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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Was a well written article. Pretty amazing contrast in the way various people are forced to live. While obviously not great for black people during apartheid South Africa's government really fell apart afterwards.

Hiv infection rates rose from 3% to 18% of the adult population.

Top 10 in the world for murder rates.

30% unemployment rate.

Rolling blackouts.

Afrikaans Paramilitary groups.

Massive organized criminal organizations.

Widespread government corruption.

Recently had the Zuma riots.

It seems to be inching it's way towards a failed state now.

I'm in no way implying that apartheid should not have been abolished. It was terrible. Just saying that the governments that followed were objectively not great.

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I've always wondered why there's no black-majority country that's prosperous...it's always the same story of corruption, incompetence, and/or infighting.

Now, before anyone brings out the pitchforks, I'm a black African residing in Nigeria...I'm just saying that we really have to do better than this.

Isn't Nigeria one of the fastest growing countries in the world right now? I haven't visited but I often watch videos about it (and other upcoming African nations) and it seems like Nigeria is on the path to greatness!

It was doing well until 2015, then per capita gdp seems to have gone down again to 2010 levels.

It also has the issue that its going to hit 600 million people this century with no way to feed them.

We were up until one former military dictator assumed Presidency in a democratic election in 2015, and all the progress has been erased, plus more.

It's useful to have a long unbroken cultural history passing down a set of habits, norms and social institutions useful for highly complex large scale agricultural/industrial society.

Building cultural capital is hard.

That's probably the biggest factor.

There's also the possibility (I don't know of much evidence either way) of differences in mental traits, not necessarily in a less intelligent sense, but in an adapted to a particular way of life sense. Individual humans aren't fully general intelligences and some of us have more skills in some areas than others, this may also apply across people's groups that diverged in lifestyle a hundred generations ago, leading to slightly different specializations that nonethless make it slightly harder to function in an environment made for another group.

Brain drain is another huge factor.

If opportunities within a country are exceptionally poor, and opportunities outside are both more remunerative and reasonably accessible, talent will flee.

You see this within countries as well (generally migration from poorer / inland parts of the US toward the coasts, though housing unaffordability has somewhat put a damper on this in the past decade), but it's especially pronounced between poorer and wealthier nations of the world.

This tends also to continue to depress opportunities within poorer countries: talent migrates elsewhere, institutions tend to be less capable / more corrupt, etc. It's a vicious cycle.

My guess is that it's old tribal alliances vs what is best for a country.

... which is not special to Africa particularly. But Western Europe went through this centuries ago. It is said that the past is another country. The reverse is true.

There are other factors like fewer geographical separations. Lesotho and Namibia are more stable now because they are enclosed by mountains and separated from others by desert respectively.

Imagine if there was no water separating England and the European continent. There probably would not be an England. Or rather, no UK.

"Africa time" was prevalent when I lived there. I also saw recently that critical race theory considers being on time to be characteristic of white supremacy, but I know nothing of CRT so I'm not getting into a discussion on that; just seemed a connection.

Botswana and Rwanda seems to be countries with lower levels of corruption and reasonably good or improving public services.

Ghana too was doing well in the last decade, but now has taken a turn for the worse since the current government took over. I live in Ghana, and the level of corruption now, and the neglect of a proper development agenda, is unbelievable.

So, I don’t think there is necessarily anything that makes black-majority countries incapable of curbing corruption.

Paul Rusesabagina could not be reached for comment.

Context, for the curious: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rusesabagina>

Not sure what this has to do with Rwanda having low corruption. The kinds of countries in the 3rd world that are sufficiently "liberal" to the liking of the west are usually cesspools of corruption and poverty.

I should know, because I have experienced it myself. In Ghana set up stalls for trade on the sides of major roads, at considerable risk to their safety. Successive governments have tried to force them away for a while, only for people to denounce those actions as heartless. Invariably, they slowly creep back. Imagine those who promote this situation are fined or jailed. Is that a case of being authoritarian, or a case of robust enforcement of safety rules?

