The bit about the current government blames everything on Apartheid, but it only lasted 50 years ... before that it was centuries of colonial rule that put the basics laws of Apartheid in place feels almost like satire.
The arrogance.
There is a tendency for the ruling party to maximise the damage caused by Apartheid - there is also a corresponding impulse to minimise it by those who benefited from it (I'm including author here) who claim that it was brief (2 generations!), or a long time ago (1 generation!). To that, I present my own life story - I was born, and started my education during apartheid, which for people like me, meant going to poorer schools and having a limited curriculum suited to the modest career decided for me by the government based on the colour of my skin - such as in a mine or on the factory floor. I am in my mid-30s.
One of apartheid's most awful and lingering consequences is spatial apartheid, the creation of isolated racially-segregated communities far outside city centres, poorly-served by transport options, in areas marginal for local business and industry.
The ANC owns its fair share of blame for our present state, particular during the Zuma administration. The electricity crisis, worsening of police ineffectiveness and corruption, and collapse of local services are all failings of the ANC first and foremost.
But what's most important to understand is that fixing South Africa after 1994 was always going to be hard because of the huge amount of damage performed by apartheid. We were all far too sanguine about how easy it would be to move ahead, and coasted on a few years of goodwill and optimism without addressing the deep structural issues that caused social ruptures later on.
One of the challenges in writing is realising that no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to please every one. I spent a lot of time on this post, and it went through several revisions. In some versions I was harsher on the ruling party; in others I went into more detail about the brutality of colonialism and apartheid.
As I acknowledged in the post, I have my own biases, and therefore encourage people to do their own research. I also provided a very short list of some of the terrible things associated with, or directly caused, by apartheid. I could certainly have expanded upon that, but then the post would have been about apartheid, and not the current state of the country. I could also have expressed more empathy for the suffering of the millions of people in the country who lack access to basic services, decent jobs, access to educational opportunities, etc. I have however become increasingly disillusioned by that type of writing, as it does not seem to have helped improve the situation. It is rather a style that I think helps to salve the conscience, at the expense of avoiding true self-reflection.
A child comment to this points out that spatial apartheid is still very much a thing; I agree completely. I could have written about that; but that is not what I wanted to write about. I am more concerned by the fact that spatial apartheid still exists, and that little to no progress has been made in addressing it, than in the fact that a certain group of terrible people situated at a specific point in history were responsible for it.
An unfortunate situation has arisen where any criticism of the current situation in the country is construed as 'minimising the damage of apartheid' or something similar, with the subtext that the critic is probably racist in some way (or just too privileged to understand). South Africans need to wake up to this - it is one of the primary ways that the ruling party has entrenched itself, and shuts down any criticism of itself.
I would suggest you meditate on an alternative reality where all the people who make the criticisms are in actual fact both racist and privileged.
What would that look like? How could you tell? What if in other parallel worlds 25%, 50%, 75% of the people, or the things they say could be categorised as racist and/or privileged?
In which of these worlds would complaining about how everyone complains about racism and privilege be a good look and a constructive contribution? In which of these worlds would the person saying it actually be saying something privileged and racist?
I don't think 100% of white south Africans are privileged and racist 100% of the time when they have opinions on the running of their country, but 0% isn't my estimate either. I can see a range of answers that individuals have to that question being reasonable given their different life experiences.
It felt like you were falling into the common trap of seeming angrier about "people complaining about X" than "X" even as you mentioned that X was bad.
The mentions of great crimes all seemed a bit remote and dry, whereas the accusations of people being overdefensive and deflecting using it as an excuse seemed a bit more heartfelt.
I think from the inside it can be hard to judge that balance and put yourself in the position of someone who might weight things differently. A problem of "privilege" which you bring up, but don't seem to be swayed by, though I've never met anyone who thinks it doesn't apply to other people.
