Johannesburg, South Africa

After losing power in 1994, South Africa's white right-wingers withdrew into psychic exile, leaving the chattering classes to pursue a political agenda so correct that it sometimes verged on insanity. Newspapers were soon filled with great billows of soft-left pabulum. Talk show hosts routinely used appalling terms like "gendered" or "Othering," and almost everyone observed an unwritten law stating that it was unfair to criticize black people on the grounds that any failings they might exhibit were attributable to poverty, oppression and bad education, otherwise known as "the legacy of apartheid." In time, I came to feel as if I were suffocating in a fog of high-minded pieties, a condition that often reduced me to cursing and throwing things at the TV set.

In the course of one such episode a few years ago, I switched channels and came upon a demented comedy sketch in which a gunman was tutoring a class of black schoolchildren in the finer points of armed robbery. "You got to have an inside source to tell you where the money is," yelled the gunman, "and when you get caught -- I just love this bit -- when you get caught, blame it on the legacy of apartheid. OK! So what have you learned today?" The children chorus, "Blame it on the legacy of apartheid!"

If you're not South African, you'll probably never understand how dumbfounding this was, but let's give it a try. What do you do, if you're young, gifted and African, when the Economist describes your home as "The Hopeless Continent"? Contest this assessment and you sound like a silly white liberal, which is anathema to a cool dude like comedian David Kibuuka. "The way the foreigners see Africa is sort of the way it is," he says. "Wars, people dying of diseases that were cured long ago and so on." But acknowledging such truths is dangerous, too, because some brothers are always going to accuse you of being a self-loathing sellout, and that's enough to keep most Africans quiet.

Not so for a group of young, black comedians who have taken South Africa by storm. Their attitude, says 30-year-old comic Kagiso Lediga, is, "Get lost if you can't take a joke. Our job is to talk about things that are wrong, and we'll keep doing it unless you kill us."