It reaches you via Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech, which segued into Aids denialism, blaming the CIA and the West for an alleged conspiracy, and finding common cause with Mugabe.

It is seen in common culture in the attacks on immigrants, the contempt variously displayed towards the US, the UK, Australia, Nigeria, India and its people and so on.

It is the same parochial cultural strain throughout.

The notion is that these (often perfidious and interfering) foreigners just don’t begin to understand you and all your complexity. It is a profoundly wrong-headed world-view.

I have lived in SA, in old and new democracies. And I have worked in many of the countries mentioned. I am even a citizen of one.

The point is however a dead simple one and not aided in any way by a silly little wall-urinating contest.

The notion of SA exceptionalism is just a transparent attempt (and incidentally also a very old school, apartheid-era ruse) at rationalising SA parochialism. SA is not unique. It is not exceptional. It was not uniquely scarred, dislocated or left behind. It is not uniquely impoverished or disabled. It is often, however, dangerously introspective, self-referential, smug and self-satisfied.

That understanding is where the liberating insights and growth opportunities are, where the ability to break out of tired old holding patterns of thought is to be found. Not in the belief of your uniqueness, and not even in the belief that you may just possibly be able to learn little snippets from other countries on vanishingly small points of detail selected by yourself.

I disagree with your comment on communism. It definitely was brutal and dehumanising.
Apartheid was evil, but there is no need to try to position it as the greatest evil. There are and have been other evil regimes in the world.

South Africa is not so exceptional. And a spurious listing of the two things you think you know about each country I listed doesn’t make it so. Nor was South Africa uniquely brutal, as a visit to a labour camp may bring home to you. Nor were South Africans uniquely disadvantaged by a lack of education.

Apartheid took away humanity which communism left intact? Twenty millions deaths say that is just silly sloganeering.

Communism took away the freedom of the people in those ‘nascent democracies’ but apartheid went one step futher and took away ones humanity as well!

Or alternatively, explain please whether only white people have housekeepers, maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, security guards, etc. If this is the case, why is it so? If this is not the case, does your fixation with Ms Zille’s housekeeper continue to hold its appeal and why?

If all households (the majority of which not being white) immediately dismissed their housekeepers, maids and gardeners, what do you think the impact of this would be generally? Negligible to positive? I assume this is your belief. On what do you base it?

Now there are employers who are really disgusting, pay employees less than the minimum wage, demand ridiculous hours, etc. The point is that we have legislation to hit these employers, and it needs to be firmly applied. Exploited workers need all the help that they can get.

If you have such a big problem with the hiring of employees in private homes, I would strongly suggest that you get in touch with your local Cosatu affiliates and others. Express your concerns and begin a campaign to ban certain kinds of work that you view as demeaning. Rich people can then just do their own housework and look after their own children or put them into daycare like the rest of us do.