To foragers, change was immanent in the environment—it happened all the time, when the wind blew, the rain fell, or an elephant cleared a new path. But change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient precedents or future ambitions.

Foragers like the Ju/’hoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic diseases, despotism, and war, it was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange, or distribute, the more miserable angels of our nature took over.

In the eyes of apartheid’s victims, that is, South Africa’s traumatic history has never been fully integrated into the life of the nation: it is not without reason, therefore, that sections of the public continue to call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘2.0’. From the perspective of a psychoanalytically inclined psychotherapist, a case can surely be made linking this dissociative amnesia to our propensity for committing and repeating the kinds of acts that are considered heinous by any moral yardstick - all in all, an unconscious attempt to master the original traumas inflicted by colonial and apartheid rule.

Still, as the Fanonian scholar Hussein Bulhan explains, colonisers are basically tragic figures. On the one hand, they need the colonised to remain in their place, to serve as the unquestioning repository of their projections - a fate that no human being will tolerate indefinitely. On the other, since the colonial relationship is effectively a recapitulation of the master-slave dialectic, the coloniser never feels recognised as a human - because the act of recognition is made by a slave and is therefore worthless. It is this hapless situation that creates what the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève famously called the existential impasse of the master. Such an impasse confronts, arguably, many white South Africans today.

In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argues that the civilisational setup is antithetical to human happiness: the individual quest for freedom - specifically, the discharge of the sexual and aggressive drives - is thwarted repeatedly by societal demands for conformity. And yet, despite identifying easily with two sources of our suffering - the awesome power of the natural world and the hopeless fragility of the human constitution - we are less inclined to concede as the third, and main, source of that suffering the lockstep marching of state and society. In Freud’s view, “When we start considering this possibility, we come across a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell on it. This contention holds that what we call our civilisation is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilisation, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilisation.