World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [53]
South African whites fall into two general categories: Afrikaners, descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers, and “English speakers,” most of whom have British origins. The English speakers have more of a claim to being “entrepreneurial.” Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century the Afrikaners were a rural, economically backward underclass compared to the commercially dominant British.
4 (This changed with the aggressive pro-Afrikaner affirmative action policies pursued by the Nationalist Party between 1948 and 1976). But the main reason that South Africa’s present-day whites are so overwhelmingly market-dominant, vis-à-vis the black majority, is not because of any superior “entrepreneurialism.” It is because they have a gargantuan economic head start.
They have this head start because generations ago, their forebears turned the black majority around them into a mass pool of uneducated, disenfranchised, dehumanized labor held in check by a police state. For seventy years, while whites advanced and luxuriated—South Africa has fabulously engineered roads, first-class hospitals where some of the world’s first heart transplants were performed, and resplendent vineyards—the apartheid regime deliberately and systematically destroyed the human capital of the black majority. So-called Coloureds (people of mixed African and European descent) and Asians, together about 11 percent of the population, occupied an intermediate niche, above blacks. They too, however, were disenfranchised and barred from living and mingling with whites.
Catching up will not be easy. Any way you look at them, the statistics are awful. Sixty-five percent of South African blacks today live in abject poverty. Eighty-eight percent have less than a high school education. A quarter over the age of twenty have had no formal schooling at all. In townships like Soweto, it is common for four thousand residents to share five toilets; electricity, where it exists, is generated with car batteries. There is almost no intermarriage between blacks and whites. AIDS is pandemic—in recent years, 40 percent of all adult deaths in South Africa have been AIDS-related—and strikes blacks extremely disproportionately. Seven years after the end of apartheid, whites still own 80 percent of South Africa’s land and account for 90 percent of the country’s commercial agricultural production.
Economic liberalization has produced some success stories. The case everyone knows is that of Cyril Ramaphosa, who went from trade union leader to chief negotiator for the ANC to media tycoon. A few former township dwellers have made it to Harvard. But while the hope is that in the long run free market policies will create thousands more such success stories, at the moment the unemployment rate among blacks is a frightening 48 percent. The townships are not shrinking but growing, at a rate of a million black Africans a year. As of August 2000, blacks controlled only 1.7 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s total capitalization. According to a recent report released by South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment Commission, almost all of South Africa’s mines, banks, and major corporations remain in white hands.
5
Like South Africa, both the neighboring countries of Namibia and Zimbabwe have a market-dominant white minority who, because of their huge and hugely-undeserved head starts, would under laissez-faire market conditions overwhelmingly economically dominate the black majorities around them.
Unknown to most Americans, Namibia is one of the most mysteriously beautiful places in the world, from