As a white South African who lives abroad, I agree that you should be careful about taking on face value things white South Africans who live abroad say (except for me of course!)
As the statistics show, white South Africans are in a much better place than black South Africans in terms of employment. I had specific opportunity related reasons for departing South Africa (and the family ties I have created in the United States mean it is very unlikely that I will return), but if I did return I am confident that I would find a respectable job in my field, as I did every time I searched for one when I was living there as a working adult (2001 through 2004). This is true of all my white males friends (in effect, 90% of my social group in South Africa) - none are unwillingly unemployed.
There is certainly affirmative action, but as others have said it affects different industries in different ways. Even with affirmative action I think whites are at an advantage due to their far superior economic situation. They live in better neighborhoods, go to better schools, know more people in industry, etc. I believe that success begets success, so this advantage is likely to be around for a while. For this reason I support affirmative action policies in South Africa, even though they go against my standard strongly held belief in a merit based society. The fact is without the forced pressure black South Africans will continue to be on the margins of the skilled employment infrastructure, which is bad for everyone.
That isn’t to say South Africa doesn’t have serious issues. Violent crime is a real problem. But once again that affects the poorer elements of society far more than it does the middle class or wealthier. Living there I certainly had higher walls than I do here, but otherwise lived my life pretty much the same way I do here in a nice Sacramento neighborhood.
As for the future, I’m cautiously optimistic. It has strong economic fundamentals and has maintained good fiscal discipline. I think the disparity in education and opportunity is the biggest challenge, and see a lot of the other issues such as crime as flowing from that - better employment and education opportunities will decrease poverty, increase the middle class and reduce crime. This disparity should be a huge focus for the country, and I would be comfortable if the government chose to dedicate far more resources to this.
The thing that keeps me worried about South Africa is the success of Jacob Zuma. Everything I’ve read about the man indicates that he and his supporters are scarily ignorant and corrupt. Just scroll down his Wikipedia page for a minute and you’ll see what I mean.
In the years I’ve been (loosely) following South Africa, the political situation appears to have just gotten worse. South Africans tend to pooh-pooh the idea that a Mugabe type could get power and wreck the country, but the trend is worrisome. So tell me: why should I not worry about Zuma and whoever comes after him? If the ANC candidates become more and more corrupt, what’s the chance that an opposition party could actually get elected?
…And on a lighter note, people interested in South Africa might enjoy the comic strip Madam and Eve. A lot of the archives are online, and it’s fascinating to go back and read reactions to all the changes that have happened in SA in the last ~20 years.
I have to be honest, Zuma did concern me greatly before he actually became president. I’m not in touch with the intimate details of his administration, but now that he has been there a while I have a better impression of him than I do of Thabo Mbeki. He seems far more grounded and less conspiracy theory prone than his predecessor. And as far as I can tell, he was legitimately, soundly and democratically elected within the ANC party. I think he is in some ways an improvement.
Having one party dominate so much is a concern, and I would be happier if there were more viable alternative parties. On the other hand, I don’t think the ANC can be directly compared to a US style party - internally it seems to have many competing forces - it may be that the big ideological arguments that occur in public in the US still do occur in South African politics, just within the party.
I’d be curious if there are any South African posters here who have a better view into the internal workings of the ruling party. I’d also be curious what South Africans still living in South Africa think of the Zuma presidency, along with his cabinet members.
Really, as President, Zuma hasn’t yet done anything that I would particularly object to. I have to rate him higher than Mbeki if just for the change in HIV/AIDS policy. I agree that he seems more grounded; perhaps he’s a little bit too populist for my taste, but in balance I think it’s better than Mbeki’s “ivory tower” attitude. Zuma does seem to give at least the appearance of caring about what’s happing to the “man in the street” - although of course it could all be PR spin.
One issue that I have had is with the proliferation of portfolios in the Cabinet. I’m not sure if there was a need for all the new ministries; it may be that there really was too much workload, but there does seem to be a bit of a “too many cooks” situation. When you have separate ministers for Finance, Economic Development, National Planning, and Trade & Industry, how do you divide up the responsibilities?
The ANC is quite a “big tent” and a lot of the policy debate goes on within the party rather than in public. In the long run I think that’s a bad thing, and it’s been interesting to see that more of the disputes within the ANC (and the Tripartite Alliance) have been aired in public recently. I was hoping the the formation of COPE might have been a legitimate split in the ANC, but it seems that the leaders of COPE have sunk it by their infighting, and by their platform of “Look how bad the ANC has been in government! We’d be better than that! (Never mind that we were in the ANC government until last year.)”
It’s been encouraging to see that, since the DA took control of the Western Cape provincial government in last year’s elections, the relationship with the national government has been reasonably smooth - not that there haven’t been issues, but from what both sides are saying they seem to actually be able to work somewhat amicably together.
The Zuma presidency could be a lot worse (Malema could actually be a Minister or something :(), and while I used to think Mbeki was a good president aside from the AIDS thing, it seems I was wrong about him and he was actually just fronting, as more stuff about the underhandedness has come out. One thing I’ll say about Zuma, what you see is pretty much what you get, even if it isn’t pretty, and he definitely thinks with his penis first,which isn’t reassuring (but - Kennedy, Clinton, they were OK presidents, weren’t they?)