Yours was one of the better takes, and I mostly agree with what you have to say - I especially appreciate your self-awareness around biases (I have my own). I should clarify that didn't take issue with the entire article, I was mostly reacting to the sentences that implied, as I read it, that the period of formal Apartheid was brief, and an improvement over the previous colonial period (as quoted by gp) - those ideas sound absolutely tone deaf to me.
edit:
> An unfortunate situation has arisen where any criticism of the current situation in the country is construed as 'minimising the damage of apartheid' or something similar
You misunderstand me, I think, and possibly doing a great disservice to your article and the discussion it spawned if you're reducing my criticism to just that. I tried to clearly state why I thought you minimized specific aspects; and it's not because I wanted you to adopt a tone of atonement, or for something I wished you had written. I took issue with 2 specific ideas, which in all suggest that Apartheid wasn't a big deal. Perhaps we should discuss the specific criticism rather than be pulled into a generic race-relations meta-discussion?
What I disagreed with, in point form:
1) The idea that Apartheid was brief. 50 years is a long time in politics; Apartheid spanned >90% of both my granddads' productive years, 100% of my dad's education (including college) as well as his early and mid-career, and a small part of my early education. I count 3 generations directly impacted.
2) The idea that Apartheid was a long time ago. As you can imagine based off what I said in (1), the effects are still very present to me, and I'd like to think I'm not that old. This doesn't absolve the government, but it is true nonetheless.
Politicians deflect blame everywhere, but just because politicians like to ham-up Apartheid's effect doesn't mean we cannot have a nuanced, honest take.
That said, South Africa was built on the foundation extractive industries and cheap labor. The end of Apartheid did not change that; the only thing that changed was the introduction of the black ruling elite, and a modest increase in the size of the non-white middle class. The levels of inequality are dangerously high, and people seem concerned about it, until you ask them how much they pay the help (this goes across all races, BTW). The TRC was fine and all, equal attention should have been given to national cohesion, people are unwilling to look out for each other, even for their own sake, in the long term.
For how long can you blame the czars when they're no longer in power? And who does it serve?
It seems to me blaming the long gone czars mostly serves as a distraction from corruption in the successor government.
Going from no voting to every adult can vote is probably too much. Having elites create a parliament and make the foundation before full voting is how basically every well functioning modern democracy was formed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Constitution
> The Lower House, or House of Representatives was directly elected by all males who paid at least 15 yen in property taxes, effectively limiting the suffrage to 1.1 percent of the population.
That 1.1 percent was expanded over the years. Then after WW2 USA just needed to finalize the expansion and you got a well functioning modern democracy.
By the time Japan became a democracy, the people were already accustomed to functional and orderly governance.
Afterwards it became a one-party democracy to an unusual extent. I am not sure what could or should be made of that, other than perhaps that one should be wary of general theories of political development.
IE, it didn't go from "no voting" to "every adult can vote". Millions of people voted in every single election from '48 onward.
There was a massive jump in voters in the first multiracial election of '94 (10+ million). But that's not the same as going from zero to full franchise.
Not sure how it should have been done, the old rulers were associated with apartheid so of course the population would want to replace them, but totally replacing a government in a single election and starting over from basically scratch doesn't seem to lead to good outcomes.
The years 1990-1994 could even be regarded as some type of unofficial transitionary government though.
To the credit of the '94 administration they did extend an olive branch to those existing pre-94 staff to remain/join their government. In fact FW De Clerk (president before Mandela) was Mandela's Vice President.
As a South African those early years of the ANC government still have a rosy tint as I still genuinely believe the ANC of that era (Mandela, maybe Mbeki to some degree) did try their best to move the country forward. The later Mbeki years and obviously JZ years are were things went backwards a few decades.
I'll argue that Mandela and Mbeki gathered up all that goodwill and did exactly nothing with it. Zuma was more publicly corrupt, but policy-wise, I don't think there was any daylight between him and his predecessors.
I suppose the gold standard for smooth regime change in Southern Africa would have to be Botswana. Don't know enough about their history to understand how they got it right when it was so bloody for all their neighbours.
