South Africans react to which provinces "acts mean/nice" meme

As with any joke, there is a time and a place for it, and this also applies to memes.

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There are many inappropriate memes that make their way to social media and cause upset for very valid reasons.

Usually, these memes are about serious topics or events that are made laughable or funny, but it's really just unseemly and improper.

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There are also memes that might feel like a personal attack or like you're being specifically called out.

In 2024, Grammy-award-winning singer Dua Lipa spoke again about her dancing being turned into a meme and how hurtful it was: “When people took that snippet of me dancing online and just turned it into a meme, and then when I won the best new artist Grammy and people were like, ‘She’s not deserving of it, she’s got no stage presence, she’s not going to stick around.’ Those things were hurtful. It was humiliating," she told  Pitchfork in an interview after the release of her album, 'Radical Optimism'.

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Seriousness aside, South Africans might have some negative feelings about the country, but no one else gets to insult us except us.

A recent viral meme has caused quite a stir by dividing areas in SA into various categories and essentially pitting them against each other.

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The meme shows South Africa divided into four blocks, classifying the people in each block in one of the following categories:

1. Acts nice, is nice.
2. Acts nice, is mean.
3. Acts mean, is nice.
4. Acts mean, is mean.

This implies that only two areas are classified positively, and these are the only people characterised as “nice”.

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Naturally, those being described as “mean” are not happy with this meme.

See the meme below:

Unfortunately, according to this divisive meme, most of upper South Africa and the Western Cape are the villains.

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But South Africans won't let this slander circulate on the internet, and it's not just the "villains" that are defending their honour.

Outside of the other jokes, most of the comments had one thing in common: you can't put a large group of South Africans into a box, and there will always be a few bad apples, no matter the location.

We might not be perfect, but the only people that can come for us is us.

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