Here you have an African country enforcing the rule of law and a strong national identity, and with actual results to back it up. Of course mistakes can be made, and I'm not holding up the Rwandan regime as blameless in terms of human rights. But if you you focus on quality of life of the average citizen, they have improved a great deal.

I feel like if it can all turn bad just from one election to the next, then it was never really good. I wonder if Botswana and Rwanda are just as vulnerable as Ghana was.

Rwanda is no stranger to bad times. 1994, being well known.

I think it takes generations for the right culture to develop.

If you look back at early Western large-scale democracies (as opposed to the historic smaller scale Greek ones), most of them weren't all roses for the first couple of generations.

I think this is right. We see similar phenomenon in Russia and Ukraine. There are flashes of democracy sometimes but then they revert back to what they've always known. In the case of Russia/Ukraine it's the legacy of feudalism + strong ruler syndrome which was coopted by communism and which they still have not emerged from.

If anything, differences in political culture and history define Ukrainian-Russian conflict to the greater extent than language, nationalism or economics.

Given the last 30 years, the trend is going in opposite directions — where Russia reverts to their authoritarian baseline, Ukraine actually devolves central authority and especially presidential powers. Ukrainian constitution of 1996 literally has a transition plan to disperse the power of central executive authority into several distinct bodies.

Both trends are backed by centuries of history. To put that in a perspective: Ukraine had more democratic transitions of power in the last 10 years than Russian had in the last 300.

Things can only move forward so fast. Look at the French and Russian revolutions. It didn't take long for things to revert to autocratic strongman type governments but there was some progress that stuck.

Perhaps one thing to say is that not that many countries developed in general in the last hundred years or so, depending on how you count them. It seems there isn’t really an easy path to development and many African countries started a very poor quite recently without the smoothest transition out of colonialism.

You might count a few Caribbean countries for your initial question, eg the Bahamas is 90% black and has similar per-capita gdp to Poland (a lower hdi though). But maybe it’s easier to be this developed if you’re a small country (population 400k).

The Bahamas is successful essentially because it's a subsidiary of the US. With 80% of it's economy based on tourism and most of the rest on financial services for people that want lee way. If cruise ships stopped going there the island would collapse in a few months.

There is tourism in Africa and there could potentially be a lot more of it, if there were more infrastructure and less social/political problems.

It’s not that hard for me to get to Dakar or Windhoek as it is, and I could certainly see myself enjoying those destinations if there were more to do

Cruise ships stopped during the recent pandemic. Did it collapse? I imagine it suffered, but do we know what happened?

That is a good point. Their GDP is 11.2 billion. Their losses during Covid are estimated at $7.9 billion. They did survive.

https://www.iadb.org/en/news/covid-19-effects-and-impacts-ba....

Devil's Advocate - in 1954, South Korea was at least as poor as most of Sub-Saharan Africa, if not poorer.

Singapore

South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan were benefited hugely by becoming significant considerations within the US Cold War calculus against both the Soviet Union and China.

There was both direct engagement through defence spending and presence, as well as policy designed to specifically encourage trade relations with the US and Europe. That hit critical mass in the 1960s (Japan) and 1970s/80s (Korea).

All three regions were otherwise strongly unified culturally had had relatively little history of colonisation (arguably less so for Korea, which had in fact been occupied by Japan, than Japan or Taiwan).

I don’t understand what your argument is? I’m not denying that other countries developed but my (admittedly very poor) understanding of development economics is that there are some vague theories of ways that countries might develop but many attempts to develop have been stymied in practice in different ways in different countries in different places all around the world.

I'm one that believes that without a common point of unity groups can not prosper. It's easier to break apart than to stay together. Large established countries have a long enough background that they can count on national patriotism or a Royal or something similar to unite on. Unfortunately, all(i think) black majority countries have been created from areas that were formerly part of another state that dominated it and the last thing they want to do is follow the practices of the domineering state. Yet, they don't have the history and myths that can bring them together as one group to succeed as a nation. They don't even have the family history to count on since whole cultures have been destroyed and they can't count on their culture to unite on.

