History > 2008 > South Africa (I)

Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy

in South Africa

November 26, 2008
The New York Times
By CELIA W. DUGGER

JOHANNESBURG — A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.

The Harvard study concluded that the policies grew out of President Thabo Mbeki’s denial of the well-established scientific consensus about the viral cause of AIDS and the essential role of antiretroviral drugs in treating it.

Coming in the wake of Mr. Mbeki’s ouster in September after a power struggle in his party, the African National Congress, the report has reignited questions about why Mr. Mbeki, a man of great acumen, was so influenced by AIDS denialists.

And it has again caused soul-searching about why his colleagues in the party did not act earlier to challenge his resistance to broadly accepted methods of treating and preventing AIDS.

Reckoning with a legacy of such policies, Mr. Mbeki’s’s successor, Kgalema Motlanthe, acted on the first day of his presidency two months ago to remove the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a polarizing figure who had proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies.

He replaced her with Barbara Hogan, who has brought South Africa — the most powerful country in a region at the epicenter of the world’s AIDS pandemic — back into the mainstream.

“I feel ashamed that we have to own up to what Harvard is saying,” Ms. Hogan, an A.N.C. stalwart who was imprisoned for a decade during the anti-apartheid struggle, said in a recent interview. “The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.”

For years, the South African government did not provide antiretroviral medicines, even as Botswana and Namibia, neighboring countries with epidemics of similar scale, took action, the Harvard study reported.

The Harvard researchers quantified the human cost of that inaction by comparing the number of people who got antiretrovirals in South Africa from 2000 to 2005 with the number the government could have reached had it put in place a workable treatment and prevention program.

They estimated that by 2005, South Africa could have been helping half those in need but had reached only 23 percent. By comparison, Botswana was already providing treatment to 85 percent of those in need, and Namibia to 71 percent.

The 330,000 South Africans who died for lack of treatment and the 35,000 babies who perished because they were infected with H.I.V. together lost at least 3.8 million years of life, the study concluded.

Epidemiologists and biostatisticians who reviewed the study for The New York Times said the researchers had based their estimates on conservative assumptions and used a sound methodology.

“They have truly used conservative estimates for their calculations, and I would consider their numbers quite reasonable,” James Chin, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Public Health, said in an e-mail message.

The report was posted online last month and will be published on Monday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

Max Essex, the virologist who has led the Harvard School of Public Health’s AIDS research program for the past 20 years and who oversaw the study, called South Africa’s response to AIDS under Mr. Mbeki “a case of bad, or even evil, public health.”

Mr. Mbeki has maintained a silence on his AIDS legacy since his forced resignation. His spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, said Mr. Mbeki would not discuss his thinking on H.I.V. and AIDS, explaining that policy decisions were made collectively by the cabinet and so questions should be addressed to the government.

The new government is now trying to hasten the expansion of antiretroviral treatments. The task is urgent. South Africa today is home to 5.7 million people who are H.I.V.-positive — more than any other nation, almost one in five adults. More than 900 people a day die here as a result of AIDS, the United Nations estimates.

Since the party forced Mr. Mbeki from office and some of his loyalists split off to start a new party, rivalries have flared and stories about what happened inside the A.N.C. have begun to tumble out, offering unsettling glimpses of how South Africa’s AIDS policies went so wrong.

From the first year of his presidency in 1999, Mr. Mbeki became consumed with the thinking of a small group of dissident scientists who argued that H.I.V. was not the cause of AIDS, his biographers say.

As president he wielded enormous power, and those who disagreed with him said they feared they would be sidelined if they spoke out. Even Nelson Mandela, the revered former president, was not immune from opprobrium.

In a column in The Sunday Times of Johannesburg on Oct. 19, Ngoako Ramatlhodi, a senior party member now running the party’s 2009 election campaign, recounted how Mr. Mandela, known affectionately as Madiba, was humiliated during a 2002 A.N.C. meeting after he made a rare appearance to question the party’s stance on AIDS.

