by Lipton Matthews
South Africa has adopted the forms of modernity without the psychological development to sustain them.
The images are harrowing. South African mobs wielding machetes and clubs, forcing foreign nationals from their homes, looting their shops, and, in some cases, ending their lives. In recent months, vigilante violence has driven thousands of immigrants from countries including Nigeria, Ghana, and Zimbabwe out of South Africa, with Nigeria and Ghana repatriating around two thousand of their citizens on government-sponsored flights. The victims have been subjected to a level of brutality that shocks the conscience. South African authorities, overwhelmed or indifferent, have largely stood by as the country’s long-simmering xenophobia boils over into organized violence. While anti-immigration sentiment is certainly not unique to South Africa, the way it manifests in the country’s townships and informal settlements reveals something deeper and more troubling about the nation’s psychological development.
Across the Atlantic, Western nations face their own immigration controversies, yet the contrast could not be starker. In the United Kingdom, the state remains tightly constrained by the rule of law in how it approaches asylum seekers and immigrants, with independent courts, legal aid, and appeals processes that protect the rights of even the most vulnerable newcomers. In the United States, anti-immigration rhetoric has sparked fierce counter-protests and legal challenges, with lawsuits filed against immigration policies and robust judicial oversight of executive actions. The ferocity of counter-Trump protests suggests something approaching excessive fondness for newcomers among certain segments of the American population. In both countries, those who would restrict immigration must work through democratic institutions, legislative processes, and the courts. There are parliamentary debates, judicial rulings, and civil rights organizations monitoring every move, not mobs with clubs. The contrast with South Africa could not be more striking.
What explains South Africa’s persistent tribalism and xenophobic violence? The answer lies not in economics alone, nor in political failure, but in developmental psychology. Drawing on the insights of Jean Piaget and the cross-cultural research he inspired, one can understand why South Africa remains stuck at what the Swiss psychologist called the preoperational and concrete operational stages of cognitive development, incapable of the formal operational thinking that characterizes modern societies. The evidence from South Africa’s traditional and community courts demonstrates precisely the kind of primitive legal thinking that Piaget associated with children below the age of twelve.
Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology describes a progression through four stages of cognitive development. The first two stages, which characterize children up to about the age of seven or eight, involve magical, animistic thinking in which the boundaries between natural and moral laws blur. Children at these stages believe that objects, rocks, and rivers can see and judge human actions, that fate and morals govern every occurrence, and that the cosmos itself intervenes to punish wrongdoing. The third stage, concrete operational thought, involves some logical reasoning but remains bound to immediate, tangible experience. The fourth and final stage, formal operations, emerges only in adolescents and adults of modern societies between the ages of ten and twenty.
This stage enables abstract reasoning, hypothetical thinking, systematic logic, and the capacity to distinguish between intentions and outcomes. Crucially, cross-cultural research conducted across Afghanistan, Lebanon, West Africa, China, and among American indigenous peoples has demonstrated that adults in traditional or backward regions remain bound to the second and third stages. They do not reach the stage of formal operations. As Piaget himself noted, “it is quite possible that in numerous cultures adult thinking does not proceed beyond the level of concrete operations.” This means that adults in premodern milieus share the same psychological structures as children in modern societies, differing only in life experience and knowledge. Both groups take animism as given, credit the idea that events can be bent through magic, and treat ghosts and fairy tales as real possibilities. Both reason about cause, luck, and likelihood using the same conceptual tools. And most importantly, both approach questions of society, politics, and morality through identical modes of thought.
What this means for the administration of justice is direct and devastating. Piaget’s research on children’s understanding of rules and law revealed three stages of development. Children below the age of ten understand rules as being eternal, holy, and unchangeable, made by God, parents, or government, and not subject to democratic choice. They do not differentiate between natural laws and juridical laws, believing that moral laws rule both society and nature. Moral codes are taboos, enforced by supernatural powers. Correspondingly, these children believe that the cosmos, God, ancestors, or the elderly do not change the laws but care for their eternal status. The laws are holy. People must obey but have no right to criticize, modify, or choose them. Children in this stage also demonstrate what Piaget called “objective responsibility,” attributing guilt and responsibility to persons based on the consequences of actions rather than on intentions. They punish outcomes, not motives.
Now observe the operation of traditional courts in South Africa. These courts, known as dikgoro among Sotho-speaking peoples or inkundla among Nguni-speaking peoples, function under the leadership of a chief who acts as judge. Adult males attend sessions and participate in cross-examining parties and witnesses, but women are strictly excluded. The procedure aims to reconcile victim and offender, with criminal and civil cases often heard simultaneously. In such courts, an offender may be sentenced to punishment and compensation at the same trial, and the accused person must prove their own innocence. Legal representation does not exist. The trial takes place in public, with all allowed to attend, ask questions, and offer input.
The case of Mononono village in 1997 illustrates the problem. A widow objected to the Bakgatla mourning custom requiring her to sprinkle a herb called “mogaga” on her pathway each time she left her yard. She refused on religious grounds. The tribal authority sentenced her to confinement in her yard for the entire twelve-month mourning period. The traditional court made no effort to distinguish between the woman’s intentions and the cultural expectation, between her religious convictions and the community’s custom. They punished an outcome rather than evaluating a motive, exactly as children do in Piaget’s experiments.
The kangaroo courts that emerged in South African townships during the anti-apartheid struggle provide even more troubling evidence. These courts, dominated by young men, exhibited what can only be described as the most primitive forms of justice. In Everton township in Gauteng, a man who fought with his wife was assaulted by kangaroo court members who arrived at his home at midnight, pulled him from his bed, and struck him with a broken bottle. No investigation was conducted. No attempt was made to establish facts. The accusation itself was sufficient punishment. In another case, a kangaroo court adjudicator allowed personal animosity toward a woman to cloud his judgment when she reported her husband for adultery. Rather than examining the case on its merits, he abused his position to punish the woman he disliked.
