In a recent essay at American Greatness, a Black writer Lipton Matthews examines South Africa's recurring waves of xenophobic violence through the lens of developmental psychology. The piece, "The Tribal Mind: Understanding South Africa's Xenophobic Violence Through Developmental Psychology," confronts images that have become grimly familiar: mobs with machetes and clubs dragging foreign nationals, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, from their homes and shops, looting, and sometimes killing. Thousands have fled; some governments have organised repatriation flights. Authorities often appear overwhelmed or passive. The author does not treat this as mere economic competition or political mismanagement. He locates it deeper, in cognitive structures that Jean Piaget described decades ago.
Piaget mapped four stages of cognitive development. The early ones feature magical and animistic thinking: boundaries between natural and moral laws blur; objects and the cosmos themselves enforce rules. Concrete operational thought allows limited logic but stays tethered to the immediate and tangible. Formal operational thinking, the capacity for abstract reasoning, hypotheticals, distinguishing intentions from outcomes, and systematic logic, emerges reliably in modern societies but, according to cross-cultural research Piaget inspired, often fails to appear among adults in traditional settings. Piaget himself observed that in many cultures adult thought may never advance beyond concrete operations. The result, the essay argues, is that large parts of South African society still operate with the psychological tools of children under twelve when confronting questions of justice, outsiders, and social order.
The evidence cited is concrete. Traditional courts (dikgoro, inkundla) exclude women, require the accused to prove innocence, mix civil and criminal matters, and operate without legal representation. A widow who refused a mourning custom on religious grounds was confined to her yard for a year; the court punished the breach of custom without weighing her motives. Township "kangaroo courts" during and after the anti-apartheid struggle were worse: midnight assaults on the strength of accusation alone, beatings of the wrong person, personal grudges deciding outcomes. These map directly onto Piaget's description of "objective responsibility": guilt assigned by result rather than intent, and the preference for severe, revenge-oriented punishment that younger children display. Emotion rules; due process and proportionality do not.
From this perspective, the xenophobic mobs are not calculating political actors. They do not carefully separate the foreigner who undercuts wages from the one running a legitimate business. They punish presence itself. The foreigner becomes the convenient object of resentment in the same way a clumsy child who drops a roll becomes the target of childish justice: outcome over intention, group emotion over abstract rights. South Africa possesses a modern constitution that recognizes customary law while formally prohibiting corporal punishment and affirming individual rights. The gap between that formal document and lived practice is the gap between imported institutions and the psychological development required to sustain them.
The contrast the author draws with Western countries is deliberate. In Britain and the United States, immigration disputes remain channelled through courts, legislatures, legal aid, and protest within the bounds of the rule of law. Even heated rhetoric produces lawsuits and parliamentary argument rather than machete-wielding crowds. The West's institutional constraints rest on populations that, on average, have internalised formal operational habits: the ability to separate persons from categories, to weigh evidence, to accept that outcomes alone do not determine guilt.
This analysis is uncomfortable precisely because it is offered by a Black writer. It refuses the usual externalisations, colonialism, apartheid, inequality, as sufficient explanations, though none of those factors is irrelevant. Economic desperation, high unemployment, and the failure of the post-1994 state to deliver security or opportunity clearly fuel anger. Historical trauma and the deliberate cultivation of ethnic and racial identities under apartheid left deep fissures. Yet the essay insists these alone do not account for the form the violence takes: the sudden collapse into pre-modern justice, the absence of procedural restraint, the readiness to treat entire categories of people as legitimate targets. Parallel patterns appear in other traditional or post-traditional societies when formal institutions are thin. Medieval Europe, classical Greece in certain periods, and many non-Western settings once operated under similar "holy law" assumptions and objective responsibility. Development is not automatic.
Critics will note that Piaget's stages have been challenged for cultural bias and that adult competence is often domain-specific rather than global. Some societies reach formal operations in practical domains while retaining traditional modes in moral or political ones. Others point to successful African institutions, urban professionalism, and the very existence of the essay itself as evidence against blanket claims. These caveats matter. Still, the persistent gap between constitutional aspiration and township reality, the chronic inability to forge a civic identity strong enough to restrain tribal or xenophobic impulses, and the repeated resort to vigilante violence are empirical facts that demand explanation beyond "poverty" or "legacy of apartheid."
The deeper claim is that modernity is not merely a set of institutions or documents. It requires a widespread psychological capacity for abstraction: the ability to treat law as man-made and revisable, to separate the person from the group, to constrain emotion by procedure, and to extend rights even to the inconvenient outsider. South Africa adopted the forms: elections, a progressive constitution, recognition of customary law, while large segments of the population retained the cognitive habits suited to smaller-scale, high-trust, kin-based societies. When those habits confront rapid urbanisation, mass unemployment, and visible foreign competitors, the result is not parliamentary argument but the club and the machete.
This is not a counsel of despair or racial essentialism. Cognitive development is shaped by education, literacy, urbanisation, market exchange, and institutional practice over generations. Societies can and do change. But the essay refuses the comforting fiction that transplanting Western legal forms automatically produces Western habits of mind. The violence against African immigrants in South African townships is a harsh reminder of that limit. Understanding it requires looking past both economic reductionism and racial taboos to the psychological foundations of order itself, as the work of Lipton Matthews continues to do.