There’s a story that sticks with you if you’ve ever spent time in South Africa. It’s about a politician at a dinner party, a glass of wine in hand, explaining to the people around the table that truth is really just a cocktail: half of it is reality, and the other half is whatever you need to tell the public to make your point land. It sounds cynical, but it also sounds familiar. Anyone who has watched South African politics knows that feeling of not getting the whole story, of suspecting that the person in the spotlight is massaging the facts to fit a narrative. And in the age of social media, AI-generated fakes and endless online noise, that old dinner party confession has become something like a survival guide for people in power. This is the messy, uncomfortable world that Dan Corder, a writer, journalist, podcaster, comedian and broadcaster, explores in his new book The Miseducation of South Africa. But the book isn’t a lecture. It’s not a list of things you should believe or a series of arguments you must accept. It’s more like a conversation with someone who wants you to wake up a little, to stop swallowing things whole and to start asking better questions. South Africans, Corder argues, are vulnerable to hogwash, misinformation and fake news in ways that go far deeper than simply being gullible people who fall for silly internet hoaxes. The reasons are rooted in history, inequality, language, and the way the country’s media and political systems have developed. And until those roots are understood, the same tricks will keep working.
Why is South Africa such fertile ground for misinformation and disinformation? Corder is blunt about it: South Africa is one of the most vulnerable countries in the entire world to these forces. That isn’t an exaggeration or a dramatic flourish. It’s a reflection of a society divided by a painful past and an unequal present. South Africans are separated by class, wealth, employment, education access, and language. Millions of people speak languages that do not have rich, built-out media ecosystems with many reliable publications working to tell the truth in those languages. That means accurate information is not equally available to everyone, and in a space where reliable reporting is thin, rumors, half-truths and conspiracy theories rush in to fill the gap. But there’s another layer, one that is easy to miss if you haven’t lived inside the country’s history. South Africans have been trained by history itself to expect that there is always something hidden underneath the official story. For decades, the government lied to people in the most brutal and systematic ways. The state told families their loved ones had disappeared when they had been murdered. It told people that they were inferior based on the color of their skin. It told the world that apartheid was a peaceful arrangement, not a crime against humanity. So, as Corder points out, South Africans are not crazy for thinking, “Oh no, there is something going on here.” That instinct has been proven right too many times. The problem is that this instinct, which once served a people fighting for survival and justice, now makes them easy targets for anyone who wants to sell a story. The best lies are not complete fabrications. They are built on a small nugget of truth, enough to make the whole thing feel real. And once a person has accepted that initial grain of truth, they often swallow the entire tale, hook, line and sinker.
Misinformation does not just make people believe strange things. It is a weapon that can be used in politics, often with devastating effect. Corder explains that the more vulnerable South Africans are to disinformation, the easier they are to mislead about political opponents, about candidates, about who to vote for and why. If you can make voters afraid, angry, or convinced that the other side is pure evil, you don’t need to convince them that your side is actually good. You just need to keep them distracted, suspicious and divided. This is not a new trick, but social media has made it faster, cheaper and more effective. A lie can travel around the country before the truth has even put its shoes on. And the consequences go beyond elections. Misinformation also shapes what voters expect from politicians after they win. Corder argues that South Africans have developed a culture of not demanding enough from the people they elect. This sounds strange because South African social media is full of noise, anger and argument. People are constantly fighting with each other online, keyboard warriors screaming into the void. But that noise does not translate into collective pressure. In fact, it often does the opposite. One of the most damaging effects of misinformation is that it divides the population so that people cannot effectively unite to demand political change. Instead of coming together to demand that roads be fixed, that electricity stay on, or that public money not disappear, citizens become consumed with fighting each other over competing narratives. The politician who was supposed to be serving the people almost becomes a sideshow. The blame is redirected from those in power to neighbors, rival groups, or whichever scapegoat has been manufactured for the day. And while everyone is arguing, the real accountability never happens.
Corder’s book is not an attempt to replace everyone else’s version of reality with his own. He says explicitly that he doesn’t care whether readers agree with everything he writes. That might be one of the most refreshing things about The Miseducation of South Africa. It refuses to treat readers like empty vessels that need to be filled with the correct opinions. Instead, it treats them like thinking people who might have lost their way a little bit, people who have been battered by decades of carefully crafted nonsense and have become a bit too comfortable with not asking questions. The book is a wake-up call, not a command. Corder wants someone who reads it to walk away thinking, “Now I need to put into practice a more informed life.” That is a very different goal from telling people what to think. It is about equipping people to figure things out for themselves, to be more curious, to read more, to ask more, to stop accepting the easy narrative and start investigating the complicated one. In a country where the truth has so often been weaponized, curiosity is an act of resistance. Corder’s point is not that you must agree with him, but that you must become harder to fool. And that matters not just for your own sense of personal satisfaction, but for the health of the country as a whole. A population that is busy fighting each other over nonsense is a population that never looks up to see who is running the show.
What does all of this mean for ordinary South Africans? It means that the fight against misinformation is not someone else’s job. It is not just the responsibility of journalists, academics or fact-checkers. It is a personal responsibility, and it starts with the small choices we make every day. It means pausing before sharing a post that makes you angry. It means checking who created a meme, what their agenda might be, and whether the source can be trusted. It means being willing to say, “I don’t know,” and then going to find out from somewhere reliable. It means being skeptical, not cynical. Skeptical people ask questions because they want the truth. Cynical people assume the truth doesn’t exist and stop trying. South Africa, Corder suggests, has a serious risk of sliding into cynicism because the history has been so painful and the lies have been so thick. But the answer is not to give up on the idea of truth. The answer is to get better at finding it. And that requires effort. It requires reading more broadly than your own bubble. It requires listening to people who speak different languages, live in different neighborhoods, and have different experiences. It requires admitting that the world is complicated and that comfortable stories are usually too neat to be true. It also requires holding politicians accountable in a way that South Africans have not done well. These are the people who work for us. It is literally their job. And if we do not demand transparency, if we do not force them to explain themselves, if we do not punish them when they lie, we are not doing our part in the social contract.
In the end, The Miseducation of South Africa is not really a book about misinformation at all. It is a book about citizenship, about what it means to live in a society and take that role seriously. Dan Corder has written a book that is full of humor, insight, and a deep love for his country, a country that has survived so much and yet still has so far to go. He knows that South Africans are not stupid. They have simply been miseducated, manipulated, and exhausted by a system that has often been designed to keep them confused. The way out is not to accept a new set of beliefs handed down from someone else, no matter how smart or well-intentioned that someone might be. The way out is to become more curious, more demanding, more uncomfortable with easy answers, and more committed to the messy, difficult work of figuring things out for yourself. Corder’s hope is that readers will finish the book and feel a renewed sense of agency, a feeling that they can be more effective participants in this strange, beautiful, frustrating social project called South Africa. That is not a small thing. In a world where misinformation is everywhere, where disinformation is weaponized, and where the truth is so often treated as optional, the simple decision to live a more informed life is enough to make a difference. It is enough to make it just a little bit harder for the next politician, executive, or PR practitioner to get away with the old dinner party trick: half reality, half made up, and all too easy to swallow.