In Soweto, a young boy accused of snatching a handbag was brutally beaten and stoned by a group of women. He was bleeding and swollen, and it subsequently transpired that he was the wrong person. The mob had not established his identity or guilt; they had simply acted on emotion. Similarly, the community of Riverband near Randburg developed its own constitution, with all digressions punishable by eviction. Three executive members were evicted for allegedly embezzling community funds, again without any proper legal process.
What characterizes these kangaroo courts is precisely what Piaget identified in children’s understanding of justice. Emotion governs their judgments, not reason. Outcomes get punished while intentions go uninvestigated. Formal procedures for establishing facts, or for protecting the rights of the accused, simply don’t exist. A “law and order” mentality prevails, the same one Piaget identified in children under twelve, who favor severe punishment and revenge and show no capacity for proportionality, reconciliation, or compensation. The younger children in Piaget’s Swiss survey demanded punishment for a child who clumsily lost a roll, while every child over thirteen rejected punishment and demanded compassion. The kangaroo courts of South Africa’s townships reflect the same cognitive immaturity.
The connection to xenophobic violence is direct. When South African mobs attack foreign nationals, they are not engaged in sophisticated political reasoning or economic calculation. They are manifesting the same primitive psychological structures that produce animistic belief systems, objective responsibility, and kangaroo justice. The mob does not distinguish between the immigrant who deprived him of a job and the immigrant who runs a legitimate business. They do not evaluate intentions or circumstances. They punish the foreigner for being foreign, for being present, and for being the convenient object of their resentment. This is an objective responsibility elevated to a political principle.
The historical record here is extensive. Societies across the world, from Aboriginal Australia to classical Greece to medieval Europe, showed the same psychological structures. Guilt was determined through ordeals involving fire or poison; courtrooms handed down official punishments against animals and even inanimate objects; sentences were brutal and wildly out of proportion to the offense; and law itself was treated as sacred, fixed, and handed down from the gods. None of these societies had developed the formal operational thinking required for abstract reasoning about justice, proportionality, human rights, or the rule of law. They were stuck, as South Africa remains stuck, in the psychological stage of childhood.
However, South Africa lacks the cognitive development of the typical Western society. The country is not yet at the formal operational stage, and its legal institutions reflect this fact. The Constitution of South Africa recognizes traditional leaders and requires courts to apply customary law, but as the South African Law Commission has noted, traditional courts need to be alerted that “corporal punishment is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.” The very existence of this recommendation reveals the gap between constitutional principles and traditional practice. The Constitution may be a formal operational document, but the traditional courts remain concrete operational. They operate according to the same logic that governed medieval European customary law, which, as historian Fritz Kern described, was understood as part of nature, cosmos, and God, something people had to obey but could not make or change. The traditional courts of South Africa manifest the same “holy law” ideology, and the kangaroo courts of the townships manifest the same gap between holy ideology and scant reality.
South Africa’s persistent tribalism, its inability to build a unified national identity, its chronic violence, and its resistance to democratic institutions all reflect the same cognitive deficit. They are, in Piaget’s terms, operating at the level of concrete operations, unable to grasp abstract principles of justice, unable to distinguish between their immediate emotions and the rights of others. Hence, the vigilante violence against immigrants is not an isolated phenomenon, nor is it simply a matter of economic competition or political failure. It is the manifestation of a society that has not yet developed the cognitive capacity for abstract reasoning about justice, human rights, and the rule of law. It is a society that treats foreigners the way Piaget’s children treat the clumsy child who dropped a roll, with punishment rather than compassion, with emotion rather than reason, with objective responsibility rather than a nuanced evaluation of intentions and circumstances.
The mob does not see the immigrant as a person with intentions, circumstances, and rights. They see the foreigner as the object of their resentment, the cause of their problems, the figure onto whom they can project their frustrations. This is objective responsibility on a national scale. It is the same cognitive deficit that makes children believe that the bridge collapsed to punish the thieves, that animals can be tried and executed, that objects can see and judge human actions. The foreigner is the bridge, the animal, the object. He is there to be punished, regardless of his intentions or guilt.
South Africa, in this sense, is not yet a modern society in the psychological sense. It has adopted the outward forms of modernity, a constitution, a bill of rights, democratic institutions, but these forms are not deeply rooted in the cognitive structures of its people. The solution, such as it is, lies in education, economic development, and the slow process of psychological maturation. It lies in the patient work of building institutions that can teach people to think in abstract terms, to distinguish between intentions and outcomes, to see the humanity in others. It lies in the continued efforts of the South African Law Commission to bring traditional courts into compliance with the constitution. It lies, ultimately, in the same process of cognitive development that has transformed every other society from premodern to modern.
South Africa has adopted the forms of modernity without the psychological development to sustain them. It has the constitution of a modern society with the mind of a child. Until that gap is closed, the violence will continue. Until South Africa reaches the formal operational stage, the mobs will rule the townships, the traditional courts will rule the villages, and the immigrants will run for their lives. The tragedy of South Africa is not just political or economic. It is psychological, and like all psychological deficits, it will take time, effort, and pain to overcome.
Lipton Matthews is a researcher and podcaster. He is a regular contributor to American
Greatness. In addition, his work has been featured in Mises, The
Federalist, Chronicles, American Thinker, Epoch Times, and other
publications. He is also author of Busting African Delusions:
Institutions, Human Capital, and the Path to Progress. He can be reached
at lo_matthews@yahoo.com.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/13/the-tribal-mind-understanding-south-africas-xenophobic-violence-through-developmental-psychology/
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