This article is extremely well-written, and insightful in its reading, to say the least.
The vectors prior and post Dec 1834 [de jure emancipation] until Dec 1838 (de facto emancipation) has a strong cognitive-retention-echoing-effect once one reads the article in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review. The arguments being made, enforces a point of distinct reflection, especially when encompassing the vector birthed between the stratification of de jure and de facto.
The vector image from the ‘Runaway by year and valuation’ graph (FIGURE 2, page 14), reminds one of the Michael Zibulevsky analogy in a recent article (1), which could (potentially) be analogous to the 'Carel-narrative' in the ‘Running Towards’ article with a much deeper resonating context in today’s not-so-objective space of many ill-constructed world views. In Michael’s article, an effective analogy is deployed to describe the composite reflective nature of the mirrors produced on a nano-scale by Carl Zeiss SMT in Oberkochen, Germany:
‘’Imagine a mirror the size of a dinner plate, polished so perfectly that if you scaled its surface to the size of Germany, the tallest imperfection would be less than a millimeter high. It must reflect 13.5-nanometer extreme ultraviolet light without absorbing or scattering a single photon. Each one takes 18 to 24 months to produce. Only a handful of people on Earth know how to make them.
These mirrors come from Carl Zeiss SMT in Oberkochen, Germany. They are the irreplaceable heart of every ASML EUV lithography machine — the machines that print the 2-nanometer transistors powering AI chips, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving computers, Optimus robots, and the coming wave of orbital AI satellites. Without Zeiss optics, ASML’s machines do not work. And without ASML’s machines, the entire modern semiconductor industry stalls. ‘’
It is my sincere view, that a self imposed standstill by any modern leader within the boundaries of such Runaway-vector – being equipped with self-reflective mirrors – is diagnostically well suited as catalyst for identifying a weakness of argument, when allowing opportunity for long aperture. A mere reading of ‘Carel’ or, ‘Marthinus’, or any others in this story and not allowing oneself as reader to pause, would be unjust to the gist of the related article, as it demands such pause. This article provides a mirror for cognitive introspection, though it certainly would require a blend of intent and a will, in order to do so – which regrettably, in a South African context, is often glaringly amiss in many aspects.
In the main article, many aspects stood out, and if one may mention a few:
• “...coercive rights are rooted in deeper power structures...”,
• ‘‘...endogenous shifts in marker conditions contributed to the erosion of coercion over time....”,
• “... Our findings challenge the familiar narrative that frames escapes solely as acts of resistance to cruelty or poor treatment...”,
• “Enslaved labour was more than a source of labour for agricultural production; it was also the backbone of the entire colonial credit and financial system. Slaves were often used as collateral in private credit markets, becoming a crucial capital asset that underwrote loans and investments, thereby facilitating the expansion of settler agriculture and the broader colonial economy”
Stemming from just these excerpts (and there are many more deductions), the much larger narrative engulfing the 1830-1838 time frame, bridges constraints of time and space. The answers are entrenched in the highly perceptive ‘vector space’ arising from the building blocks in the empirical economics analysis, and some deductions can clearly be made relevant to modern spaces as well, namely -
• Embedded power lives in structures.
• Embedded power lives in market conditions.
• Embedded power lives in sensible healthy analysis, and can alter trajectories.
Years before, I was invited to attend a Board meeting of a JSE-listed entity in the capacity as acting Public Officer - which yields the impetus to one’s frames-of-mind in this writing.
In the Afrikaans-language, there is a well-known saying “Die vreemdeling wat by julle vertoef, moet vir julle wees soos ‘n kind van die land wat onder julle is. En jy moet hom liefhê soos jouself, want julle was vreemdelinge in Egipteland..” My deduction always was, such ‘vreemdeling’ would include a person in any space and at any time, and such ‘’parallel’ should not be strange as one of many considerations towards spaces employed in logic cognitive reasoning, and hence not be excluded from secular spaces in its application, and in particular with reference to spheres of apparently democratic values, free economic markets and impartial judiciary frameworks.
