A recent radio programme demonstrated how people can recognise and learn from the past, yet remain blind to the much more pressing present. Under discussion was the new name for the Port Elizabeth Airport and its significance for South Africa in 2021. An historian from the University of Cape Town explained who the renamed Chief Dawid Stuurman International Airport was named after: he was a Khoi leader who joined forces with the Xhosa people in opposing colonial expansion on the 18 th-century eastern border of the Cape. We were further informed that the apartheid government’s policy of divide and rule had been most effective in shattering the unity between the Khoi (and, more broadly and subsequently, the coloured people) and the amaXhosa. The interviewer then asked: who benefits now from the division between black and coloured South Africans?