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Comment by zohch | Hacker News Reader

> The western world has stolen enough wealth from us.

South Africa has taken all the rope it had and hung itself with it. Sure the west stole enough from South Africa, but South Africans stole more from other South Africans than the west ever stole from South Africa, and they continue to steal from other South Africans, and will continue doing so. South Africa's biggest roadblock to prosperity is not the west, it is South Africans, and especially those South Africans who whip up political fervor and xenophobia by pointing to the other (e.g. the west) while robbing the rubes blind.

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Please don't take HN threads further into hellish flamewar. The GP started it but at least that comment was partly on topic. You should have ignored the provocation at the end and either replied to the interesting, curious bits, or—if you didn't find any bits interesting or curious—not replied at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm struggling to parse the point you're making, paraphrasing: "Systemic issues in SA causes more money to be lost than sending money to Uber Eats... thus the parent's point of not supporting Uber Eats is moot"?

I think you can choose to not support a company that isn't playing by South African labour rules and rather support a local alternative even if the government is corrupt. And that doing a little bit is better than doing nothing, even if it's not a complete fix.

Apologies if I misunderstood, though - I do agree with you that there are bigger issues at play too in the country. But I do think it doesn't mean we shouldn't also fix the smaller issues if they are in reach. Low-hanging fruit and all that.

> "Systemic issues in SA causes more money to be lost than sending money to Uber Eats... thus the parent's point of not supporting Uber Eats is moot"?

Fair enough, the point about not supporting Uber Eats is great. I boycott Amazon for example for similar reasons. I'm just a bit tired of hearing how awful the west is while any problems that the west creates for South Africa is negligible compared to the problems that South Africans create for themselves.

But yeah sure, fuck Uber eats, where I live (in the west) we don't even have Uber never-mind Uber eats. But again we have legislation that prevent them from operating here, put in place by politicians, who were voted for by the populace, same as in South Africa. So you know, the root cause remains the root cause.

South Africans en masse can claim they don't want Uber eats to operate there, but of course they would never stop voting en masse for shitty politicians either that keep screwing them over and that allow Uber eats to operate there.

But I guess if you are the kind of person who thinks lynching a Pakistanis and Nigerians will fix something, then probably it also seems like a good idea to boycott Uber eats while voting for politicians who allow Uber eats to operate.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550522.

A lot of our mineral wealth does still go overseas, because they are foreign owned corporations. Or the rich owners leave with the money.

If all our industry was owned locally it would be a huge boon IMO

Sure, it isn’t stealing if you’ve built the labour and market system to cater to labour exploitation and wealth extraction.

Most here live a very simple life in rural africa and would probably be content to do so if it wasn’t for taxation and labour demand.

Sure we have our issues. Billions of rands poor out of this country, extracted by modern multinational neo-imperialists. If we blink the wrong way, the spectre of “loss of foreign investment” is always held above us. If we blink the other way, the rand is punished and ratings agencies come knocking.

I love my country and it’s people. I think we have enough to feed and house everyone. It often feels like other people are pulling the strings.

> Sure, it isn’t stealing if you’ve built the labour and market system to cater to labour exploitation and wealth extraction.

It is not stealing if it is by definition not stealing, but at least you can say that you never voted for the singular political party that has enjoyed an legislative majority (and sometimes supermajority) for almost 30 years ... right? I mean it is better than chance you did, as the majority of South Africans who can vote have at least once in their lives voted for said party, but not you for sure, and definitely not your parents, that would be ludicrous to suggest.

> Most here live a very simple life in rural africa and would probably be content to do so if it wasn’t for taxation and labour demand.

And you definitely never voted for the political party that set the tax regulations.

> It often feels like other people are pulling the strings.

Must be, can't be the voters, obviously the majority of the voters who voted for singular political party that has enjoyed an legislative majority (and sometimes supermajority) for almost 30 years have no say in how the country is governed, that would just be fucking stupid to suggest.

> I love my country and it’s people. I think we have enough to feed and house everyone. It often feels like other people are pulling the strings.

Well, stop for voting the people pulling the strings...

A quick example: The largest owner of land is the South African Government, and yet laws are pushed through to allow land to be confiscated from people of a particular race and "redistributed" to other people of a selected race[1].

As long as the majority allows things like that they will remain poor and impoverished.

It's been over 25 years that South Africa has had State-mandated and State-enforced affirmative action to benefit the 90% majority at the expense of the 10% minority, and yet the 90% majority is still clamouring for more.

