Has there been a change for the better for South Africa and it's people since the end of Apartheid?

Are you being facetious?

No, just trying to get some conversation going on here other than most of what I have seen lately.

I think that in the beginning, at least for the blacks, there were some better days and opportunities.

Now, I think that it is rapidly becoming a corrupt example of a long list of African countries. RSA needs to tighten up, or me thinks a new "Zimbabwe" will emerge somewhere down the road.

Ironically, "AIDS" may balance the voter base between whites and blacks in RSA, and actually save the country from imploding like Zimbabwe.

my opinion....


/

Any system which classifies the population according to colour will never be popular with me, whether they discriminate against blacks/coloureds or against whites as is being done now in Zimbabwe.
On the other hand, crime, AIDS, corruption etc seem to have brought the beautiful 'land of the rand' back into the African model it had elevated itself above.
I don't believe for a minute that AIDS will 'level the voting base' as there are always going to be many black Africans for every white African (yes African, not settling Europeans but 10th generation Africans that are rightfully proud of the fact) and the immigration from Zimbabwe/Mozambique will quickly fill any voids left by Aids.
Have any of you gone hunting in RSA during apartheid? Any major differences in the hunting (price I presume) or tourism?

Aids isn't going to effect African politics at all, it is just another desease running rampant, and a false hope by White Africans I fear....

Under Apartied some grave mistakes were made by the white government, that needed to be corrected, but a black "tribal minded" Government is not the answer IMO things took place too soon...Now, as a result of all this, the tribal mind set is at work and the atrocities being committed on the colored, and the atrocities on the Xhosi by the Zulu Government are far beyond anything apartied every did, but the USA has chosen to ignore that because its black against black and to interfer would bring complaints of prejudice unpon our white Government. Then we might just have to admit how badly we screwed it up and thats a no no on this side of the pond...and remember that the liberal half of our society were partially responsible for the downfall of apartied. We certainly did our part to create the fall of Apartied under a Democratic Pary Government, with a hell of a lot of support from the Republican pary I might add...US black votes were at risk here for heavens sake.

As a result of that change in society, crime is rampant, graft and corruption prevail in high places, the cities are going to ruin, the highways are in disrepair, band of young gangs roam the country side stealing chickens and killing older white farmers and their wives, rape is rampant, and the beatiful So. Africa of my earlier days is gone forever, it was clean, and beatiful, not trashy and a miserable dump.

Thats the way I saw it and thats the way I see it now, if I am wrong then show me something positive, but save me the old freedom speal, it didn't work in So. Africa, we went about it wrong...All great changes in History came slow, not overnight like this one and it may still correct itself, I certainly hope so...but the off shore banks are bulging with corrupt money from RSA and Zimbabwe as we speak.

I agree with Ray.When I first visited RSA in 1988 the streets in Joburg were clean,the airline employees were efficient and courteous.We stayed at the Carlton,downtown, which contained a huge shopping mall in the lower floor.When we returned in 1998 airport staff were surly,Customs was slow and inefficient and local friends refused to allow us to go downtown due to the crime.Shortly after our return to the good ole USA I read that the Carlton had closed due to lack of customers.When we overnighted in Joburg in '98 the motel where we stayed was surrounded by a 10ft.wall with razor wire on top a shotgun armed guard in the parking lot.
I'd sure have to say the changes we saw were not for the better.

In addition to the social problems mentioned above, the actual economic condition of the blacks in RSA seems to be declining. I don't remember the exact statistics, but some articles in the U.S. press recently provided numbers that attested to the decline. Part of that is due to AIDS, but I can't imagine the old white government doing any worse on AIDS than the current black government.



South Africa stands facing in two directions at once- toward future miracle where it all works out, or toward a future like Zimbabwe where nothing works. Today, no one can be certain which way it will go.



There is, in my opinion, no way to justify some of the things that the whites did to the blacks and colored, both in the distant past and in the more recent past. But two quotes from the U.S press pretty well sum up the way the rest of the continent has gone:



"Socially and politically, Africa is the continent with an infinite capacity to disappoint."



"It turns out that the only thing worse than being oppressed by the white man, is to NOT be oppressed by the white man."

