DEEP TROUBLE: Black workers, like these in the Mponeng gold mine, are often paid little for dangerous work
Posted Sunday, April 11, 2004; 2.15BST
There's plenty to celebrate. Black South Africans now sit on the country's corporate boards, play on its international sporting teams, edit its most important newspapers, and own some of its best restaurants. Parts of old black townships have been reborn with new roads, new houses and supermarkets where once there were muddy fields. More blacks than whites now buy Jaguars, and a growing black middle class is fueling a housing boom.
Yet huge divisions remain: between white and black, rich and poor, urban and rural. There are too few Mthunzi Mdwabas and too many people struggling in the dark. Up to 20% of blacks now count themselves as among the middle class, but an estimated 40% of households still fall below the official poverty line of $53 per month, and the black townships remain among the worst of the country's slums. At stoplights in South Africa's cities, a haunting one-act play is performed hundreds of times a day. An expensive car pulls alongside a beggar holding a scrawled sign that reads: help. no food. family to feed. god bless. The beggar stares at the driver. Finally, the window opens a crack and a hand appears holding some change. These days there's an occasional twist to the scene: a black driver handing money to a white beggar. Mostly, though, the characters play to racial type. As Mbeki said in his state-of-the-nation speech two months ago. "We have not yet eradicated the cruel legacy we inherited."
To fix the economy and heal its society, Mbeki and the A.N.C. have put their faith in capitalism and in policies designed to expand the black middle class. But overturning decades of iniquity and inequality takes time, and the black majority mostly poor, often without opportunity remains frustrated and impatient. Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of Cape Town, celebrates the progress but worries about "a huge gap growing between the rich and poor." The country's leaders, he told TIME, "must beware the siren song of affluence, huge mansions and big cars when the bulk of our people still live in poverty and squalor." Ten years on, South Africans have discovered that the revolution that brought democracy also raised expectations and false hopes.
No crisis confronting South Africa looms larger than AIDS. Until India passes it sometime in the next year, South Africa holds the dismal distinction of having more HIV-positive citizens than any country in the world: more than 5 million out of a population of 45 million. Instead of tackling the disease, Mbeki has questioned the link between HIV and AIDS and the worth of lifesaving drugs. Finally, last year the government announced it would begin a treatment program that will eventually provide antiretroviral drugs to more than a million people with the disease. But the government has dragged its feet on the drug rollout, leaving charities and private companies to take up the slack. "Sometimes it feels as if we have to run as fast as we can just to stand still," says journalist and AIDS activist Charlene Smith. "We still have a marathon to run."
Another persistent scourge is crime. South Africa has always been a high-crime society. In the apartheid era, lawlessness induced by poverty and desperation added to the charge book full of race-law infringements. But since the end of apartheid, the number of reported serious offenses has rocketed: armed robberies shot up from 84,785 in 1994-95 to 126,905 in 2002-03, and rapes and attempted rapes which experts believe are still substantially underreported rose from 44,751 to 52,425. During that time the homicide rate has actually declined from 67 per 100,000 people (many of them political killings) to 47 per 100,000, though it remains one of the highest in the world. "In most countries, the leading cause of nonnatural death is automobile accidents," says Ted Leggett, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. "In South Africa, it's murder."
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