He essentially preserved the economic/racial balance of apartheid, while he and the people around him became the new insiders. He started hanging out with the C

He essentially preserved the economic/racial balance of apartheid, while he and the people around him became the new insiders. He started hanging out with the Clintons and giving diamonds to Naomi Campbell. > To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it. Apartheid was "peaceful" enough. The problem is the lack of "transition." The same people are still living in the shacks their parents lived in. > that's why non-South Africans look on Mandela so fondly. Non-South Africans had a lot of cognitive dissonance because they did business with South Africa and they didn't like what that said about themselves morally. The end of Apartheid gave them the license to continue that business guilt-free. It's like how sharecropping debt peonage to the same plantations that people were enslaved in and the leasing of convicts who had been sentenced to decade-long sentences for the crime of vagrancy let Americans feel better about how much they benefited from slavery.