And without specifying details, I realised – and learned - that none of its Board Members or Senior Management, past or then present or now present, ever truly had subjected the ‘will’ to walk into footsteps of the past, or had envisaged the 'self' as if standing within the boundaries of de jure and de facto stratifications. On paper, a Board may seem to have a fully-fledged BEE-imprint; in ‘auditory terms’, the conversations and presentations may echo a polished and sophisticated elegance of intelligence and thought; in ‘visual terms’, the visible may follow the auditory with near-perfect synchronisation; but coming from the ‘Evidence Room in Titanic’s-Belly’ on a plant level far removed from ‘Sandton Board Room talk’, the pace can be too fast for a Maiden voyage of Transformation: skill sets are not built overnight, or in a week or two, or in certain aspects in a year or two or even five or ten in unique aspects; decision making cannot be based on the weather only, but on information from a captain willing to visit all tiers of the ship, including the engine room, and the outer posts on the ship, and doing so quite often.
Leaders unwilling to learn lessons from the world in the past – whilst economic indicators are prophetic signals – will only learn when history transmutes into ‘vector mirrors’ as large as Germany, once a Damascus-Light with blinding force exposes ill-equipped spaces-of-cognitive-of-function, with a total disregard towards images overflowing from 'vet beursies' and many lucrative management-share-option-incentives being deployed to 'retain' skill sets etc. And a long list of concerns may find themselves within the walls of this alphabetic framing: "etc.".
This lingering thought accompanied me for many years – post that Board Meeting years ago and others as well : “How is it possible that, despite the tremendous draconian effect of egregious LAW of many years bygone and in the latter years post 1994, having prima-facie evidence of the most harmful psychological and physical effects towards economic disadvantaged groups, that powerful leaders from the ‘new dawn’ – often being the victims of such laws for many years themselves- refuse to learn the lessons echoing from history in order not to walk in its ways, and seem to be most unwilling to yield to the wisdom of a wide-lens-of-education ?”
Is 'oppressed' turning into 'oppressor'? Are the invisible factors assigning power of weight to non-economic-alignment mechanisms with extremely destructive outcomes, even known?
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, made a well-known remark in 2025, that they understood about three percent of how their Claude chatbot actually worked, and that its abilities seem to emerge far more from abstract constructs, which are hard for one’s heads to put around.
Modern AI models are in essence vast neural networks made of billions or trillions of parameters being fed immense quantities of data. Bit-by-bit, they are pushing parameters within these models in order to grow the models to generate improved outcomes. With trillions of parameters and data points, it is not easy to grasp the complete minds inside these models.
One would (or should) not infer a similar view with respect to human-signals, when such view is based on criteria of cohesion and a solid and broad-understanding of a factual research on any undertaking. However, one’s experience is that many environments (i.e. leaders themselves from many spheres) in the South African context, may in fact, voice a type of ’stochastic parrot' being fed with incomplete or even poisoned data sets, and one says that with great concern.
Will a major intervention of political will and thought, be able to stop the current trajectory? It is doubtful. But I am no ‘seer’.
There is nothing as destructive, as a refusal to learn from history, and to learn from an encompassing and broad history, and a refusal to turn the mirror to the ‘self ‘ in the first instance. The mind should be permitted to learn not to unlearn the lesson, and to change the course based on what it has learned. But such level of learning, is costly and should not be a free-handout to unwilling minds not committed to fare the stormy seas of mindfulness.
Legend:
(1), “The Mirror War: Can Elon Musk and America Duplicate Europe’s Irreplaceable Chipmaking Crown Jewel” by Michael Zibulevsky, dated 14 April 14, 2026
Johan, I refer to the article at the link below, which I read at the same time as yours. Nicholas’ scenario boils down to freeing up labour markets/normalising labour markets, be it very unconventionally. I suspect that your conclusion, i.e. “Those people noticed when their world changed. They acted on the change.
That is the discipline at its best: a way of taking seriously the choices of people in markets, including the people the law refused to count as people.”
Of course my assumption needs to be vigorously tested, but I also regard many State employees in South Africa as “bound” to the State in ways similar to the real slaves you referred to. Some private sector employees may be in a similar position on account of Trade Union power and our current labour laws, also “binding” employees to employers by means of the over-protection of labour.
My hypothesis is thus that doing what Nicholas suggests, will have a similarly beneficial effect; i.e. the “bonded" State and other employees will notice it and act on it. The result will be a tremendous South African labour market normalisation/readjustment in a pro-growth direction.
This article is extremely well-written, and insightful in its reading, to say the least.