[1] It makes more sense for the South African Government to give out land that they actually own, not land that is held by someone else.

I think painting this as such a clear "black&white" issue you make it much too easy for yourself. This goes particular for South Africa, where much of the wealth disparity is because of the economic divisions that were created during colonization and apartheid live on.

On a more general this is similar to the arguments with libertarians who hold property rights up the highest, ... but only from now, ignoring the blatant disregard for property rights in history which cemented todays economic structures.

I don't have good answers how to deal with wrongs of the past, but it's clearly not simple.

> I don't have good answers how to deal with wrongs of the past, but it's clearly not simple.

But definitely voting for less shitty politicians won't fix it right ... I mean god forbid someone puts a stop to the uninhibited looting from your political class who are elected time and time again with legislative majorities or super-majorities. Definitely xenophobia is a much better solution ... lynched any Americans lately, maybe that will solve it, or is that something South Africans reserve for other Africans and Pakistanis?

More broadly, as a pragmatic issue utterly divorced from the goal of “justice”, few nations achieve prosperity when confiscation is the norm, as prosperity usually involves planning and investments with multi year returns. If a nation wishes to repair inequalities through transfers, the less disruptive way to do it is through taxation. Seizing specific properties outright is an arbitrary and capricious distribution of the burdens, and a lingering political culture of expropriation will likely deter investment for a generation or longer.

It is also remarkable the extent to which these land confiscation programs focus on the nation’s farms, as if the leaders’ vision of a prosperous future was simply subsistence agriculture: two acres and a cow for every family. The proceeds of a program of taxation can be invested in health and education and infrastructure, the foundations of future prosperity. It’s hard to do that with seized land; few will be fool enough to buy it off of you.

On the other hand, a campaign of land seizures, fêting ethnic resentment, is much more effective at feeding the ruling party’s political power, so, there’s your tragedy.

I don’t agree with the policies around land without compensation but the economic prosperity that the people of the USSR and PRC experienced after instating those policies can not be denied.

Economic prosperity?! They had massive famines. Tens of millions died.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–1933

You mean the prosperity of China, which is about one-third the prosperity of, say, South Korea, which started out in about the same place? Ah! I regret that it only seems impressive because the nation is very large.

Oh! But perhaps you mean those heady years of growth during the Great Leap Forward itself, where the nation became so prosperous that ~45 million people starved to death.

As a South African. I am wondering what this guy is on about?

> As a South African. I am wondering what this guy is on about?

I guess as South Africans who voted for the politicians who sell South Africa out to anyone willing to pay while stuffing their pockets, the majority of South Africans have no clue what I'm on about.

I mean at least Russians can claim that their voting system is horribly corrupt, but South Africans claim with a straight face that they, en masse, do not in fact support the policies instituted by the politicians they elected and who who are so blatantly corrupt that it would make Putin blush.

No, that is all the west's fault. Apologies if I delayed you from a xenophobic lynching with my crazy talk, or was it the burning of another university?

Do you have sources to backup this often repeated rhetoric?

I don’t think you can downplay the role of foreign capital and multi-nationals In South Africa’s economic problems for the past two decades - for example the role that The Guptas, McKinsey and KPMG all played in looting the state.

> for example the role that The Guptas, McKinsey and KPMG all played in looting the state.

Who made that possible? The voters, who voted for Zuma and the ANC and gave them a legislative super majority, who then in turn gave the Guptas all the power that they managed to get and either looked the other way or more likely were complicit in the Gupta's corrupt dealings with KPMG and McKinsey.

Without South African politicians selling out the South Africans who voted for them, the Guptas, KPMG and McKinsey would be entirely irrelevant. But I'm sure these facts won't prevent South Africans from lynching some more foreigners.

So we're clear, I'm not proposing the west do any kind of reparations. You just won't calculate it and the damage is already done, a pay cheque isn't going to help. But you are wrong. I'd prefer it if they just left, take their corporations with them. They don't have to return anything, just go.

Firstly, I am referring to the whole continent. The west didn't just destroy one nation, they took us all out (except Botswana, and hey wouldn't you know it: They're mostly fine. Strange that, must be a fluke). It's ridiculous to think we would have self-corrected after the colonials left, especially in a few decades.

The west created power vacuums, committed coups to remove leaders who didn't want to hand over land and money (and instead wanted to invest it into our own future) and pulled us into wars we had nothing to do with, just to further their own commercial interests. It's not just mineral wealth that was taken from us. They also divided the land they didn't have any right to amongst themselves. Some good arguments about how responsible the west is for the middle east's current crisis. I also feel like this argument ignores a lot of the CIA's activities over the past 5 decades...

