Why South Africa Is on the Brink of Chaos

The Tutsi and Hutu split stretches back before colonisation too.

You could make the argument that it was always going to be a problem and the colonizers didn't materially affect the course of history.

What you can't do is argue they didn't intentionally take advantage of this split for their own purposes. Because they did and it's documented history.

edit to add:

Here's a pro-apartheid Quora answer that suggests the separation of the different tribes was necessary to stop communists from stealing South Africa's mineral wealth.

> Apartheid gave these tribes their land back. Apartheid gave each tribe his independence from White Rule. Yes you lived ‘apart’ from the whites. But you lived apart in your own country. You could choose your own leaders and government and destiny.

> Communism was one of the driving forces to push the Black Independence program. The communists were using the blacks to try out vote the whites so that they could get control of of SAs mineral resources. By dividing SA into several smaller countries you effectively defeated the Communist plan.

> How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?

At least for Eastern Europe, the answer is very clear: the European Union imposing a serious baseline regarding democracy, rule of law and corruption. While Poland and especially Hungary are testing how far the patience of the EU can stretch, in general it's still holding up. On top of that, Eastern European nations/their populations wanted to join the EU desperately, wishing to never experience authoritarian realsozialismus again.

China had an immense amount of young, trainable people and a lack of environmental and worker regulations, which the West was all too keen on exploiting, and established trade routes from UK empire times. That's how they got big.

Africa, in contrast, had and widely still has nothing. No coalition/federation that pushed applicants to improve, no/barely any external interest in the countries, no major trade routes, no one who gave a flying fuck about the entire region. The US largely don't care as long as there is no bad actor threatening their interests (such as ISIS, al-Quaeda and its offshoots), Europe doesn't care about anything but getting rid of migrants no matter what, the Arabs don't care, and there aren't natural resources worth the trouble of extracting them without violating supply chain concerns. The only ones at least caring a bit about Africa as a continent are the Chinese, but they don't care about politics as long as they get a supply of workers and a potential market for cheap crap now that Europe and the US are saturated - we're seeing first signs of that by Chinese fast fashion taking over clothing from Western "second hand" (mitumba) stuff.

Sounds like a pretty good argument that South Africa's previous regime should not have given up power.