The vectors prior and post Dec 1834 [de jure emancipation] until Dec 1838 (de facto emancipation) has a strong cognitive-retention-echoing-effect once one reads the article in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review. The arguments being made, enforces a point of distinct reflection, especially when encompassing the vector birthed between the stratification of de jure and de facto.
The vector image from the ‘Runaway by year and valuation’ graph (FIGURE 2, page 14), reminds one of the Michael Zibulevsky analogy in a recent article (1), which could (potentially) be analogous to the 'Carel-narrative' in the ‘Running Towards’ article with a much deeper resonating context in today’s not-so-objective space of many ill-constructed world views. In Michael’s article, an effective analogy is deployed to describe the composite reflective nature of the mirrors produced on a nano-scale by Carl Zeiss SMT in Oberkochen, Germany:
‘’Imagine a mirror the size of a dinner plate, polished so perfectly that if you scaled its surface to the size of Germany, the tallest imperfection would be less than a millimeter high. It must reflect 13.5-nanometer extreme ultraviolet light without absorbing or scattering a single photon. Each one takes 18 to 24 months to produce. Only a handful of people on Earth know how to make them.
These mirrors come from Carl Zeiss SMT in Oberkochen, Germany. They are the irreplaceable heart of every ASML EUV lithography machine — the machines that print the 2-nanometer transistors powering AI chips, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving computers, Optimus robots, and the coming wave of orbital AI satellites. Without Zeiss optics, ASML’s machines do not work. And without ASML’s machines, the entire modern semiconductor industry stalls. ‘’
It is my sincere view, that a self imposed standstill by any modern leader within the boundaries of such Runaway-vector – being equipped with self-reflective mirrors – is diagnostically well suited as catalyst for identifying a weakness of argument, when allowing opportunity for long aperture. A mere reading of ‘Carel’ or, ‘Marthinus’, or any others in this story and not allowing oneself as reader to pause, would be unjust to the gist of the related article, as it demands such pause. This article provides a mirror for cognitive introspection, though it certainly would require a blend of intent and a will, in order to do so – which regrettably, in a South African context, is often glaringly amiss in many aspects.
In the main article, many aspects stood out, and if one may mention a few:
• “...coercive rights are rooted in deeper power structures...”,
• ‘‘...endogenous shifts in marker conditions contributed to the erosion of coercion over time....”,
• “... Our findings challenge the familiar narrative that frames escapes solely as acts of resistance to cruelty or poor treatment...”,
• “Enslaved labour was more than a source of labour for agricultural production; it was also the backbone of the entire colonial credit and financial system. Slaves were often used as collateral in private credit markets, becoming a crucial capital asset that underwrote loans and investments, thereby facilitating the expansion of settler agriculture and the broader colonial economy”
Stemming from just these excerpts (and there are many more deductions), the much larger narrative engulfing the 1830-1838 time frame, bridges constraints of time and space. The answers are entrenched in the highly perceptive ‘vector space’ arising from the building blocks in the empirical economics analysis, and some deductions can clearly be made relevant to modern spaces as well, namely -
• Embedded power lives in structures.
• Embedded power lives in market conditions.
• Embedded power lives in sensible healthy analysis, and can alter trajectories.
Years before, I was invited to attend a Board meeting of a JSE-listed entity in the capacity as acting Public Officer - which yields the impetus to one’s frames-of-mind in this writing.
In the Afrikaans-language, there is a well-known saying “Die vreemdeling wat by julle vertoef, moet vir julle wees soos ‘n kind van die land wat onder julle is. En jy moet hom liefhê soos jouself, want julle was vreemdelinge in Egipteland..” My deduction always was, such ‘vreemdeling’ would include a person in any space and at any time, and such ‘’parallel’ should not be strange as one of many considerations towards spaces employed in logic cognitive reasoning, and hence not be excluded from secular spaces in its application, and in particular with reference to spheres of apparently democratic values, free economic markets and impartial judiciary frameworks.
