A personal account of the transition.
by Gedahlia Braun
South Africa is
now ruled by blacks; the only prosperous country on the continent has been
handed to them on a platter. While the country has not sunk overnight into the
morass of the rest of Africa, and while most of the dire predictions of the
white right did not come to pass, a dispassionate view of the last four years
gives one no confidence that South Africa’s future will be fundamentally
different from that of other black-ruled nations.
Virtually every
trait that makes one skeptical of black rule—dishonesty, deviousness, incompetence,
corruption, unreliability, and callous indifference to human suffering—manifests
itself daily.
When I first
visited South Africa in 1986, after a decade in black Africa, it was at the end
of the apartheid era. The contrast with the rest of Africa was stunning: all of
the amenities one associates with the modern world— from telephones to potable
water to public toilets—were plentiful in South Africa. Most of the apartheid
legislation was still in place, though much of it was becoming a dead letter.
Apartheid’s ostensible goal was an exclusively white South Africa, with most
blacks living in nominally independent tribal “homelands.” Those living in
South African townships near whites were “temporary sojourners” and thus were
not, for example, allowed to own businesses, as this would give them a degree
of permanence….To Read More…
No comments:
Post a Comment