Mr. Ramatlhodi described speakers competing to show greater loyalty to Mr. Mbeki by verbally attacking Mr. Mandela as Mr. Mbeki looked on silently. “After his vicious mauling, Madiba looked twice his age, old and ashen,” Mr. Ramatlhodi wrote.

Mr. Ramatlhodi himself acknowledged in a recent interview that in 2001 he sent a 22-page letter, drafted by Mr. Mbeki’s office, to another of Mr. Mbeki’s most credible critics, Prof. Malegapuru Makgoba, an immunologist who was one of South Africa’s leading scientists. The letter accused Professor Makgoba of defending Western science and its racist ideas about Africans at the expense of Mr. Mbeki.

In 2000 Mr. Mbeki had provided Professor Makgoba with two bound volumes containing 1,500 pages of documents written by AIDS denialists. After reading them, Professor Makgoba said in an interview that he wrote back to warn Mr. Mbeki that if he adopted the denialists’ ideas, South Africa would “become the laughingstock, if not the pariah, of the world again.”

But Mr. Mbeki indicated last year to one of his biographers, Mark Gevisser, that his views on AIDS were essentially unchanged, pointing the writer to a document that, he said, was drafted by A.N.C. leaders and accurately reflected his position.

The document’s authors conceded that H.I.V. might be one cause of AIDS but contended that there were many others, like other diseases and malnutrition.

The document maintained that antiretrovirals were toxic. And it suggested that powerful vested interests — drug companies, governments, scientists — pushed the consensus view of AIDS in a quest for money and power, while peddling centuries-old white racist beliefs that depicted Africans as sexually rapacious.

“Yes, we are sex crazy!” the document’s authors bitterly exclaimed. “Yes, we are diseased! Yes, we spread the deadly H.I. virus through our uncontrolled heterosexual sex!”

In 2002, after a prolonged outcry over Mr. Mbeki’s comments about AIDS and the government’s policies, Mr. Mbeki agreed to requests from within his party to withdraw from the public debate. That same year, the Constitutional Court ruled that the government had to provide antiretroviral drugs to prevent the infection of newborns. And in 2003, the cabinet announced plans to go forward with an antiretroviral treatment program.

“We did an enormous amount of good in the early days in South Africa, not because of the Health Ministry, but in spite of the Health Ministry,” said Randall L. Tobias, who was appointed by President Bush in 2003 to lead the United States’ $15 billion global AIDS undertaking.

In the same years, former President Clinton and his foundation were also deeply involved in helping South Africa get a treatment program going. Mr. Clinton attended Mr. Mandela’s 85th birthday celebration in Johannesburg in 2003. During the dinner, he and Mr. Mbeki slipped away to talk about AIDS, Mr. Clinton recalled in a recent interview.

Mr. Clinton said he told Mr. Mbeki how antiretroviral treatment had reduced the AIDS mortality rate in the United States and reminded him, “I’m your friend and I haven’t joined in the public condemnation.” That evening, when Mr. Clinton offered to send in a team of experts to help the country put together a national treatment plan, Mr. Mbeki took him up on it.

The Clinton Foundation helped devise a plan and mobilized 20 people to travel to South Africa in 2004 to help carry it out. But the South African government never invited them, Mr. Clinton said. So the foundation, which had projects all over Africa, was to have none in South Africa.

Changes since Mr. Mbeki’s fall from power have prompted many to hope for forceful South African political leadership on AIDS. Mr. Mbeki’s rival and successor as head of the party, Jacob Zuma, who is expected to become president after next year’s election, himself made a famously questionable remark about AIDS.

In his 2006 rape trial, in which he was acquitted of sexually assaulting a family friend, he testified that he sought to reduce his chances of being infected with H.I.V. by taking a shower after sex. Nonetheless, he seems to have more conventional views on the pandemic.

“Who would have thought Jacob Zuma would be better than Mbeki, but he is,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the former ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration who heads a coalition of businesses fighting AIDS. “The tragedy of Thabo Mbeki is that he’s a smart man who could have been an international statesman on this issue. To this day, you wonder what got into him.”