America's wealth was greatly enhanced by the railways built by the slaves they stole. How much of that came back to Africa? Oh yeah, none of it. That counts as wealth theft, but I'm happy to agree that this starts to get messy quickly and isn't very productive.

I have to laugh at the 'The west stole enough' line. They nearly stole everything, and it continues to this day. The gold, the fucking Cullinan Diamond, the minerals used to create phones. They all come from labor in Africa, and very little of the generated wealth comes back. That seem balanced or appropriate to you, or does it seem there's a power gradient? We all know about the supply chain issues at companies like Apple, I'm not sure how you can argue that the damage isn't still ongoing.

> South Africa's biggest roadblock to prosperity is not the west

The west excludes us from global economic activity all the goddamned time. In extreme cases that includes assassinating leaders who want to punt them out of Africa. And hey, look at that, Shell is busy sonar blasting our coastline for fucking oil. Great. You think we're gonna see any of that money? Not a chance. Nevermind the destruction they're causing, at least the westerners can drive their cars around. But hey, we should just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, right?

Here's a nice example: Take omicron. The west banned travel from here because we reported it first. This is pretty simple to work out: We are world leaders in infectious disease management, due to the amount of infectious diseases we have to manage. Experts in the field have been explaining this to (apparently) deaf audiences for a while now. It's not great to have so much experience in identifying and managing infectious diseases, but we do. The west could (and should) learn something from us. I learned the other day that _nothing_ has killed more Americans in the same timeline as COVID has, not even the civil war. Admittedly I doubt that civil war claim and I suspect we just don't know how many people died as a result of the war. Still, COVID is up there.

A lot of the west seems to think Africa is just fundamentally flawed. We're not, it's just hard to act independently or in our own interests under the capitalist boot.

To be fair, it's not just the West. China is busy creating the next silk road through crafty debt tactics. Once again: Something the West could do to help us, but won't. Which is going to cost you a great deal more in the long run (we're used to poverty, I don't see modern America handling it well).

----- EDIT

Removed a lot of "you's" because I am not actually upset with anyone in particular. But the west has 0 understanding of what they did here, they elected to whitewash history instead. Plenty of scars to disprove the narratives.

It's also worth noting I'm a white south africa. I know a great deal about this whitewashed history because most older white south africans spout it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Happy to continue this debate, I really don't mean it to be aggressive (but I love this country and I will passionately defend the defensible parts of it)

> > South Africa's biggest roadblock to prosperity is not the west

> The west excludes us from global economic activity all the goddamned time.

And yet you fail to cite one example of this. I don't see how this is true, but by all means, maybe try again and cite an actual example. And just for clarity, an example of restricting travel in a god damned pandemic is not an example of "systemic economic exclusion", it may be an ill conceived policy choice, but the west is also not responsible for your pathetically low vaccination rate which likely helped the new variant come into existence.

> And hey, look at that, Shell is busy sonar blasting our coastline for fucking oil. Great. You think we're gonna see any of that money? Not a chance.

Definitely the voters who vote for the politicians who license and allow this have nothing to do with this, right?

> It's also worth noting I'm a white south africa.

Nope, not worth noting.

> And just for clarity, an example of restricting travel in a god damned pandemic is not an example of "systemic economic exclusion", it may be an ill conceived policy choice, but the west is also not responsible for your pathetically low vaccination rate which likely helped the new variant come into existence.

I’m not from Africa nor am I from America so I don’t think I have a horse in this race but I think this is the sort of rhetoric that the guy is critiquing. It has a clearly skewed understanding of the power differentials of the pandemic and then blames the nations with less power for being able to pull less strings.

Firstly, it makes total sense to me that preventing travel from a region just because it discovered a variant, when that region is apparently world reknowned in its ability to study infectious disease, is a policy born out of ignorant xenophobia. There’s no evidence that this thing started in the regions that were banned or that omicron hasn’t already spread internationally at that point, only that one of the nations with a world class variant detection system sounded the alarm.

Secondly, damn are we really gonna blame colonized countries on low vaccination rates when vaccine access is still being hoarded, it’s production still close sourced, and antivax movement is still strong in western nations?

> It has a clearly skewed understanding of the power differentials of the pandemic and then blames the nations with less power for being able to pull less strings.

A stupid but justifiable policy from the past 2 weeks cannot be a good example of why South Africa is spiraling the toilet. Sorry. Pick better examples. South Africa has been spiraling the toilet way before COVID.