In time, these nations will find a single point of unity but it will take generations and strong leaders.

Take a look at the white-majority countries that are in a similar boat. You're different from Russia only in that one global power didn't seize control of your continent a few centuries ago.

From my perspective it looks like you're speed-running a continental democracy.

imperialism fucks up both the "colonizers" and "colonised" and only end up feeding an authoritarian and violent police state who doesnt care about anything that isnt "value extraction" and "keeping stability". Russia claims to be the third Rome and they are believable

Africans don't worship the state, so the state cannot find a stable footing, and the void left gets filled with anarchy.

The reason all major nations are the way they are is the cult of the state: it combines the selfish ambition of the people and brings it to the altar of the war machine demon, quite literally. This manifests in earnest worship of the law and order for its own sake, the greatness of empire, the national security and the faceless economy as the highest idol. The war machine lives only to fight other war machines, it wants to keep everyone in its iron fist, including its own people, and make them worship its greatness. It's a dumb and selfish ruler, so all empires whither and die in its "caring" hands, and with it dies the demon. Then anarchy fills the void to multiply sufferings, until another war machine rises and gets the people under its thumb. Balancing between the two evils is the doom of every advanced nation. Prosperity is a transient and almost incidental property here.

On Twitter recently a Nigerian business man shared some of his frustrations which I found insightful.

He started a bar. Yet later discovered that his business partner was reselling booze via the back door, pocketing this money for himself. Next, the business man started a transport business. Every driver he hired mysteriously got "robbed", which means they resold the fuel. They are just anecdotes, but if widespread, it must be near impossible to get any development going. It's constantly sabotaged by your peers.

On a TV program, I saw a Nigerian woman complaining how the city fails to maintain drinking water infrastructure, specifically pointing to a broken pipe. It was in this broken state for 13 years and as a result she had to walk an additional 30 mins for her water, every day. It's bad that government is this careless but looking at the broken pipe, I'd say its 1 hour of work to repair for a pro. So maybe crowd fund that pro with some locals and get it done?

One of my friends has a construction company that infrequently does some jobs in Africa. He really wants to do things right so exclusively hires local people and offers them double the usual pay. Guess what happens? They don't show up the next day. Literally living life by the day.

I personally visited Madagascar a few times. All over the country you see structures crumbling. You can tell somebody had the right idea and built something of value, but not even minor cheap repairs are carried out. So it's all falling apart from pure indifference.

Our guide, a local, explained how there was a tree planting project where people are literally paid per tree. Most planted a handful and went home.

I tried to help out in ecotourism by explaining how they're drastically undercharging. Make little booklets and sell them. Charge 5 times more for your drinks, they'd still be cheap by western standards.

Nobody cared. It's just baffling, this widespread apathy. Simple and effortless opportunities presented on a silver platter, and it's just met with complete indifference.

There's different ways to frame the issue. You could say they underperform by the standards of global capitalism. Another way to look at it is that some/many reject performance culture altogether.

For sure there are also other factors at play, historical, geopolitical, but a culture that "doesn't even try" is quite self-defeating.

I gotta be honest, this post reads like "just driving by I knew how to fix all these peolles' problems but they seem too lazy to care". Is it possible there's something you don't know about each of these scenarios? It's easy to construct some self congratulatory narrative when you're visiting a poor country, but it's also a trap. In the past, these narratives tended to be biological. Now they're "cultural" but the effect is often similar.

Take the pipe example. Maybe the police don't let people just "crowd fund" repairs to public infrastructure and perform them themselves. Maybe what you saw on the video isn't representative of the whole problem, or your assessment of the repair difficulty isn't accurate.

Perhaps your brilliant idea about pricing and selling ecotourism booklets isn't such a great idea after all. Maybe they already tried it and tried different price points and were too polite to tell you. That's common in "development" projects where there's a power/wealth imbalance between the person giving well meaning advice and the folks receiving it.