Gentlemen,

Ten years is a very short time so I think we�ll have to wait a while for the situation to stabilize. The decline we now see in the RSA is pretty much the same thing we see in countries that were occupied by the USSR and that have now regained independence (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia etc etc). Yes crime and social unrest exist but I guess that is the price of freedom. The RSA is no longer a playground for whites and we�ll have to learn to live with that. Looking a bit more positively on the situation maybe our money will help in making a difference (a small one but just the same) if part of it is plowed back into the local economy. Will we have another Zim? I doubt it, Mandela has left quite a legacy and any major deviation from that will probably bring world opinion down on them like a ton of bricks.

Am I politically naive? Overly positive?

Yes.

But hope is the last thing we need to lose.

*deleted*



To damn long article, sorry...



/Martin

Cewe, yes, you are politically naive.

Freedom, my ass.

South Africa lost its freedom when the US and the UN and all the other bleeding hearts around the world delivered it into the hands of comrade Mandela and his gang of murderous communists. Using the destruction of the former free state of Rhodesia as a model.

New York Times leftist propaganda notwithstanding.

It seems that rampant deadly disease is the best hope the continent has.

my brother is currently living in Johannesburg going to graduate school at Witswatersrand University. My parents visited him in March. Photos of his neighborhood were particularly informative - every house had razorwire and lethal electrified fences. Fence posts were all topped with knife-edges, etc. Most people have some sort of large dog.

Early on while he was there, his wife (a vet) was covering another vet's residential practice while he vacationed. They were staying at his house, and had gone out for the evening. When they returned, the house had been broken into, lots of stuff stolen, including her brand new laptop computer (a wedding present). When the police finally arrived, the police basically said "so what, file a report with your insurance" and left.

Other than fear of crime and neglient police, his impression of the place hasn't been all that bad, though.

Troy

Here is what the N. Y. Times had to say in an article this morning, Ann:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/26/international/africa/26AFRI.html?th

Since most of you might not have a subscription to the Times, you won't be able to access it, so I am copying some of the article below.
Decade of Democracy Fills Gaps in South Africa
By MICHAEL WINES
and SHARON LaFRANIERE

Published: April 26, 2004


OSHANGUVE, South Africa � Some days are unforgettable, and so it is that Meisie Ndlovu and John Henshall both recall what they were doing 10 years ago on April 26, 1994, when South Africa won its freedom.

Mr. Henshall stood in a broiling sun in his all-white suburb, part of a two-mile line of voters electing the first democratic president. Ms. Ndlovu stood in a line in her all-black town, listening to neighbors exult that democracy meant free food, forever, for everyone.


Mr. Henshall was skeptical that black rule would be as bad as some neighbors feared. Ms. Ndlovu was skeptical that it would be as good as neighbors predicted.

"I didn't believe it," she said, laughing. "I said, `This government is going to be poor.' I said, `I am not educated, but I can think.' "

As it turned out, they were both right.

This is a tale about the Ndlovus, black and striving, and the Henshalls, white and coping, and what a decade of democracy has brought them and their country.

The two families are not acquainted. Indeed, they are separated, like most blacks and whites here, by huge racial and economic divides.

But if a lesson can be drawn from a decade of multiracial democracy, a transformation hailed for its almost miraculous absence of rancor, it is that families like these are far more alike today than they were before 1994 � both in aspirations and fears.

For Ms. Ndlovu, a plump, round-faced woman with a quick laugh, there is no mistaking what 10 years of freedom have done. Just look at her toolshed.

Set behind her brick home just outside this city of 146,000, the shed is 10 feet by 10 feet, a listing shambles of rusted corrugated iron and sheet metal, unexceptional but for this: before it was a toolshed, the Ndlovu family lived there for five years.

Under apartheid, Ms. Ndlovu was an illiterate black domestic in a white household. Today she runs her own construction company, laying asphalt and building fences on freeway projects. Her three-bedroom home has new living-room furniture and a carved wood door.

Her old shack sits in the backyard, a dilapidated reminder of the past. Her 17-year-old daughter calls it "scary." Ms. Ndlovu refuses to tear it down. "I like that house," she said. "I suffered in that house."

There is also no mistaking what a decade has brought John and Liann � Li for short � Henshall. Just look at Kyalami Estate, the idyllic suburb they and their three children call home.

Ten miles north of Johannesburg, theirs is an American-style community, studded with tennis courts, parks, lakes and community centers, unexceptional but for this: it is enclosed by a 10-foot brick wall, crowned with an electric fence.

