Anyone know about the political situation in South Africa?

[Socci]

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I do think it depends on where you live though. The cape has always been much safer than what was the Transvaal, and Joburg has always had a high crime rate. If you speak to people in Cape town they?ll tell you that things are good, that the crime rate is comparatively low, and that there is a sense of harmony. Speak to people in joburg and surrounding areas and they?ll tell you that the crime rate is horrendously high, that they don?t feel secure in their own homes, and that most would leave if they could.

Living on farms is especially hard, and to date over 1500 farmers have been killed on their farms.

\link{ geoffandwen.com/Blind/newsarticle.asp?u_id=3878\this}

is just one example of the kinds of crimes that have been happening. The woman in this article is a friend of mine. She honestly believes that her husband was killed purely because he was white. They?d been broken into three times before this incident, on each occasion goods were taken, but the night they shot her and her husband they came, they killed him, and they left. And while she was in Namibia staying with her parents, coming to terms with what had happened to her (this is the second time she has been widowed as her first husband died from illness) the property was once again broken into and everything was taken. Clothes, furniture, everything that wasn?t bolted down.

I do believe that this is very likely rumour and scaremongering from the right, but I do also believe that it is possible. Similar rumours were abound when Rhodesia became independent, a friend of my mum?s used to tell how the black house boys would tell how when independence was declared, they had instruction to murder their white bosses. When she asked the man who worked for her ?you wouldn?t do that would you?? he said ?no, I?d get the boy next door to do it?.

It didn?t happen at the time, but look how things are nearly 30 years on. And I do think the fact that South Africa are refusing to speak out against Robert Mugabe says a lot.

\linkgeoffandwen.com/Blind/newsarticle.asp?u_id=3878\this}

try again

Surely there are lots of countries where drivers would suggest that certain areas are not safe for tourists (or others) to stop in? I've been to a few.

Any country where the majority of the population is suffering from poverty while other groups (tourists, expats or, in SA, the white community) are visibly affluent is going to be fairly tense, and those perceived to be in possession of otherwise unattainable riches would probably be obvious targets, but that doesn't necessarily mean that organised massacres will ensue, does it?

I thought Uhuru was the Swahili word for "freedom" or "liberty", rather than the grisly definition given here. IIRC, there's a newspaper called Uhuru, not in SA but somewhere else (Congo?). It would be an odd choice if it did mean "the night of the long knives".

I have spent the better part of the last two decades doing research on rural poverty in South Africa. There are great inequalities in SA and terrible poverty, violent crime is an enormous problem and many people are having to deal with the impact of HIV/AIDS. But conspiracy fantasies of this sort are just that, fantasies.

1. Racial tensions are far less bad now than they were in the 1980s and early 90s. There was also a great deal of black-on-black violence, especially between supporters of the ANC and Inkatha. At that time, many people took gruesome pleasure in predicting carnage when the ANC took over. Nothing of the sort happened. You may remember the TV footage of people queueing joyfully, and multi-racially, to vote. Most black South Africans have demonstrated a touching faith in democratic processes as a means to addressing their grievances.

1. South African politics is much more complicated than a simple black/white division. Many middle class blacks have benefited from the transition to democracyy, with well-paid jobs and better housing. They have nothing to gain from the scenario painted here. Nor are poor blacks politically organised, other than through the ANC and the trade unions. There is no political organisation on the ground making such plans or able to carry them out.

1. Violence is a problem, yes, but there is also a strong non-violent tradition in many parts of the black community (Churches etc). Extraordinarily strong, in view of the violence many blacks have been subjected to in the past.

South Africa's inequalities, particularly the land issue, demand redress, but I cannot imagine this fantasy becoming reality.

Uhuru is the Swahili word for freedom.

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My family are all out in South Africa and Zim. The recent emails from my sister talk about little else but recent mounting violence. The hospital that my nephew worked at has one of the highest gunshot wound rates in the world. Black on black violence.

I don't feel qualified to explain violence of this sort. I do know that it can be driven by multiple motivations - poverty, racial hatred, brutalisation due to a whole host of circumstances - and that it's often impossible to identify clearly the reasons for violence in any particular case. Was a particular white farmer killed because he was white, or because he was a wealthy person in a sea of poverty, for example? I wouldn't presume to think that I knew the answer to this, or, indeed that the people involved could tell me. I think it's possible both for some types of violence to be increasing (e.g. robbery combined with murder) and for racial tensions (in day-to-day interactions, for example) to be decreasing overall. I compare my experiences in small-town SA in 1991, where my black companions felt unable to enter a cafe with me, with the much more relaxed atmosphere in the places I went into less than ten years later.

I do agree that failure to address the issue of poverty with any real seriousness will lead to increasing violence, but that's very different from talking about people making plans to commit large-scale murder.

I was having an email conversation with a friend about this over the past couple of days. He said that there had been simimlar concerns after the 94 elections which hadn't come to anything. He said that there were serious concerns about what will happen once Mandela dies, but that "if these people think they're hatching a secret plot they're not exactly doing a very good job of keeping it a secret if it's all over the internet". He said that many of the extreme parties' followings had deminished seriously since the abolission of apartheid, especially since some of their leaders (eugene terblanche of the AWB) were put on trial for murder/attempted murder.

he did say that the two greatest problems in south africa are the increase in violent crime, and the aids crisis, but that the government seemed unwilling/unable to have tackled these at all. he said, "you know, I get so many emails every day talking about the incomppetence of George W Bush, but they could equally replace his name with Thabo mbeki".

Socci violent crime like this has always happened, although it has definitely increased in recent years. But it was never uncommon to have bars on the windows of your house/to carry a gun/to own an agressive dog to deter burglers.

When I was at boarding school our hostel was broken into at about 11:00 at night. The burgler broke in through a downstairs window, made his way into the kitchen, found the key to the back door, proceeded to empty the pantry of any food he could find. then he came back, went upstairs, and went to every room until he found one where a girl, one of my classmates, was sleeping alone. The first she knew about it was when she woke up and realized someone was sitting on her bed. she sat up and he leaned forward and hissed "shhhhhhhh" into her face. She screamed loud enough to wake virtually everyone in that corridor. The bloke legged it down the stairs and out through the back door and was gone. police etc were called and took statements etc. When my friend went back to her room they discovered that the "burgler" had left a 10 inch knife on the table next to her bed. Had she not screamed I shudder to think what might have happened to her.

also this kind of violent crime is not limited to South Africa. When I was a baby we lived in Zambia, and the stories people there tell are horrendous. In those days, if you went out, you would lock every door in the house. if you went to bed, you locked every door in the house, and it was said that you must never put the keys on your bedside cabinet, as burglers would put a pole with a hook through the window to get the keys, but that if you tried to stop it, the pole was covered with razer blades.

This was 30 odd years ago, so I don't know if things have changed since then, I do know that michael palin went through Zambia on one of his exbiditions, and that the people he had stayed with there were murdered on their farm shortly after.