Speaking of which, maybe home repairs that look cheap when you're driving by aren't actually cheap by local standards. Perhaps the materials aren't affordable or people have absentee landlords that don't take care of the place because it's not in their interest to do so. There are plenty of buildings like this in SF but the reason is economic incentives, not a culture of apathy.

Who knows what's going on with your friend's construction business. As an absentee foreigner they may rely on a foreman who pockets a bunch of the workers' pay, making it a shitty deal for the workers.

Yes, I was wrong on all accounts. And even though locals will readily confirm and admit to these cultural issues and are equally frustrated by it, it's best to pretend they don't exist.

Because I said it. And obviously my only possible agenda can be rationalize a sense of superiority, it can't possibly because I care.

While I like that you try to show the situation(s) may be more complex than seen at first glance (which is true for any situation anyway), the sheer number of situations should easily explain there is one or many global causes for all these.

I watch the video of a thai native going back to Thailand to make a restaurant and his experience is the same : paid the workers more to get them "committed" but they have this culture of "good enough/it's not important".

You cannot expect civilizations with millenia of divergent cultures and climate to have evolved with the same cultural/traditional habits.

In what corrupt country have you seen the police super active to keep random citizens from fixing issues that affect them personally? In what countries do they even have the manpower to keep someone posted on each broken piece of infrastructure to guard it and make sure that it doesn't get fixed?

It sounds like you're reaching for explanations and grasping at straws. At some point you either get to "maybe aliens did it" or you stop reaching and look for other explanations.

> There are plenty of buildings like this in SF but the reason is economic incentives, not a culture of apathy.

Yes, some things can look similar but be very much not the same. Look at the incentives, I'm sure they're not the same between a slumlord in SF and someone living in their own house.

The grasping at straws is because I, a westerner, said it. Had a local expressed it, which they regularly do if one cares to listen, then none of the examples would be challenged. Half my examples are made by locals, they aren't even my personal take on it.

Not only is any plain and simple observation I make incorrect, it is also not so subtly assumed to be driven by an agenda of biological or cultural racial hierarchy.

Which is to suggest that I'm a supremacist looking to confirm my supremacy. That is what is implied.

I can handle that bad faith toxic notion just fine, no issue there. The real issue is that this style of discourse strongly discourages people to call out very serious issues that are grounded in reality. Just pretend they don't exist.

To remind what got this started:

"I've always wondered why there's no black-majority country that's prosperous...it's always the same story of corruption, incompetence, and/or infighting. Now, before anyone brings out the pitchforks, I'm a black African residing in Nigeria...I'm just saying that we really have to do better than this."

And where we're at now: Nah, it's all fine. Stop talking about it.

> In what corrupt country have you seen the police super active to keep random citizens from fixing issues that affect them personally?

In a country where they can benefit from pushing you around and enforcing arbitrary rules? Is it really hard to imagine corrupt police stopping a citizen from doing something that's technically illegal and benefits the citizen? That's the entire basis of their power.

> Yes, some things can look similar but be very much not the same. Look at the incentives, I'm sure they're not the same between a slumlord in SF and someone living in their own house.

You don't know someone owns the house they're living in when you drive by. That was exactly my point.

That reminds me of a story of western businessmen offering 50% more to local workers to get them to work more. This totally works in the US, where overtime pay can easily get workers to show up for extra shifts. The result here was they worked 50% less and were happy to take home the same amount.

Workers seem misguided in both cases, but it is clear that they had a totally different view and relationship to money.

No freeze. The grasshopper can just keep on fiddling.

I have heard similar stories, from people I kmow who have spent a lot of time working all around Africa. And countries where people are more proactive—Rwanda, Ivory Coast—are more functional overall. Climate seems to be a factor

Because Africans had to make a huge leap from primitive way of life to the modern one unlike Europeans or Asians which developed gradually over the last 3000 years or so. Some people might think it is a genetic gap that will never change but I think it can be done, it is just a long process of hundred years at best.