And without specifying details, I realised – and learned - that none of its Board Members or Senior Management, past or then present or now present, ever truly had subjected the ‘will’ to walk into footsteps of the past, or had envisaged the 'self' as if standing within the boundaries of de jure and de facto stratifications. On paper, a Board may seem to have a fully-fledged BEE-imprint; in ‘auditory terms’, the conversations and presentations may echo a polished and sophisticated elegance of intelligence and thought; in ‘visual terms’, the visible may follow the auditory with near-perfect synchronisation; but coming from the ‘Evidence Room in Titanic’s-Belly’ on a plant level far removed from ‘Sandton Board Room talk’, the pace can be too fast for a Maiden voyage of Transformation: skill sets are not built overnight, or in a week or two, or in certain aspects in a year or two or even five or ten in unique aspects; decision making cannot be based on the weather only, but on information from a captain willing to visit all tiers of the ship, including the engine room, and the outer posts on the ship, and doing so quite often.
Leaders unwilling to learn lessons from the world in the past – whilst economic indicators are prophetic signals – will only learn when history transmutes into ‘vector mirrors’ as large as Germany, once a Damascus-Light with blinding force exposes ill-equipped spaces-of-cognitive-of-function, with a total disregard towards images overflowing from 'vet beursies' and many lucrative management-share-option-incentives being deployed to 'retain' skill sets etc. And a long list of concerns may find themselves within the walls of this alphabetic framing: "etc.".
This lingering thought accompanied me for many years – post that Board Meeting years ago and others as well : “How is it possible that, despite the tremendous draconian effect of egregious LAW of many years bygone and in the latter years post 1994, having prima-facie evidence of the most harmful psychological and physical effects towards economic disadvantaged groups, that powerful leaders from the ‘new dawn’ – often being the victims of such laws for many years themselves- refuse to learn the lessons echoing from history in order not to walk in its ways, and seem to be most unwilling to yield to the wisdom of a wide-lens-of-education ?”
Is 'oppressed' turning into 'oppressor'? Are the invisible factors assigning power of weight to non-economic-alignment mechanisms with extremely destructive outcomes, even known?
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, made a well-known remark in 2025, that they understood about three percent of how their Claude chatbot actually worked, and that its abilities seem to emerge far more from abstract constructs, which are hard for one’s heads to put around.
Modern AI models are in essence vast neural networks made of billions or trillions of parameters being fed immense quantities of data. Bit-by-bit, they are pushing parameters within these models in order to grow the models to generate improved outcomes. With trillions of parameters and data points, it is not easy to grasp the complete minds inside these models.
One would (or should) not infer a similar view with respect to human-signals, when such view is based on criteria of cohesion and a solid and broad-understanding of a factual research on any undertaking. However, one’s experience is that many environments (i.e. leaders themselves from many spheres) in the South African context, may in fact, voice a type of ’stochastic parrot' being fed with incomplete or even poisoned data sets, and one says that with great concern.
Will a major intervention of political will and thought, be able to stop the current trajectory? It is doubtful. But I am no ‘seer’.
There is nothing as destructive, as a refusal to learn from history, and to learn from an encompassing and broad history, and a refusal to turn the mirror to the ‘self ‘ in the first instance. The mind should be permitted to learn not to unlearn the lesson, and to change the course based on what it has learned. But such level of learning, is costly and should not be a free-handout to unwilling minds not committed to fare the stormy seas of mindfulness.
Legend:
(1), “The Mirror War: Can Elon Musk and America Duplicate Europe’s Irreplaceable Chipmaking Crown Jewel” by Michael Zibulevsky, dated 14 April 14, 2026
Pieter Cloete. Which Pieter? PJ Cloete, father to Judge Henry Cloete.
I can’t find Theal, Records, vol 29 online
Johan, I refer to the article at the link below, which I read at the same time as yours. Nicholas’ scenario boils down to freeing up labour markets/normalising labour markets, be it very unconventionally. I suspect that your conclusion, i.e. “Those people noticed when their world changed. They acted on the change.
That is the discipline at its best: a way of taking seriously the choices of people in markets, including the people the law refused to count as people.”
Of course my assumption needs to be vigorously tested, but I also regard many State employees in South Africa as “bound” to the State in ways similar to the real slaves you referred to. Some private sector employees may be in a similar position on account of Trade Union power and our current labour laws, also “binding” employees to employers by means of the over-protection of labour.
My hypothesis is thus that doing what Nicholas suggests, will have a similarly beneficial effect; i.e. the “bonded" State and other employees will notice it and act on it. The result will be a tremendous South African labour market normalisation/readjustment in a pro-growth direction.
https://rationalstandard.substack.com/p/south-africans-need-to-be-fireable?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5yb7i8