gas tanker taking pictures for social media for hours before it exploded and killed dozens. The police only pitched after the explosion.

There is no serious border control, and any mention of it is shut down as “xenophobic” by the media and business that want to flout labour regulations by hiring undocumented migrants from the rest of Africa, despite the obscene unemployment rate.

The electricity situation has been discussed at length here previously, but it’s strangling the economy.

Sure you can make money if you are skilled, but you can make better money using those skills in any number of other countries.

The only thing that’s keeping many middle-class South Africans from emigrating is the cheap domestic help. They are happy to exploit the obscene inequality since it gives them cheap labour. They live in terror of washing their own clothes and cleaning their own toilets.

I ask because like perhaps many, I've read a number of novels by Zakes Mda and it has sparked an interest. They're wonderful books, very emotional and beautifully written, but it's like looking at South Africa through a kaleidoscope, not all that much really comes into focus intellectually. Unfortunately my school education on the country was also basically nil.