There is also the issue of many African countries being a mix of more than one nation. It causes a lot of tribalism and favouritism and corruption. Uganda is a good example of how they got over it but still, diversity is a problem when there is more than one major group which sets the tone. Some western countries are going down this path thinking it will benefit them but it just makes things worst.

No. Plenty of white majority countries face the same problems. Corruption, incompetence and infighting are weapons disguised to look like "human nature" while someone else is sucking your blood.

Seems like a good place to mention South Africa is running joint exercises with China and Russia.

ANC is literally a wannabe "CCP" and modeled similarly

How many majority black countries were afforded the opportunity to grow up unmolested by great powers during their formative post colonial years?

How many once in a generation leaders were assassinated or deposed in favor of brutal yet capital friendly regimes?

America, with all its cultural heritage of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson and Lincoln barely survived the 1960’s due to political assassinations. It’s hard to expect younger nations to fair better.

No country has ever been unmolested during their formative years except maybe the USA.

While true that all countries had conflicts, most (maybe all?) of the developed world was never pillaged to the extent Africa and South America were. Not to mention a lot of the conflicts between those nations happened "voluntarily" between the fighting countries.

Africa especially, the current country borders were designed based on the division of property between all the European countries invading the natives' lands. That meant several tribes and groups were divided/grouped together, leading to wars that hold to this day. If I'm not mistaken the Rwanda Massacre is the major example of that coming to fruit

Nope. Check how Frenchness came about (there used to be many languages in the current French borders). Check all the various wars (Napoleonic Wars, Finnish War, WW2, much further back we have Mongol War...).

Germany didn't exist 200 years ago.

Welsh nearly went extinct.

Poland moved hundreds of miles.

The thing that differentiates those European countries from the African ones is mostly age. And even then its not always one-sided.

There's also countries like Vietnam or empires like India which got pillaged just as hard as South Africa or Rwanda.

Also, are you trying to make the point that multi-ethnic societies result in civil war? That goes pretty strongly against current public sentiment.

Isn’t Senegal in a much better state than your example? Asking because I don’t know enough to be sure.

Also, they have other common aspects - apart from being in Africa and having black population.

Decades of colonialism, constant disruption and malicious interference from multiple powerful governments ought to count for something.

Remember, Russia single handedly influenced culture, politics, and elections in the US, just with the means of social media.

How many black-majority countries were or are imperialist? External Imperialism does wonders for the prosperity of the home country.

I ought to ask this on /r/AskHistorians

> External Imperialism does wonders for the prosperity of the home country.

Does it last though? The UK doesn't seem to be bursting at the seams with prosperity these days. Switzerland does much better yet never had any colonies. Portugal had lots, just as Spain, and look at them. Germany had few because they started late and they're doing much better. The Ottoman empire was huge but Turkey isn't doing too good, despite its strategic geopolitical location that pays lots of dividend.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but does lack of correlation?

And yes, of course there were African empires, but they didn't nicely map to countries (but then again, did European empires? The Habsburgers would say otherwise) and didn't leave a lasting imprint of prosperity.

> The UK doesn't seem to be bursting at the seams with prosperity these days. Switzerland does much better yet never had any colonies.

I dunno - Northern Ireland seems to be doing alright, current woes affecting the rest of the Kingdom (Britain) appear to be self-inflicted.

More seriously: I never claimed imperialism led to eternal prosperity. Pax Britania led to a very prosperous Britain - it is undeniable that imperialism is beneficial while it's happening: captive markets abroad support broader industrialization than just a single home market[1], and externalization of costs makes it cheaper/more "efficient".

1. Which Britain is relearning - as you noted, they are not exactly bursting at the seams with prosperity, post-Brexit

I mean, arguably Ethiopia comes to mind with the expansion into ethnic Somali territories in the 19th century, but does invading adjacent countries and ethnic groups count as imperialism?

