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I spent three years driving around Africa, exploring the remote corners of thirty five countries and really sinking into the culture as much as possible. After
by grecy 4y ago
I spent three years driving around Africa, exploring the remote corners of thirty five countries and really sinking into the culture as much as possible. After six months I thought I knew a lot. Six month later I learned that was all rubbish and started again. And so on.
I spent a few months in South Africa, and I felt less safe there than any other country on the continent. It is extremely edgy.
I genuinely believe the magic of Mandela was stopping the (immense) majority of blacks from slaughtering the (extremely small) minority of whites for what they did. I had tears streaming down my face for hours in the Apartheid museum in Jburg.
With Mandela long gone, many of the problems I saw in South Africa, I think, are the result. "It's time we got you back", etc.
It pains me to say it, but I'll be shocked it the country doesn't tear itself apart in the coming decades.
Countries like Botswana feel like the polar opposite, where blacks and whites have always lived together peacefully, and work together to make the country better for everyone.
For context, I'm white.
- buyx 4y agoI think whites are going to be increasingly irrelevant in South Africa, and apart from the poor, the old, and ideologically motivated Afrikaners, I suspect that they are going to continue to emigrate in increasing numbers. Indians are already displacing them as the dominant minority in professional contexts, but they'll also start leaving for greener pastures. A focus on race-relations, in 2023, obscures the real issues plaguing South Africa, which, although in large part a legacy of apartheid, don't have to do with black-white relations.
- grecy 4y agoI have a lot to learn. > A focus on race-relations, in 2023, obscures the real issues plaguing South Africa, which, although in large part a legacy of apartheid, don't have to do with black-white relations. What are the real issues?
- buyx 4y agoCorruption, an incompetent civil service stuffed with political appointees, terrible education system, open borders (sorry, but it's a fact....you can't have huge unemployment and open borders with large numbers of undocumented people who are willing to work with no protections and below minimum wage - as per the article ), constrained electricity supply and constrained infrastructure due to a neoliberal obsession with paying down debt in the 1990-2004 period, instead of investing.
- grecy 4y ago> Corruption, an incompetent civil service stuffed with political appointees, terrible education system ... constrained electricity supply and constrained infrastructure.... And what are all of those caused by? In my opinion, it's all come about because the blacks and now saying "Screw you" and "You did it to us, so we'll do it to you"... The country is not working together. And this is the result.
- buyx 4y agoBlacks are the people who would suffer the worst from this attitude, since whites tend to be richer and able to buy their way out of trouble (generators, solar, batteries, private schools, private healthcare). It may possibly have been a thing 20 years ago, but nowadays, I doubt anyone relishes the breakdown in services as "sticking it to the man".