For South Africans who watched the dying and were powerless to stop it, the grief is still raw. Zackie Achmat, the country’s most prominent advocate for people with AIDS, became sick during the almost five years he refused to take antiretrovirals until they were made widely available. He cast Mr. Mbeki as the leading man in this African tragedy.

“He is like Macbeth,” Mr. Achmat said. “It’s easier to walk through the blood than to turn back and admit you made a mistake.”

Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa,
NYT,
26.11.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/world/africa/26aids.html

South Africa Is Aiming to Ease

Dangers of Digging for Gold

November 21, 2008
The New York Times
By BARRY BEARAK

JOHANNESBURG — The easy pickings are long gone. The remaining gold is buried in slender seams two and three miles down, tiny but precious particles flecked within the subterranean reefs of unyielding rock.

Each day, the miners crowd into the open-cage elevators, descending into the earth at a depth greater than that of the Grand Canyon, then boarding the small trains that carry them through the lattice of tunnels. It can take 90 minutes just to reach the high-powered drills at the next pocket of unclaimed ore.

That far down, heat floats off the rock at about 110 degrees, a temperature made tolerable only by refrigerated air blown through the passageways. The drilling is done in narrow, low-roofed clefts that have been gouged out of the gold-bearing reef. Explosives are then wedged into each hole. Entombment is the biggest danger under the weight of falling rock.

The value of the extracted gold is measured in currency, but of course there is a human toll as well — fatalities that, while declining, continue to be appalling enough that Parliament has been considering a measure this week that threatens company executives with prison time for deaths within their mines.

A 1995 national commission estimated that 69,000 mineworkers were killed in South Africa between 1900 and 1993, with 25 times that many seriously injured, the vast majority digging for gold. That does not count the untold numbers felled by lung diseases owing to the contaminated air — or those rendered deaf by the bone-jolting noise.

The rate of mining fatalities compares “unfavorably with most other countries in the world,” the commission concluded. Since then, safety measures have reduced the annual number of deaths to about 220 from an average of 742. This is post-apartheid South Africa, and the welfare of miners — nearly all of them black — is a matter of more scrupulous concern.

“We’ve had pockets of amazing improvements, but people continue to work in conditions that are patently unsafe,” said Prof. Mavis Hermanus, the director of a center on mining at the University of Witswatersrand.

The new legislation would subject company executives to prison for up to five years or fines of up to $300,000 — making administrators sitting in offices criminally culpable for accidents in the dank underground.

“We’ve campaigned for these penalties for a long time,” said Lesiba Seshoka, a spokesman for the National Union of Mineworkers, which represents a majority of the nation’s 465,000 miners. “The companies pay lip service to safety and go on being negligent. They blast before putting up the proper supports. Imagine what remains of a man after the ceiling of rock has fallen on him. Sometimes you have nothing left to put in a grave.”

But most of the major mining companies say they have already become far more conscientious about safety. Randel Rademann, general manager at Mponeng, one of the biggest mines, said he opposed the legislation. “We all need to work together on safety and not against each other with threats,” he said. “If they make laws too onerous, skilled people will leave the industry.”

Mponeng, 30 miles southeast of here, is owned by the international giant AngloGold Ashanti. At 11,355 feet, the mine is the second deepest in the world, and the excavation there will soon put it in first place, Mr. Rademann said. Depth matters. The danger of a rock fall, a cave-in caused by unsecured weight, or a rock burst, a violent fracture caused by built-up stress, gets greater as the mining goes deeper.

But only one man has died at Mponeng this year, trapped between two cars of a train. A sign at the mine’s entrance proclaims, “Health and safety is our first value.” Beside it is a running count of fatality-free worker shifts. Managers nimbly insert that catchphrase — safety is our first value — into conversation. Even miners, their faces lacquered with sweat, recite the words like corporate liturgy.

“Safety is the big value,” said Hendrik Marubane, 25, a driller’s assistant working in one of those narrow clefts. As he moved his head, the light affixed to his hard hat became a dancing beam against the dark rock.