I feel its because there are so many different tribes/groups, each fighting for power with others. The old tribalism never went away, its just reflected in the government now.

because when you adopt an abusive system and the only change is the abusers the abuse will continue. modern african governments adopted extractive colonial gvts - so the extraction shifts from 'white' man to the 'black' man. with SA all that changed was who was in power. But the fucked up apartheid economy exists. BEE won't change anything.

btw: i'm also a black southern african

As a fellow Nigerian also residing in Nigeria, I must add that things are even more nuanced than they seem.

- We’ve had an ugly history of military rule, post-colonization. - During the colonial period a specific region of the country[1] produced quite a number of leaders, both colonial and post-colonial era; it’s almost 63 years of independence and that region now has the highest population, higher unemployment, child illiteracy, and poverty rates in the country[2].

Thanks to this massive population and frequent election racketeering, immense political power seemingly resides with people from that region and nepotism has become the order of the day. So we now have a case of leaders who care less about establishing functional institutions or a sustainable culture and are much more concerned with maintaining power. It’s depressing.

- [1] https://www.icirnigeria.org/2023-north-has-the-numbers-to-co... - [2] https://www.thenigerianvoice.com/news/53569/northern-nigeria..., https://www.cgdev.org/blog/poverty-nigeria-understanding-and...

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.

I 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.

I 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?

Corruption, 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.

> 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.

Blacks 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".

The article makes it clear that the miners are mostly illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries.

The country has reasonably strong labour laws, but employers, who never really moved beyond the cheap servile labour model under apartheid hate worker rights (which aren’t really that strong by world standards). So they hire undocumented workers from other African countries. This contributes to the huge unemployment rate amongst South African citizens.

Kidnapping for ransom, which was unheard of ten years ago, has become a thing because of Mozambican and Pakistani crime syndicates.

It’s one of a myriad of problems in the country, but the fact is that any attempts to control the borders have been decried as “xenophobia” by elites. Interestingly, SA white conservative types, who rally for support from anti-immigration people overseas, support illegal immigration in South Africa (along with most upper middle-class people), since it keeps labour costs down, and they hold black South Africans in contempt.

There’s also been a general collapse in state capacity: the recent explosion in Boksburg where the police never bothered pitching up at the scene of a leaking LPG/propane truck to control bystanders led to 40 deaths, is indicative of the sort of don’t-give-a-damn attitude of most state institutions.

Really odd to draw the line at before apartheid and after. Jacob Zuma's reign was really a clear sign of corruption hitting an extremely high level & he did things like say I took a shower after so I wouldn't get AIDs.

My layman understanding is that the ANC's dominance of politics enabled extreme corruption to take place. It does look like they've finally started to lose hold

Zuma may have acted like a shower could prevent AIDS, but he also oversaw the rollout of anti-retroviral drugs that pushed life expectancy up.

In fact, that was one of the reasons why he was elevated to power: Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism led to huge numbers of deaths, and his political downfall in the ANC.

I’d say the real issue is not the ANC’s electoral dominance, but the party’s practice of Democratic Centralism, which allows the leader unfettered control. I would guess the closest modern analogue would be the Chinese Communist Party.

Zuma was allowed to loot the country, along with his cronies because of this, just as Mbeki was allowed to practice his AIDS denialism.

As you said, the ANC’s power is eroding, but until there’s electoral reform, to make MPs independent of party bosses, South African democracy will always be at risk of being captured by nefarious actors.

Not really. The end of apartheid was a monumental change in the country on a scale that is difficult to explain. Everything that came after was completely different.

South africa profited like many others, from the cold-war, when the us propped up the "border" wall states (germany,austria, italy, turkey, south-korea and japan). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namibia#Independence

With the wind down of the cold war, all that stopped and the ANC, which was on the loosing side of the cold-war ideologically, had to pivot, while all support was cut. It did not go very well, but they also were delt a lousy hand to start with.