Five miles west is the Diepsloot squatter camp, 11 years old and 86,000 impoverished people strong � Ms. Ndlovu's toolshed, replicated by the thousands. The Henshalls, whites who prospered in a decade of black rule, feel for Diepsloot's residents. Not unreasonably, they fear them, too.

"We believe that if you employ your own police force and you live behind the right kind of wall, you stand a chance," said Mr. Henshall, a bluff man with an embracing manner. "We're happy inside our walls."

Outside the walls, they are wary. Li says, "How good can life be if you have to live in fear?"

A decade after apartheid, many analysts say South Africa has stepped back from the racial precipice. The real worry now, they say, is not the racial gap, but the gap between the haves, of any color, and the have-nots � what President Thabo Mbeki calls two economies "without a connecting staircase."

South Africa's four million plus whites still dominate an economy serving 45 million citizens. They claim nearly half of all income. Yet today they are joined by as many as 11 million blacks who are also entrenched in the middle and upper classes.

More black children are in school; more black adults are literate; millions more blacks have clean water, electricity, toilets.

At the same time, a vast black underclass is swelling. Roughly half of South Africans are either poor or on the edge of poverty, economists say. Thirty to 40 percent are jobless. The United Nations says the living standard has fallen since 1990, mostly because of the devastation of AIDS.

Crime, among the world's worst, is terrifying for its strikingly gratuitous violence. Skilled workers are still leaving, but a much feared exodus of whites never materialized.


Even Kyalami Estate, where the Henshalls live, is itself one-third black � reflecting tumbling economic barriers and blacks' equal fear of crime. But the races seldom mingle, the family said.

For all its peaceful changes, this is not a land of lion-and-lamb peace. "Weary tolerance is one way to describe it," says Tom Lodge, an analyst at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Some whites feel the sting of lost power; many blacks resent whites' continued privilege. But majority rule has proved a balm, he said, fostering "a sense among ordinary black people that things will change."

Ms. Ndlovu suspects that whites, a tenth of the population, still wait for black solidarity to dissolve. "I don't think a person can just change," she said. "They want to get back. They still want to run the country."

John Henshall says blacks' anger has subsided since the powder-keg era of apartheid's demise. His wife, Li, disagrees. "They still feel that," she replied. "Blacks don't like whites. They will never forgive Afrikaners, never."

Still, a force stronger than their mistrust binds Ms. Ndlovu, who rose in 10 years to the head of the little Meithlo Construction Company, and the Henshalls, who run a bustling forklift business out of their $225,000 home. Unlike the have-nots, both of them have a stake in making this miracle work.

Or, as Mr. Henshall wryly puts it, "Everyone has something to lose."

Rebuilding a Life

Few in Soshanguve could have said that when Meisie (pronounced mee-see) Ndlovu arrived.

It was 1989, the year before Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. Soshanguve, created 15 years before to house Pretoria's black workers out of whites' sight, was an endless expanse of shanties on rolling scrubland 20 miles from the capital.

Ms. Ndlovu's sheet-metal shack was the first on her nameless dirt street in Block M. Five Ndlovus, plus two children from her brother Thomas's broken marriage, shared a dirt floor and an iron roof.

For them, this was a step up in the world.

Ms. Ndlovu grew up on a white-owned farm, helping her father and great-aunt mop floors, collect firewood and haul water for the owners. Thomas attended school at age 13; she had no such luck.

They treated her kindly. But later, other white employers "didn't treat us like people," she said. "You can't drink from their glasses. You can't sit in the chair where the white lady had been sitting. You can't go to their toilet." On a trip, her employers stayed in hotels; she slept in the car.

Ms. Ndlovu left at age 20, married a driver and bore two boys and a girl. They spent 12 years in a shack at his mother's squatter camp near Pretoria. Daytimes, she hiked a half-mile to a creek for water, digging wells in the mud when it ran dry. Nights, she attended school over her husband's protests.

In 1989, the couple scraped together $2,000 for a hillside plot in Soshanguve. South Africa was in the throes of revolution, but Ms. Ndlovu was not in its ranks.

"I am not in politics," she said. "I am just Meisie."

Instead, she fought for her family. She opened a hair salon in a black Pretoria storefront in 1991, training stylists for $25 apiece � women like her, desperate to feed their children. Her husband left her for a girlfriend.