I have it good authority that you can’t give the man any policy documents to read, he prefers verbal briefings as he finds reading tough going, which is a little too Dubya-like for my liking, but any quirks like that are balanced out by the reversal on AIDS policy.
And the problem with this is? Why wouldn’t you want to leave a place if you were in fear of being mugged or having your daughter/wife raped? Where in SA do you live?
Not by the State, but thousands of farmers have still been killed.
That often, when I hear of ex-South Africans bitching about SA, it turns out they left in the nineties. That tells me all I need to know.
If your fears were shown to be unfounded. It’s not like there are rape gangs prowling the middle-class suburbs. The well-documented epidemic of rape is generally confined to the townships and ghettos. I don’t think a middle-class White person is any more likely to be raped in Cape Town than in London or Sydney. But those are the people fleeing in fear.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to leave if you have that kind of fear. Let me put the problem like this: obviously the degree to which people are afraid of crime varies. Those who are particularly fearful are disproportionately likely to emigrate; therefore the picture of the situation in SA that you get from talking to expats is skewed to the bad.
I wouldn’t go as far as yendis and say that all ex-South Africans try to make SA look bad to justify their leaving. But there does seem to be a contingent who make a habit (on the Internet in particular) of almost gleefully bashing SA. (And, in fairness, there are plenty of SA residents who do the same.) I also find it odd that people will happily believe what expats say about the situation in SA, even when those expats have been gone for 10 or 15 years, but then apply a much greater degree of scepticism to what those of us who still live here have to say.
I’m not yendis but, if it matters, I live in one of the southern suburbs of Cape Town.
I live in Cape Town, southern suburbs like ctnguy.
And if I was in place where I was afraid I would try and move, but my first thought would not be to move to another country but rather to somewhere else in SA where I would be safer*.
I know that there is crime in South Africa, and wherever possible I take precautions to protect myself from crime. For example, I don’t leave expensive items, recently purchased hi fi or camera, visible on my car seats when parked. I also take care to pay attention to my surroundings when walking and let people know where I am going in case something happens. But I also understand that despite my precautions I could still be the victim of a crime, but I don’t let the fear of that prevent me from living a normal life**.
*And if did move it would probably be back to Durban where I would at least be warmer.
**Great White Sharks on the other hand are keeping me from swimming in False Bay.
That makes three of us (does Pinelands count as Southern Suburbs?)…
Like the other South Africans actually living in South Africa I would agree that while things have got worse for the richer portion of the population (although not so much worse as some would have you believe) and not as much better as many would have hoped for the poorest of the population, much remains unchanged, and probably will continue to do so.
This is true. Jumping off from this, though, I’d like to point out that, despite what the international media has reported, there has been no load-shedding since May 2008.
I’m not convinced that things have gotten worse for the wealthy at all, although I have no statistics to back that up so perhaps I am mistaken. However many middle to upper middle class extended family members are doing better now than they every have, often because they are perfectly situated to take advantage of a more open South African economy, or work for companies that do. Somewhat aggravatingly, this is especially true of an uncle who is the most racist “the sky is falling” whiner I know, his business is thriving, something that would have been very different in a restricted apartheid South Africa.
I was thinking of things like school fees, which have gone from a couple of hundred rands a year when I was at school in the late 80s to a couple of thousand a month for the same school nowadays. I shouldn’t think that salaries have increased 100 fold in the same period. People are now paying for what they once felt entitled to…
Grim
(who feels the need to point out that he grew up in Rondebosch and was absorbed into Pinelands by marriage, so that any signs of inbreeding are purely co-incidental)
This source from the Daily Mail says that about 2,500 farmers have been killed since 1994, according to the government’s own investigation. Some of the farmers place it closer to 3,000, but there appears to be agreement that the figure is in multiple thousands .
This is as compared to 18,000 murders per year in the whole of South Africa, so it looks to me like this is just a part of the overall crime problem rather than white farmers being specifically targeted. Apparently, during the 1990s about 38.4% of the victims of farm attacks [were black, Asian, or colored, which also would suggest that this is not a targeted racial persecution a la Zimbabwe, although I don’t have any figures for the 2000s.
Of course, dead is dead, whether you’re a random victim or a target of racist violence. So I certainly don’t blame the farmers for being scared, or for taking measures to protect themselves.
“Whites in rural areas” =/= “farmers”, I’d just like to say. It includes smallholders & other residents. But even then, the commission that looked into this (summary PDF), found that the motive was usually armed robbery, and people were killed as a sideline to that, not specifically targeted for execution, which was Chen019’s implication.
And I’m sorry, but if you’re the only ones in the rural areas with anything of worth, of course you’re going to be the preferential target of crime. The commission also found that (generally unarmed) Black workers tend to be a lot more passive in response to armed robberies than the ( generally gun-toting) White owners, so the disproportionate percentages of White people killed is even more understandable. I’m not blaming them, but that does explain the differences.
Not that Black workers aren’t killed, robbed or raped, because they are. In greater absolute numbers, if not proportionally (for murder - they’re preferentially raped, it seems), but I believe there’s sufficient explanation above for the difference.
Also note - that’s 2500 since 1994 - which means <200/year, or <1 every 2 days. In a country that sees 50 murders a day. If this is a campaign of genocide, it’s the least effective one I’ve ever heard of.
It’s really simple - White farmers are disproportionately the victims of farm robberies and murders because White farmers are disproportionate in numbers. 80% of arable land is still owned by Whites.
