This is the script for my video posted on July 15, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
South Africa controls 83% of the world’s platinum, metals your phone and your car can’t work without. It sits on minerals valued at over 2.5 trillion USD, and yet it has the world’s worst inequality, unemployment over 30%, and until recently, it couldn’t even keep the lights on. None of this is bad luck. South Africa was built piece by piece over nearly 400 years. So how does South Africa’s history feed into its geopolitical dynamics today?
The story of modern South Africa really starts in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company established a resupply station at Table Bay in what is now Cape Town.
For the next 150 years, Cape Town's economy was driven by slaves from Madagascar, India, Indonesia, and Mozambique. By 1806, the city had 16,500 people, and 10,000 of them were slaves. Britain banned the slave trade the next year, but slavery itself survived at the Cape until 1834.
Britain occupied the cape in the late 18th century, briefly returned it in 1803, and then permanently retook it in 1806.
Then in 1835, the Great Trek began, which saw the Boer descendants of the area’s Dutch, German, and French Huguenot settlers leave the cape entirely to found the South African Republic of Transvaal in the far northeast and the Orange Free State in the central eastern part of the region, both of which were recognized by Britain as independent states.
In 1867, diamonds were discovered near the Orange River, sparking a rush to what became the town of Kimberley. The Orange Free State claimed the diamond fields, but Britain simply annexed them. Then in 1886, huge amounts of gold were found on the Witwatersrand ridge in the Transvaal. A man named Cecil Rhodes consolidated the diamond industry into De Beers Consolidated Mines, controlling 90% of global diamond production and operating closed compounds for Black migrant workers.
The gold rush pulled a massive number of foreigners, most of them British, into the Transvaal, where they could only vote after 14 years of residence. Britain, which wanted the gold fields and the whole region under its flag, championed their grievances, and when negotiations broke down in 1899, the Second Boer War began.
The British operated concentration camps where over 26000 Boer women and children and at least 14000 Black Africans died.
Britain won the war, and in 1910 they unified their disparate colonies in the region into the Union of South Africa. Segregation was legislated from the territory’s birth. Only 7% of land was reserved for the Black majority under the 1913 Natives Land Act, and though this expanded to 13% in 1936, Black people were fundamentally dispossessed. The National Party won the 1948 election, in which the Black majority had no vote.
The rest of the 20th century was full of racially motivated violence and political oppression that you’ve probably at least heard of. But you might not know that in the same period, South Africa covertly enriched uranium and constructed nuclear weapons.
They built these with the aim to force the US or other Western powers to intervene if the country was attacked by forces back by Cuba or the Soviet Union, like those that operated in Angola and Namibia at the time. South Africa had controlled Namibia since World War One, and after the UN revoked its mandate in 1966, it held the territory illegally until 1990, extending apartheid there and fighting a border war that became a major proxy battle of the Cold War.
You’ve almost certainly heard about Nelson Mandela, who was arrested in 1962 and later sentenced to life in prison for fighting to dismantle South Africa's apartheid system. By the late 1980s, mounting domestic resistance to apartheid, global economic sanctions, and the threat of racial civil war forced the South African government to negotiate an end to apartheid and release Mandela.
This coincided with the country choosing to dismantle its nuclear weapons. Officially, the reasons were the collapsing Soviet threat and a desire to rejoin the world. But the timing has led many analysts to argue that the government also didn’t want to hand a nuclear arsenal to Mandela and the African National Congress, or ANC.
All of this feeds into South Africa’s current geopolitical dynamics. The ANC was by far the most dominant political party for 30 years, only losing its majority in parliament in 2024 due to public dissatisfaction on various issues, including the floundering economy, public corruption, failing infrastructure, and internal political divisions.
Unfortunately, the ANC had become extremely corrupt, with officials siphoning billions of dollars from public utilities like Eskom and Transnet while the country experienced near-constant power outages, brownouts, and load-shedding that have been the binding constraint on economic growth in general.
Meanwhile, the country’s legacy of apartheid continues to cause serious harm. The labor demand heavily favors skilled workers, but a large portion of the population lacks the necessary education and vocational training, largely because Black South Africans were intentionally excluded from quality education and isolated from major economic hubs. The country’s unemployment rate consequently hovers around 33%, one of the highest in the world.
Wealth inequality in South Africa is quite extreme as well, with white people controlling a disproportionate amount of the country’s assets as the government’s debt comprises nearly 80% of GDP. And though the country holds about 83% of the world's platinum-group metal reserves, part of a total mineral endowment once valued at over 2.5 trillion dollars, its infrastructure is insufficient to fully capitalize on it .
As of 2026 though, the government is running its first sustained primary budget surpluses since 2008, the result of years of spending restraint by the Treasury, with the new coalition government boosting investor confidence. Eskom achieved its first full year without electrical load-shedding in May 2026 as well.
We don’t hear about South Africa much on the news, but it has been a fascinating geopolitical player in the last decade or so. In 2025, the current US administration cut aid to South Africa, citing alleged persecution of white farmers, a claim with no evidence behind it, along with a new land expropriation law and South Africa's actions against Israel. South Africa filed a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice for its actions in Gaza. And though South Africa is a member of the BRICS economic bloc and recently hosted naval drills with China, Russia, and Iran, the country’s political environment is heavily split on just how much they should be aligned with those partners.
South Africa has a tremendous amount of potential and appears to be moving in a positive direction, though not without setbacks. Its attempt at regional leadership in the DRC ended with 14 soldiers killed by rebel forces and a full withdrawal in 2025. But for it to achieve the growth and power that it wants, it will need to fix its infrastructure, combat corruption and inequality, and figure out what kind of country it actually wants to be.
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I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.