As she cast her first ballot in 1994, neighbors predicted nirvana. "Someone said, `After we vote, we are not going to buy food anymore! We are going to get it free!' " she said. "And we won't have to work!"

Ms. Ndlovu knew better. But that year, a three-bedroom brick home with a concrete floor was rising beside her shack, with Ms. Ndlovu laying brick and hanging gutters; laborers pouring cement; a 10-year, $14,000 symbol of her rising fortunes.

Meanwhile, the new government began addressing Soshanguve's needs.

Anticrime floodlights sprouted in back alleys. Workers laid lines for water and power; paved roads; built a stadium, a cricket grounds, a shopping mall. The black technical college merged with a white Pretoria university. Government workers built 5,000 one-room homes.

Yet Soshanguve's squatter camps, visible from Ms. Ndlovu's back steps, also mushroomed. Free to travel for the first time, uneducated blacks headed for cities like Pretoria in an often futile search for jobs.


Ms. Ndlovu's brother, Thomas Mangwane, found that freedom or not, a seventh-grade education limited him. His efforts to start a tavern, a store and a window-framing business all failed. Now he drives a cab. "If you don't have an education, no one takes you seriously," he said.

Ms. Ndlovu agreed. She spent $2,000 to send her eldest son, Johnathan, to law school, then $3,000 to train his brother, Bongani, in information technology. "I will get a pain if I saw that they didn't go to school," she said. "So I will work the rest of my life for these children."

Bongani dropped out, but Ms. Ndlovu persevered. Inspired by Soshanguve's reconstruction, she quit her salon in 1999 to form a women's construction cooperative named Bakoni � Tswana for "we can do it."

For three months, she hitchhiked 150 miles weekly to Nelspruit, in the subtropical east, to study construction management and skills. Prodded by government incentives to train blacks, a major South African construction company footed the bill.

Ms. Ndlovu timidly warned her teacher that her spelling and math were lacking. "He was a white guy," she said. "But he was a good guy." He stayed after class to tutor her.

Black subcontractors became in demand from white firms, which saw that their cheap labor offered an edge in bidding for government jobs. One hired Ms. Ndlovu to erect guardrails and pave toll plazas and underpasses on freeway projects. Lacking even a truck, she hand-carried tools, cement and poles to her first job, and hand-wrote invoices.

But her work was impressive. "Excellent," her evaluator wrote.

Ms. Ndlovu replied with a thank-you note that read, "We hope to continue working with you in the extreme."

Facing the Present

As Ms. Ndlovu set down roots in Soshanguve, John Henshall quit a management job to start from scratch with Li, selling and renting forklifts. They had few illusions about the risk: apartheid was crumbling, and the economy with it. "The whole place could've packed up," he said.

But he was impressed by an argument advanced by one white businessman for burying apartheid. "You could have the whole of nothing, or a piece of something," he said. "Two cakes."

In part, John Henshall's upbringing made him sympathetic. Even at apartheid's pinnacle in the late 1950's, in his childhood home of Nelspruit, the Henshall family was an exception. Racial castes may have been inviolate, but apartheid was not.

The black servants "never sat in our chairs, and never ate off our plates, never," Mr. Henshall recalled. But his father, Richard, ignored a ban on hiring black mechanics and painters, training them and paying them a white man's salary. His mother, a British nurse, ran a feeding program for malnourished black families.

"You had a system, but you didn't have to live by that system," said Richard Henshall, now 82. Apartheid, he said, "was absolutely damned ridiculous."

As democracy arrived, Mr. Henshall held his breath. But the family business prospered. Fearing the consequences of white flight and economic ruin, the new government bent over backward to keep white businesses alive. Few of their nightmares came to pass.

"The only problem we've suffered as white people," Mr. Henshall said, "has been major crime."

In 1995, the Henshalls settled in Morningside, a northern Johannesburg suburb about a mile from Alexandra, an impoverished black township.

As the couple lay in bed late one night, a black face appeared at their bedroom window. "He'd jumped the wall � we didn't have electric fencing, just the razor wire," Mrs. Henshall said. "I could have taken a gun and shot him, I was so scared."

The man fled, but Mrs. Henshall stopped letting her children play alone in their backyard. "Five years in that house, I never slept," she said.

