This opinion piece argues that the time is almost ripe for a liberal party in South Africa, and Herman Mashaba is one of the players who thinks that he is the one to lead the project.

Despite the fact that indigenous languages were declared official languages in the ‘new’ South Africa, they have so far failed to match the growth of Afrikaans usage since 1948. With the ‘Rainbow Nation’ idea suppressing African nationalism, South Africa is left with no language that can be considered as truly national.

In the mainstream studies there is an argument that no slaves were harvested from South Africa. This is from European tendencies of treating South Africa as if it were separate from the rest of the continent. In his article ‘Slavery, social incorporation and surplus extraction; the nature of free and unfree labour in South-East Africa’ (1981), the late historian Patrick Harries of the University of Basel, Switzerland, observed that, “it is commonly believed that in south- east Africa the Nguni had a natural aversion to both export and domestic forms of slavery”

"The last king of the AmaBhaca people was Inkosi Madzikane ka Zulu. He died in the 19th century in what is now Mount Frere, next to the Drakensberg mountain range. The name "amabhaca" means refugees. They were the refugees from the Mfecane wars that had uprooted the nation from its original home in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.

Unfortunately, there are way too many Makhayas in our midst – broken souls that were created in the early days after the ‘demise’ of apartheid. Many of us are Nelson Mandela’s sacrificial lambs, who are barbecued daily in the name of reconciliation in South Africa.