Social Rebel groups seem to have a tendency to facilitate the rise of gangsters, profiteers and sadists to power, once they are victorious. Think of stalin, a little ruthless gangster, who basically ran the sovjet union like a gang kept in eternal turmoil and panic.

You left out the rape stats. Last I checked, someone was murdered approx every 25 mins, and someone was raped approx every 15 mins.

Surely rape has to far more than about twice as common as murder?

Looking at US stats the homicide rate is 0.007% and sexual assault 0.1% per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States

Why didn't you just look up the SA stats instead?

I did [1], 2015-2016 saw 51895 reported "crimes of sexual nature". There seems to be a giant amount of unreported rapes though: While women's groups in South Africa estimate that a woman is raped every 26 seconds, the South African police estimates that a woman is raped every 36 seconds and In 1998, one in three of the 4,000 women questioned in Johannesburg had been raped, according to Community Information, Empowerment and Transparency (CIET) Africa and It is estimated that over 40% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime and that only 1 in 9 rapes are reported. draw a drastic image.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_South_Afric...

It's always an emigrant giving their warped perspective on how things are when they lived here years ago as a teen. The stats don't lie, but to state "Paramilitary groups, "Massive organized criminal organisations" is beyond exaggeration. South Africa (as the 31st biggest economy) has a lot of problems, but things are slowly getting better despite the wealth inequality and corruption.

I am curious, what makes you say things are getting better?

"Afrikaans Paramilitary groups" was basically what Apartheid was, only state sanctioned.

> Hiv infection rates rose from 3% to 18% of the adult population.

It's like saying COVID rates grew XXX% in 2020 due to some new government. Yes, SA's HIV rate is absolutely awful, but HIV hardly existed before the end of Apartheid.

No, it's not like saying that - the health minister had the nickname Dr Beetroot for her ridiculous views in HIV/AIDS.

Mbeki, The president of south Africa ran a program denying aids was caused by a virus. His health minister instead recommend lemon juice and beetroot.

"In the following eight years of his presidency, Mbeki continued to express sympathy for HIV/AIDS denialism, and instituted policies denying antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients.[1] The Mbeki government even withdrew support from clinics that started using AZT to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. He also restricted the use of a pharmaceutical company's donated supply of nevirapine, a drug that helps keep newborns from contracting HIV"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism_in_South_....

Do you think South Africans would be better off today if there had been no attempt to apolish apartheid? Genuine question, not a gotcha.

Authoritarian governments are similar to economic bubbles (balloons). They push out everything better and then leave a mess when they collapse.

Pretty much everything on GPs list was a problem during apartheid era as well, or caused by it.

There was 30% unemployment in apartheid era?

(Definitely agree with your first paragraph)

It's estimated to have been around 20% [1], but there isn't an official number. The participation rate was lower because non-white people were limited in terms of where they were allowed to go, live and work.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13167/w131...

White South Africans definitely. Black South Africans I don't know. Some of them could be better off financially but it's a heck of a thing to be treated as if you are a lesser being because of the color of your skin. I guess the answer is yes in regards to the economy, health (maybe, not sure sure on this) , government corruption and a couple other things but no on just the simple act of being treated like a human. Apartheid had to go but just throwing power into the mob was not a good way to do it. I don't have an answer as far as what would have been a better solution.

I left South Africa as a young teen during the collapse of Apartheid. We had a black maid / nanny who lived on our property in housing my parents provided for years. She did a lot of the work raising us as my parents were always at work. She had a daughter a couple years older than me. Years later my mom wrote her a letter to see how she was doing. She was completely destitute begging for money. Her daughter has multiple kids and was hiv positive. Really rough.

I really don't know what the right approach would have been. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback.

No, there were hectic sanctions against South Africa. We wouldn't have been able to do business outside of SA, travel to many countries, take part in the Olympics, etc. Probably would've ended up like Cuba.

(South African here) I think so. It has to be better than living under a state which regards you as something less than human.

> Hiv infection rates rose from 3% to 18% of the adult population

Thanks to western Pharma companies doing "business" there.

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