Five miles away, on Alexandra's other border, Li's brother Hayden Goldman and his wife, Barbara, shared those fears.

The Goldmans lived with their teenage children, Kirsty and Andrew. Andrew, 19, was a budding geophysicist, winner of a four-year university scholarship from Anglo-American, the gold-mining empire.

In June 1994, he cast his first vote. "He was so excited," Mr. Goldman said. "We stood in the queue together, and we were so happy that things were going to become normal."


Six months later, Andrew drove to his girlfriend's home nearby. As he drove past the driveway's sliding gate, two men darted in. They shot him in one leg through his closed car window. Then they shot him in the head.

The Goldmans raced there. Ms. Goldman heard screaming, then her husband's shouts to stop. "Eventually," she said, "I realized it was me screaming. So I stopped. It was my worst nightmare."

The killers were never found. Ms. Goldman, who now counsels crime victims of both races, has since been robbed at gunpoint twice. Her husband was robbed in their garage � unable to remove his wedding ring, the thieves tried to bite off his finger.

The couple nearly emigrated to New Zealand, Ms. Goldman said. Li Henshall also pondered leaving. In the mid-1990's, she said, her children came home reporting another friend's departure almost daily.

Instead, the Henshalls moved in 2000 to Kyalami Estate, where a 24-hour security force patrols and a gated guardhouse screens visitors. John Henshall jokingly calls it "our prison."

Ms. Ndlovu does not joke about prison. In December, her son Bongani, the 23-year-old dropout, was arrested in a robbery in which the black victim was killed. Bongani Ndlovu swears that his friends duped him into driving the getaway car, Ms. Ndlovu said. The police charged one friend with murder.

His brother, Johnathan, studying pre-law, despairs that Bongani has sunk from helping paint their dining room to living in prison. "I am ashamed," he said. Bongani's legal bills also worry him: "Now the car we have to fix. She is paying for my studies, and the utilities, and also the outstanding debts."

Ms. Ndlovu is distraught, but firm. The trial begins next month. Bongani will stay in jail until then.

"He said, `Mama, I won't do it anymore,' " she said. "I wanted to put up bail."

"But when I look at that mother" of the slain young man, she said, "I really cry."

"They do this, they must be punished."

Ms. Ndlovu agrees that crime is government's biggest challenge. Driving from her home one afternoon, she pointed to the silver cellphone under her dashboard. It is her fifth. Her workers stole the others.

"They come at night and steal the petrol," she said. "I find out in the morning when I try to go to work."

Hope for a New Generation

Still, Meisie Ndlovu has hopes. She wants to move from subcontracting to better-paying contracting. She wants a computer and a fax machine. She wants Johnathan to break into the ranks of white lawyers and Bongani to get a second chance.

She would like another husband. But she fears AIDS, so "I just keep myself busy with work," she said.

She believes that "some whites have changed." But her church, her daughter's high school, her town � in fact, her whole world � is black, save the whites who monitor her work. She figures she is too old to see that change.

"The new generation is the one that is going to get the new world," she said. "They are going to work together. Not the old people. The young generation is the one who is going to know the truth."

Her son Johnathan agrees. The ranks of the legal profession are lily-white, but he hopes to break in. He is not sure what to think of white people yet. "I take a person as I find them," he said. "I have never interacted with many whites."

John and Li Henshall have hopes, too, for a safer and more harmonious nation. They say Mr. Mandela's message of tolerance is firmly imprinted on their three children. "You say one thing negative about the blacks, they will shout you down � `You are a racist!' " Mrs. Henshall said. "It is actually quite good."

Their world is somewhat less monochrome than that of the Ndlovus: their children's school is integrated, and their firm's black employees and customers are acquaintances.

They feel regretful, not guilty, about apartheid. "You know, it wasn't my fault," Mrs. Henshall said flatly. Still, they plan to educate their maid's grandson.

"That is how we come to terms with it," Mr. Henshall said. "Privately."

Ten years ago, they say, whites endlessly bemoaned South Africa's irreversible descent. But no more.

"There isn't that hatred that there was at first," John Henshall said. "Things haven't really improved, but they haven't gotten that much worse. Perhaps all the promises are futile, and nothing is going to come of it, and everybody has just settled down and said, `We've got our life.' "

Or perhaps, says Ms. Ndlovu's brother Thomas, people need not only to forgive, but also to forget � not forever, but long enough for wounds to heal.

