Going all the way back to the early 1990s, it has often been assumed that some supernatural agency was always indispensable to otherwise unthinkable home-grown SA success. Given the odds, this “faith”, if you like, didn’t always seem wholly irrational.

Back then, after the grim final years of apartheid’s failure (made grimmer by its bloody effort to keep going), it almost made sense that the “miracle” narrative caught on as having the most plausible explanatory power, reinforced in turn by the veneration of the emergent, soon sainted, figure of Nelson Mandela. ..

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