[Recent history of Zimbabwe](http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD)
If a zinger or meme effectively and accurately communicates the message, why not?
>Like what is your point here?
This is your way of avoiding actually addressing what the "zinger or meme" in this case communicates, which is that life in Zimbabwe is immeasurably worse across the board since Mugabe took power.
Could you expand on this a bit? Why?
Fareed Zakaria is a proponent of this theory from the left: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re...
Jonah Goldberg is a proponent of this theory from the right: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/off-the-shelf-suicide...
Incompetence and corruption are likely the enemies of such progress that are incredibly hard to root out. A lack of competition in politics is also a problem. Sure, the current mega party sucks, but who's going to do better?
"Putin is trying to be a czar, this is bad and Putin is bad"
Vs
"Putin is good, everything wrong with Russia is the fault of those perfidious czars! Citizens are reminded that any criticism of Putin is illegal czarist sentiment, and to report all czarist sentiment to Putin's secret police. They know where to find you."
When South Africans realized their public funds were being looted by the Gupta family, and the latter paid PR firm Bell Pottinger to come up with a campaign to blame everything on white people ... that starts looking a little more like the latter situation.
As long as their power structures still remain you can continue to blame them. However in the case of Russia, the Soviet Union pretty much hit the reset button on power and the elites of the Russia were thrown out.
AFAICT (I'm not very well versed in South African history), the elites of SA are the same and are largely inheritors of the pre-apartheid power structures. To me, any "solution" would have to address the deficiencies of the power structures that were setup 70-80 years ago.
This is the cognitive problem in a nutshell. If the power structures of the current government are the same as the old government, the problem lies with the current government.
If the new government does the exact same thing as the old government, the fact that the old government did it is not a defense
Why? Because the current government didn't hit a Soviet-style reset button?
If the current president is taking bribes, They are at fault. The fact that the last government was also corrupt is not an excuse.
Ironic that Mandela was so loved because he chose not hit the Soviet-style button. IMO he should have used all the political capital he had gathered to make some difficult decisions (not a reset, but major changes). Unfortunately for South Africa, he (and every subsequent ANC leader) just coasted, and here we are.
>Russia was ruled by tyrannical czars for centuries before Communism - does that mean the actions of Communist leaders like Stalin were really the czars' fault?
Absolutely yes, a thousand times. Maybe Nicky wasn't responsible for the colors Stalin picked for his office walls, but most of the important, nation-wide decisions were obviously affected by how (dismally) Nicky ran things.
>For how long can you blame the czars when they're no longer in power?
I'd say a very long time, probably centuries. I'm sure there's a PhD thesis or other publication somewhere estimating how long each economic/social policy impacted the country. Note that this isn't the same as saying "meh, we found it like this, let's not do anything".
>And who does it serve?
Anyone who's interested in learning from history and not repeating mistakes from the past?
>It seems to me blaming the long gone czars mostly serves as a distraction from corruption in the successor government.
It seems to me blaming the successor government mostly serves as a distraction from the very real, very recent despotism and absolutism of semi-medieval tsardom.
You can't.
>but most of the important, nation-wide decisions were obviously affected by how (dismally) Nicky ran things.
Observe the word most. Just as I was saying the tsars definitively were responsible for most (note the word carefully again) of the momentous decisions later, it should be painfully obvious that they weren't responsible for 100% of all actions forever after. This is ridiculously obvious in any non-insanely polarized debate, which unfortunately isn't always the case of HN.
> Note that this isn't the same as saying "meh, we found it like this, let's not do anything".
But isn't that how it's often deployed? "Don't look at me, blame the previous boss!" is an age old diversion strategy.
>But isn't that how it's often deployed? "Don't look at me, blame the previous boss!" is an age old diversion strategy.
It sure is, which is why I made that remark. My point is this kind of misuse doesn't automatically make the original claim false.
Also, the mirror-image claim is just as frequently deployed: don't look too closely at the skeletons in the closet; we now have a magical clean slate.