"I still remember my kid asking me, `What was that thing you called apartheid?' " he said.

"I said, really, I don't know, too. All I know is, we were just separated � those were blacks, those were whites, and whites were living alone.

"That's why say I don't like to talk about it, because I want to forget it," he said. "I want to start from right here, going forward, and teach my kids: No, those people used to do that. But it was that time."

Control of the country has passed from one ruling elite to another, the current one less competent and more corrupt. The difference is the new elite sold the voters something they can't deliver (unlike the Nats who did deliver for their voters). Remains to be seen what they are going to do to get out of that pickle. One option is to blame the whites and persecute them by taking away their rights and property. That won't fix the problem, but it might buy some time. The other option is to pull together to get the economy going so the average voter can earn a living and support his family. That's a big job. Mineral prices are going up but the rand has appreciated so in local currency, prices are down. Tourism is strong but could be stronger if they cracked down on crime. Farming is so so. And there isn't much manufacturing thanks to divestment during the lost decades...and now there is a lack of skills at all levels so you have to be very altruistic to set up a plant there. Not to mention the laws that require you to hire blacks preferentially, and AIDS that causes you to have to replace your entire workforce every couple of years. There are just too many uneducated parents (the schools got burned in the 70s and a whole generation chose not to complete their education rather than getting one, albeit via the Afrikaans language) dying of aids leaving orphans to grow up without hope, role models, or schooling.

A mess, indeed. Just goes to show, ideology never put bread on anyone's table. And the Western World just doesn't care any more, there's no political mileage in involvement in SA, Zimbabwe, or any of the others. Besides, it's just another bunch of staring, starving black kids, we are numb to that image now.

In other words, get your hunting while you can. When SA gets really messed up, that will take a lot of supply off the table and there will be 10 hunters for every available safari. The guy who is willing to pay more than the other 9 will get to hunt. The rest will have to live with memories or fantasies.

Did I mention, I have two "hot pursuit" leopard hunts available in Botswana this season, $10K including daily rates and trophy fees? Plus some awesome plains game hunting, same locale, right up against the Central Kalahari Park, the second largest (and least developed) reserve in the world.

Let's face it, blacks still cannot govern for themselves no matter how much free UN money gets thrown into the cesspool. Until somebody wants to work to do something right and get that through to the masses that work is a viable alternative to handouts, it's going down the toilet.

An emotional article lacking in facts and misleading the reader by extrapolating two data points to the whole population. Not up to the standards one would expect from the New York Times.

I grew up in SA. At one time during the "terrible" apartheid years, literacy in SA was higher than any other country in Africa. There were more doctors in South Africa than in the rest of the Southern hemisphere. Schooling was available for people of all colors, albeit on a segregated basis, up through graduate and postgraduate study. The New York Times fails to point out that Mandela was a black lawyer before he was incarcerated, way back when. Instead, they insinuate that the son of the woman chosen as the symbol of the new era was attaining something previously unattainable. While the majority of blacks were laborers earning a marginal living, the unemployment rate was much lower than it is today and employers made sure their employees were fed and healthy (you have to be to work!). There was no law against blacks making money (after the dissolution of petty apartheid and job reservation) and there were many successful black businessmen, yes, with brick houses that were every bit as grand as those of their white counterparts. And the ANC did not invent government housing with security lighting and potable water, the Nats did.

However, there were laws, practices and codes that were humiliating to blacks; that did make it harder to succeed in a material sense; and there was widespread nepotism and favoritism toward their own among the Afrikaners, at the expense of everyone else especially blacks. At the same time, the blacks were led to believe (by the western press as much as by marxist-influenced agitators) that a vote at the ballot box was sine qua non of happiness and prosperity. Instead of creating a black middle class by coopting the black elite, the Afrikaner government alienated them and created ideal conditions for revolutionary ideas to take root. Meanwhile, the rest of the world had decided that South Africa had to change and made the status quo harder to maintain. Faced with no place to turn, the Afrikaners threw in the towel and handed over the reins of government to the ANC under Mandela, who by this time had moved away from Marxist ideology to a significant degree, partly because of the fall of communism generally, partly because he saw the need to be practical and conciliatory toward the whites and the Western powers.