> Secondly, damn are we really gonna blame colonized countries on low vaccination rates when vaccine access is still being hoarded, it’s production still close sourced, and antivax movement is still strong in western nations?

Who exactly is South Africa colonized by currently? And further:

- EXCLUSIVE South Africa delays COVID vaccine deliveries as inoculations slow ( https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-... )

- South Africa Asks J&J, Pfizer to Stop Sending Vaccines “It is entirely owing to hesitancy,” Crisp said. “We have plenty vaccine and capacity but hesitancy is a challenge. Unfortunately it means that many unvaccinated people may have an unhappy festive season and will possibly result in hospitals being congested.” (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-24/s-africa-...)

- South Africa's low vaccination rate is NOT a supply problem and vaccine hesitancy is stifling demand so much that it had to delay delivery of doses, say experts - but the rest of Africa still needs more doses ( https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10248699/Low-vaccin... )

Let's not pretend like South Africa has a vaccine supply shortage, because that would be a lie.

I never said that SA had a vaccine shortage I’m saying are we really gonna blame SA when 1) there’s no evidence of wrongdoing on their part except to use their world reknowned infectious disease institutions to discover an existing variant that had entered their populace; 2) other nations are equally if not more flawed?

My understanding is the only reason SA even sounded the alarm was that they were smart enough to proactively be scanning for variants aggressively. They frankly did the world a favor and the world responded by assuming those poor African fucks are gonna dirty everyone with their disease.

> They frankly did the world a favor and the world responded by assuming those poor African fucks are gonna dirty everyone with their disease.

Do you not get how viruses work? Many western nations has or had travel restrictions from other western nations.

A lot of your argument relies on the assertion that the West took resources from Africa.

And yes, while that is true to some extent, it is not the whole story.

> America's wealth was greatly enhanced by the railways built by the slaves they stole.

IIRC (and wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade) the slaves were bought by the west. The theft was done by native Africans for the most part.

Africans enslaved other Africans and then sold them.

Should the west have refused to buy those slaves from Africans? Certainly, but it was not the West that, for the most part, enslaved and then sold the African slaves.

> And hey, look at that, Shell is busy sonar blasting our coastline for fucking oil. Great. You think we're gonna see any of that money? Not a chance. Nevermind the destruction they're causing, at least the westerners can drive their cars around. But hey, we should just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, right?

Who'd you vote for?

Because I can all but guarantee that the Shell paid money for whatever they are doing, and if you are not seeing any of that money, it is going to the leaders who sold Shell those rights.

So yeah, "The West" is buying resources at fire-sale prices from Africa, but they they're paying your leaders, and if you don't see a cent of that money, it is not the West's fault.

If your are unhappy that the resources are being mined relentlessly and you are getting nothing in return, then ask yourself where that money is going. If you think the land is being destroyed, ask yourself why you voted in leaders who took the money in exchange for destroying the land.

> But the west has 0 understanding of what they did here, they elected to whitewash history instead. Plenty of scars to disprove the narratives.

I'm South African, always have been. We have plenty of scars, but a significant number of them are self-inflicted. We vote along tribal lines (white man bad, black man good) and are then surprised when we don't see a cent of all the money going to our politicians.

> If your are unhappy that the resources are being mined relentlessly and you are getting nothing in return, then ask yourself where that money is going. If you think the land is being destroyed, ask yourself why you voted in leaders who took the money in exchange for destroying the land.

I would bet money that the majority of the revenue of mineral sales actually goes to South Africans and not foreigners, and I would even bet money it is more than 75% of the revenue.

> I would bet money that the majority of the revenue of mineral sales actually goes to South Africans and not foreigners, and I would even bet money it is more than 75% of the revenue, based on how shitty South African mining shares are.

Maybe; I don't really know the details behind the sale of mineral rights but I DO know that they are never given away for free and that usually they are sold to the highest bidder. Maybe in the case mentioned by GP (Shell) the mineral rights were sold below what the market would have borne.

My heart breaks for the South African masses; and then I talk to them, and every impoverished person I speak to is certain that they would be worse off if they voted differently. Vote another party in power? Never - the party that has failed to govern South Africa effectively since 1994 is still in power!

South Africa's poverty is, at this point, self-inflicted. I have more than a few ideas on how this can be solved, but none of the solutions involve a) Race or b) kickbacks, so you can forget about SA digging itself out of this hole.

