Beauty influencer Yoliswa Mqoco shared a candid snippet explaining why she chose to return to Gauteng after nearly a decade living in Cape Town.
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RECENTLY, beauty influencer Yoliswa Mqoco shared a candid snippet explaining why she chose to return to Gauteng after nearly a decade living in Cape Town.
Her reflections were familiar: the cost of living is suffocating, racism is palpable, and the social fabric feels cold, even hostile. But what lingered most was her final observation — that Ubuntu is dead in Cape Town.
She’s absolutely right. But the more uncomfortable truth is this: decades into democracy, many of us still do not actually understand what Ubuntu is.
Ubuntu is one of those concepts South Africans love to invoke but rarely interrogate. It has been flattened into a slogan — something soft, digestible, and easy to repeat. A vague call to “be kind”. But Ubuntu is not branding. It is not corporate language. It is not cultural jargon. And it is certainly not a personality trait.
Ubuntu is a philosophical system. An ancient Southern African framework that defines personhood, morality, and social responsibility.
At its core is the principle: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other people. This is not metaphorical. It is structural. It asserts that identity, dignity, and moral worth are not individual achievements but are produced through relationships, through care, and through accountability to one another.
In this worldview, to exist is to be in relation. To be human is to be responsible. This stands in direct opposition to the Euro-Western systems shaping modern South Africa — systems rooted in individualism, accumulation, and competition. Systems that measure worth through ownership, status, and personal success, rather than contribution to collective well-being.
Ubuntu, historically, was not abstract. It governed life. It shaped how communities distributed resources, resolved conflict, and sustained one another. Social, political, and economic life was organised around mutual responsibility. Not because it was idealistic — but because it was necessary for survival. But that system was disrupted.
What we are living in today is not a natural evolution of our values. It is the result of imposed systems — colonial, capitalist, and neoliberal — that were never designed for our realities. Systems that prioritise profit over people, extraction over care, and individual advancement over collective survival.
And instead of dismantling these systems, we have further embedded them. So now, we exist in contradiction. We speak about Ubuntu but live within systems that make it almost impossible to practise. We celebrate community but structure our society around competition. We claim care as a value but participate in systems that reward exploitation.
Ubuntu has not disappeared — it has been diluted. Stripped of its political and ethical weight, and repackaged into something that can comfortably coexist with inequality. And this is where the real problem lies. Because Ubuntu, in its full form, is not passive. It is not gentle. It is demanding. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how power, resources, and responsibility are distributed in society.
It asks uncomfortable questions: Who is being excluded? Who is carrying the burden? Who benefits, and at whose expense? And when you apply those questions to Cape Town, the answers are clear.
Cape Town is often positioned as a “world-class city” — a global destination, a site of investment, and a symbol of national progress. But beneath that image lies a city that remains disturbingly unequal, where the apartheid legacy continues to define who lives where, who has access, and who is pushed out.
Here, land is currency, not community. Growth serves the wealthy, not the people. And the displacement of entire communities is intentional — calculated, systemic, and inhumane.
This is not just about high rent or expensive coffee. It is about the systematic exclusion of the majority of citizens in a city that continuously presents itself as aspirational. And the simple fact is that: a city can never embody Ubuntu if it is structured around exclusion.
Ubuntu demands something different. It demands that we rethink not just how we treat one another but how we build. How we govern. How we distribute. How do we value human life? Because Ubuntu is not about kindness in isolation. It is about meaningful justice being strongly embedded in our structures.
Until South Africa is willing to align its systems with its values, Ubuntu will remain what it has become — a word we say, rather than a principle we live by. Because absolutely no city or society can call itself “world-class” when its streets are built on exclusion, extraction, erasure and violence.
And this is the key point: Cape Town is not cruel just because of attitudes; it is cruel — inherently — by design. Its cruelty is embedded in the systems that are maintained to perpetually extract, displace, and erase the very people who birthed it.
So the question is not just why people are leaving. The question is: what happens if this continues? What happens when more South Africans are priced out of the cities they sustain? When land is owned by fewer and fewer people? When does opportunity become increasingly inaccessible? When does belonging itself become conditional? What happens when the people who make a city function can no longer afford to exist within it?
Because that is where this is heading. And at that point, we are no longer just talking about inequality. We are talking about erasure. This is exactly what we are witnessing — not just inequality; a quiet, deliberate erasure. The erasure of people from land. The erasure of participation and opportunity. The erasure of the very people whose labour, culture, and history have built this city into what it is today.
And the most dangerous part? It is being normalised. What’s spreading is the false narrative that this is happenstance — a total coincidence. Whereas, the truth is that people are not just “choosing to leave”. They are being forced out. Priced out. And eventually wiped out. All while these extreme inequalities are being dressed up as “development”.
Once a society accepts that some people simply do not belong in the spaces they sustain, it has already abandoned Ubuntu. It has already decided whose humanity matters — and whose does not. So no, this is not about Cape Town being “unfriendly”. It is about a system that is fundamentally anti-human. Where exclusion is literally structural. This is far beyond a social issue; it is blatant systemic violence embedded into the very fabric of our society.
We are living in the ruins of the philosophy we abandoned. Until we destroy every structure that thrives on that betrayal, our society will not survive — it will decay, hollowed out by greed, selfishness, and callous indifference.
* Tswelopele Makoe is a gender and social justice activist and editor at Global South Media Network. She is a researcher, columnist, and an Andrew W Mellon scholar at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, UWC.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media.