If the New York Times article were published by the Economist, I dare say they would present data instead of anecdotes, and the picture would be depressing. Crime and poverty are way up. What has changed, is the sudden creation of a new ruling black elite with wealth that surpasses that of their Afrikaner role models. Yes, they learned how to elevate their own by watching the Afrikaners, once the "poor whites", vote themselves a government job and a nice home in the suburbs. Unlike the poor whites, the vast majority of the black have-nots won't get any dividend, as there are just too many of them to share the pie with. Surprisingly, these folks are still voting for the ANC on the whole, so one could say at least the ballot box part of the dream was delivered. It is these voters, the teenagers of the revolution that are now approaching middle age, that the ANC will have to come to terms with. They won't wait for their piece of the promised land forever (although a good many of them will die of aids, crime, or poverty before they get theirs).

One thing that is entirely new under the new regime is uncontrolled immigration from neighboring states. The Nats kept the borders pretty tight, but it seems the ANC doesn't care. Thus the huge influx of the dispossessed from neighboring (and self-governing) black countries, especially Zimbabwe and Mozambique. I don't understand why this has been permitted. Or perhaps the newly appointed Ministers just overlooked it. Who knows.

The other thing that is entirely new, no thanks to the ANC, is the very dynamic fee hunting industry. In my youth, hunters hunted for biltong, not horns, and Americans went to East Africa mainly, not South Africa, to hunt. The cheap rand/strong dollar made game farming a viable business and cattle ranches were converted at at rapid pace. It was the perfect career for the displaced white professional soldier or policeman...most of those guys had grown up hunting and stomping around the bush. So the ingredients were present and the industry blossomed. With the forex now working in the opposite direction, and with the possibility of land reform in the air, I think it is safe to say that we have seen the best hunting years already, at least in SA.

In other words, enjoy it while you can.

"An emotional article lacking in facts and misleading the reader by extrapolating two data points to the whole population. Not up to the standards one would expect from the New York Times."

I think you expect way too much from the New York Times, Russ. They are anything but unbiased; far from it. I posted the article to show what the left wing in this country USA thinks about the proletariat heaven in RSA. As usual, their take on it seems to be that more should be taken away from the rich and given to the poor.

In fairness, they do focus on the trials and tribulations of the black woman who is struggling to make it within the system. Inadvertantly, they also point out the fact that if RSA is to make it, it won't do so without the White minority's skills.

Not to simplify things, but the biggest difference between the USA and all other countries is we are a mix of races and cultures almost from day one. As was pointed out in RSA the tribal diferences still exist. To us they are blacks and all are the same. The same is true in Europe they are are all white but ethnic differences are great. Until the mighty fist of government rests mightly upon their backs these "problems" will continue. Hail to the mighty Federal Government!

Its just hard for me to believe that a tribal mindset that feeds gramma to the hyeanas because she got a little long in the tooth, and knocks a baby in the head because it was born feet first, and witch doctors that kill and make jerky powder out of 12 year old boys to feed to old men so they can hump a 10 year old girl and spread their aids, is ready to govern a country... just my opinnion, but it seems logical to me, besides the jerky powder don't work!! .

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Alf,

You can blame everything on the whites, if you want to, except the pre-white traditions of cannabalism, witch doctors, feeding Grandma to the hyenas, the exhalted behavior of killing all the neighbors you could find, enslaving the remnants, etc.

Even trying to ignore the fact that nothing in the NY Times is without political bias, one must admit that SA is going to trash. Anecdotes are hardly of any scientific value. Now, one might think that trash is not so bad, but don't try to make it out to be anything but what it is.

For those that don't think it is so bad, they should move to East St. Louis, south Chicago, Wash. D.C., or that pleasant vaction spot of downtown Detroit. Of course, I won't be around to see it, but my kids's kids will see "the coming of the trash" more and more here in the US.

It all boils down to the tribal mindset. There is no room for a constitution, even if they could spell it. The very role of the witch doctor shows that the whole society is based upon conning the populace and corruption. It is no different now. The money rises to the top in all societies but who wants to bother with a constitution.

I wonder where the esoteric idea of wildlife conservation fits in here? Ha!

It is dictatorial rule over the masses, as in the pre-white days, and kill-or-be-killed. That is where they all were or have all wound up and it will not be any different in SA.

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