> My heart breaks for the South African masses;

My heart used to break for them, but really, why shed a tear, this is what the South African masses vote for, and this is what they get good and hard, and god forbid anyone stands in their way of them getting it as good and hard as they possibly can get it before civil war finally burns the country to a cinder, at the very least they can find comfort in knowing south africans would have burned most of the county down before a civil war erupts:

- Why are South Africans burning schools in Limpopo? (https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-36225502)

- Why Cape Town's trains are on fire in South Africa (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45990981)

- South African university set ablaze in student protest (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/25/south-african-...)

Burning their country down seem to be their national passtime, or at least while they are not lynching foreigners. But I'm sure one of them will come along to blame the west for this also.

> Certainly, but it was not the West that, for the most part, enslaved and then sold the African slaves.

Surely the righteous West could’ve freed those slaves and not fought to keep them for centuries?

If you read the wiki link further, you’ll see that they paid Africans to find slaves, because they couldn’t survive on their own - amidst warring tribes and diseases. They would transport slaves as cargo, resell them throughout the West, indenture them in plantations and factories, make a racial caste that would propagate for centuries, mistreat them and kill them, and so on. It’s absolutely insane to frame colonialism in a callous manner such as you have, in 2021!

> Because I can all but guarantee that the Shell paid money

This should be investigated by the Western govs that Shell works with. Everyone knows this is happening all the time. How are they allowed to bribe poor countries, in the first place?

> you are getting nothing in return, then ask yourself where that money is going

Politicians in the West are also equally corrupt, on all sides, and none of their earnings are distributed to the people. What kind of weird argument is this?

> I'm South African, always have been

Doesn’t matter. You still seem to misunderstand colonialism’s effects, and post modern colonialism as it stands today.

> Surely the righteous West could’ve freed those slaves and not fought to keep them for centuries?

Where did I claim that the West was not at fault?

(The rest of your argument relies on this sort of strawman so there's no need to respond to it).

There is no strawman?

Your whole post relies on blaming SA for what happened to them, using their fellow SAfricans who exploited them (alongside the West) as a fall-guy. That’s a very unfair characterisation of colonialism and its modern effects, like I claimed in my post.

Further, similarly to the way you dismissed the West for purchasing slaves, you skipped over Shell getting away with bribing the poorer previously colonised country.

> Your whole post relies on blaming SA for what happened to them, using their fellow SAfricans who exploited them (alongside the West) as a fall-guy. That’s a very unfair characterisation of colonialism and its modern effects, like I claimed in my post.

No, I did not claim that, I am saying that the voters in South Africa are voting in policies based on color and racial lines, not based on their self-interest.

> Further, similarly to the way you dismissed the West for purchasing slaves,

I did not dismiss the West for purchasing slaves (I said that they should not have), I merely pointed out that native Africans were enslaving their neighbours (and worse) well before they started selling their slaves to the West.

> you skipped over Shell getting away with bribing the poorer previously colonised country.

I did not;

1) No accusation was made that Shell was bribing anyone,

and

2) I pointed out very clearly that mining rights are usually SOLD to the highest bidder by the state. If the state does not then use that money for its citizens, you can hardly blame the source of the money. Since the state is legitimately elected by the voters, the voters have only themselves to blame when their leaders (whom have been in charge for the last 30 years almost) take all the money.

An american southerner with some nitpicks, specifically to one or two spots in your post.

1. The slaves were (largely) in the south until the abolishment of the instutution in the mid 1860's. Despite railroads being a Northern business("free as in freedom" labor) well before then. The heyday of railroad construction through out america began with the well know northern robber barrons of the 1870's 80's and 90's. In other words, no, slaves did not build the railroads; poor people from anywhere did; whites, recently made free(and poor) blacks, and in the american west, asians.

2. (As i understand it, someone show me otherwise) Africans who were shipped to America were not stolen from Africa. The western part of the continent was experiencing the introduction of the idea of nationalism. Certain west african tribes went on a warring land grab, and stole from other west africans. The conquering ethnicities didnt want the subjected ethicities around, and traded them for various goods at port to american northern shipping business. They, in turn, sold those individuals to southern traders in exchange for raw materials which then went on to the northern merchantile industry to then trade various final goods to nationalists in west africa for...

Anyway, just my two cents.

> China is busy creating the next silk road through crafty debt tactics. Once again: Something the West could do to help us, but won't. Which is going to cost you a great deal more in the long run

This is something that bothers me too. The west seems to be totally ignoring China's activities in sub-Saharan Africa.

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