A disclaimer first: this piece is not exactly original, as it draws heavily from a recent Twitter thread by Zakes Mda, the acclaimed South African novelist, poet and playwright who currently lives in the US, where he is a professor of creative writing.

The Twitter thread in question mentions a 2016 novel titled White Spiritual Boy that was written by a fellow called William de Berg. It is about a cash-loaded Asian family called the White Dragon Family. One thing about this family is that they have their hearts in the right place: they intend investing their billions in initiatives to end the scourge of poverty, which afflicts billions worldwide. However, this loot gets stolen (pun unintended) by Western hijackers, and two members of the family, Rachel and her lover White Spiritual Boy, lead a campaign to recover the billions.

There are uncanny similarities between this work of fiction and real-life South Africa. First, the author’s name sounds South African – but he is decidedly an American who, when he is not writing, engages in his other pursuit, which is science, as in real science; not stuff like communication, sociology and suchlike, which they term social sciences.

Second, the name of the generous billionaire family should ring a bell in this country. Remember one Tokyo Sexwale? He reached a level of global prominence in the immediate aftermath of Chris Hani’s assassination back in 1993 when images of him at the murder scene, with Hani’s lifeless body at his feet, were beamed on to television screens across the world. He would go on to become Gauteng’s first Premier. This was followed by a foray into business, during which time he is said to have really coined it. Some say he is a billionaire now, at least in rand terms. He did stage a political comeback, serving in Jacob Zuma’s first Cabinet as the Minister of Human Settlements. However, he fell out with Zuma and was “relieved of duties”.

After he was ejected from Cabinet, Sexwale decided to lie low, only to resurface in 2021, when he claimed that an amount of R110-trillion (yes, trillion, not millions or billions) that had been donated by an overseas benefactor to fund poverty alleviation and free education in this country had been spirited away from the South African Reserve Bank. The benefactor was a trust which supposedly had Sexwale as its proxy in Mzansi. And the name of the trust? You guessed it! It was the White Spiritual Boy Trust.

Clearly, our Tokyo, a one-time Presidential hopeful, was scammed. Had he been a literature lover, chances are that he would have been aware of De Berg’s novel, which was published five years before he made his sensational claims, and would have been able to see the crowd behind the Spiritual White Boy Trust for the scammers they are.

As Mda points out in his Twitter thread, only two short years later, we no longer talk about the donated trillions, which, as he put it, now reside in their “original place of existence – fiction”.

For me, a key takeaway from all this is that we get scammed, forget about this in no time and continue as if nothing has happened. A prominent scammers group are the politicians who promise us heaven on earth but prioritise lining their own pockets instead of fulfilling their manifestos once elected. We are going to hear a lot of the promises in the next 12 months or so as the different political parties try to win our hearts and minds. Some will say they have magic wands that make blackouts disappear before you can say loadshedding. Others will say that, with them at the helm, potholes will be filled up in weeks. Please, don’t be like Sexwale, who could not recognise a scam when he saw one.