Rain Dance Papers · Volume I · Essay 20

The Wild Men Among Us

“The labels change. The psychological function remains the same.”

I grew up in apartheid South Africa. Before I understood politics, I understood categories.

White. Black. Coloured. Indian. European. African. Us. Them.

The categories were everywhere. They determined where people lived, where they worked, who they could marry, and sometimes even what they dared to dream. As a child, I accepted them because they were presented as facts. As an adult, I have spent much of my life unlearning them.

That journey has taken me from a poor fishing community in Mossel Bay to the Cape Flats, from South Africa to Switzerland, from church halls and township stages to corporate offices, airports, and concert venues around the world. And the more people I met, the harder it became to fit them into categories. Human beings are far too complicated for that. Yet the world keeps trying.

Recently, Swiss voters rejected a proposal to cap the country’s population at ten million people. The debate was passionate, emotional, and impossible to scroll past — social media was flooded with arguments about immigration, identity, housing, infrastructure, and culture. Population growth is a legitimate topic for discussion. Housing shortages are real. So is pressure on infrastructure. Every country has the right to debate its future.

But as I followed the conversation, I kept thinking about an older phrase that has surfaced again and again throughout Swiss history: “Das Boot ist voll.” The boat is full.

That phrase became famous in the twentieth century and resurfaces whenever talk turns to refugees, asylum seekers, immigration. It works because it appeals to something primal: fear. Not enough room. Not enough jobs. Not enough homes, resources, belonging. Every generation seems to rediscover this fear and pin it on a different group of people. The language changes. The target changes. The psychological architecture stays remarkably the same.

At the same time Switzerland was debating population limits, international media were once again discussing xenophobia in South Africa. Watching both conversations unfold, I felt a familiar unease — not because these issues are unimportant. They are important. But because I’ve seen what happens when complicated human realities get flattened into simple stories: the immigrant, the refugee, the foreigner, the criminal, the outsider. History keeps teaching us the same lesson, that societies are at their most dangerous when they get obsessed with labels like these. Every generation inherits a new version of the same old fear.

Years ago, something happened that has never left me. I wasn’t there when it happened. My wife, Cinzia, and our youngest daughter, Giorgia, were spending the day in Waldshut, the small German town just across the border from where we live in Switzerland. Giorgia was around nine or ten.

At some point, an elderly German woman looked at my daughter and spat in her face. Not because she knew her. Not because of anything she’d done. Simply because of what she represented in that woman’s imagination.

I only learned about it later, and I still remember exactly how it felt when Giorgia told me. Overwhelmed. Angry. Helpless. Like most parents, my first thought was that I wished I’d been there — not because I wanted conflict, but because every parent wants to shield their child from pain that didn’t need to happen.

What troubled me most was trying to see the moment through my daughter’s eyes. Children don’t start out understanding hatred. They experience it first as confusion, then as hurt, and then, if the adults around them aren’t careful, as self-doubt. The questions begin quietly: Why did she do that? What’s wrong with me? Do I belong here? The act itself lasted a few seconds. The psychological consequences can last for years. That’s why prejudice is never merely a political issue. It’s a psychological one.

Having grown up under apartheid, I recognized something familiar in that story — not because the incident matched anything I’d experienced as a child, but because prejudice always works the same way. It reduces a human being to a category before it ever encounters the person.

The Martinique-born psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon understood this better than most. Writing during the colonial era, he argued that racism doesn’t just harm its victims — it damages the people who practice it too. The victim may internalize inferiority. The perpetrator internalizes superiority. Both end up trapped inside a psychological prison built from illusion. One is taught they are less human. The other is taught they are more human. Neither is true, and yet entire societies have been built on keeping these fictions alive.

What kind of pain has to live inside a person who spits in the face of a child? I don’t ask that to excuse the behaviour — I ask it because hatred itself is a form of suffering. A person at peace with themselves doesn’t need enemies. A secure person doesn’t fear the existence of others. A fulfilled person doesn’t require someone else’s humiliation to feel whole. This is part of why prejudice fascinates me: it usually reveals more about the fears of the person doing the hating than anything true about the person on the receiving end.

Years later, an entirely different discovery connected itself to these reflections. For a long stretch of my working life I commuted by public transport, and one of the stops on my route was called Zum Wilden Mann — The Wild Man. Nearby were restaurants, inns, and businesses carrying the same name. I got curious. Who exactly were these wild men supposed to be?

Eventually the search led me to a remarkable piece of medieval art now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston: the famous Wild Men Tapestries. Created around 1440, they depict Black royalty living inside a castle while mythical wild men attack from outside — hairy giants armed with clubs and stones, figures of chaos and savagery straight out of European folklore.

What struck me was the inversion. Modern racial mythology trains us to associate Europe with civilization and Blackness with primitiveness. Yet here was a fifteenth-century European artwork doing the opposite: Black nobility ruling inside the castle, while the barbarians at the gate were drawn from Europe’s own imagination. History has a habit of disrupting comfortable assumptions like that.

The deeper I looked, the clearer it became that humanity has always built myths about “the other.” The savage. The barbarian. The immigrant. The foreigner. The unbeliever. The terrorist. The illegal. The wild man. The labels change. The psychological function remains the same — to create distance, to turn neighbours into strangers, strangers into threats, and threats, eventually, into people who can be treated as less than human.

None of this is unique to Europe, or to Africa, or to any single race, religion, or nation. It’s a recurring weakness baked into the human condition itself. Maybe that’s why history feels so repetitive. The technology changes. The slogans change. The enemies change. But the fear underneath stays familiar.

The real challenge of the twenty-first century might not be technological, and it might not even be political. It might be psychological. Can we learn to see human beings before we see categories? Can we resist inheriting the fears of the generations before us? Can we admit that the stories we tell about others usually reveal more about ourselves than about them?

As a child under apartheid, other people told me who I was. As an immigrant in Europe, I was sometimes reminded of who I was supposed to be. But after a lifetime of travelling, reading, making music, and meeting people from every corner of the world, I’ve come to suspect that the most dangerous stories aren’t the ones we tell about others. They’re the ones we inherit about ourselves.

The moment we stop seeing human beings as categories and start seeing them as neighbours, the walls begin to crack. Maybe that’s where peace begins.

The real wild men were never the creatures woven into a medieval tapestry. They’re the fears we inherit, the prejudices we nurture, and the myths we keep telling about one another. And until we confront them, they’ll keep attacking the castle from within.

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