Mr. Marubane was too tall to stand in so low a cavity and moved with a waddle. “I used to be a policeman,” he said. “I think this work is safer.”

Johannesburg owes its existence to the mines. The city did not so much grow as erupt in the late 19th century beside newly discovered gold fields. Men with pickaxes and pans were never going to reap the wealth below. The geology required international syndicates with enough capital to invade the rock. Johannesburg became a financial hub.

Most of the world’s gold once came from South Africa, but in recent decades international production has increased while this country’s yield has declined. Last year, South Africa produced only 11.1 percent of the world’s gold, and China nudged ahead of it.

Nevertheless, mining still accounts for nearly 7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and is a vital source of jobs in a country where unemployment is estimated at nearly 40 percent. Further mechanization of the mines might well reduce the number of accidents, but it would also lower the supply of jobs. Unions oppose it. “We represent people, not machines,” Mr. Seshoka of the mineworkers union said flatly. “There are other ways to make the mines safer.”

At Mponeng, Mr. Rademann, the general manager, said the company already was doing about as much as it could. He said 96 percent of injuries happened because a worker did something wrong. “It’s just like being on the road,” where most car accidents are caused by driver negligence, he said.

Lungile Mnini, 47, who works in the mine’s canteen, said he could not recall doing anything wrong when the rocks fell on him in 1991. He remembered only a tremor and then other miners scooping him free. Seven men died. He spent three years in a wheelchair. “I’m glad I don’t go down there anymore,” he said.

The conversation was taking place at a hostel for the miners. A woman named Thuli Mahlalela, a 33-year-old single parent, joined in. “It’s nice to work underground,” she said. “You get away from the things bothering you above ground.”

Six months ago, she got a job helping transport timber through Mponeng’s subterranean arteries. The job is O.K., she said, but the money is even better, about 3,000 rand per month, or $300.

“Try being a woman and get a better job,” she said.

As for danger, it did not really worry her.

“Safety,” she remarked, “is our first value.”

South Africa Is Aiming to Ease Dangers of Digging for Gold, NYT, 21.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/world/africa/21goldmine.html

Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76

November 11, 2008
The New York Times
By ALAN COWELL

LONDON — Miriam Makeba, a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom among millions in her own country though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against, died overnight after performing at a concert in Italy on Sunday. She was 76.

The cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to Vincenza Di Saia, a physician at the private Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno near Naples in southern Italy, where she was brought by ambulance. The time of death was listed in hospital records as midnight, the doctor said.

Earlier, Ms. Makeba collapsed as she was leaving the stage, the South African authorities said. She had been singing at a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats after writing about organized crime.

Although Ms. Makeba had been weakened by osteoarthritis, her death stunned many in South Africa, where she stood as an enduring emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Mandela said the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation.”

He continued: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”

“She was South Africa’s first lady of song and so richly deserved the title of Mama Afrika. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours,” Mr. Mandela’s was one of many tributes from South African leaders.

“One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing,” Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a statement. “Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song.”

Widely known as “Mama Africa,” she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States.

For 31 years, Ms. Makeba lived in exile, variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa’s state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations in 1976 — the year of the Soweto uprising that accelerated the demands of the black majority for democratic change.

“I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” Ms. Makeba said upon her return at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble, according to The Associated Press. “I never committed any crime.”

Music was a central part of the struggle against apartheid. The South African authorities of the era exercised strict censorship of many forms of expression, while many foreign entertainers discouraged performances in South Africa in an attempt to isolate the white authorities and show their opposition to apartheid.

From exile she acted as a constant reminder of the events in her homeland as the white authorities struggled to contain or pre-empt unrest among the black majority.

Ms. Makeba wrote in 1987: “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”

She was married several times and her husbands included the American black activist Stokely Carmichael, with whom she lived in Guinea, and the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who also spent many years in exile.

In the United States she became a star, touring with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and winning a Grammy award with him in 1965. Such was her following and fame that she sang in 1962 at the birthday party of President John F. Kennedy. She also performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.

But she fell afoul of the U.S. music industry because of her marriage to Mr. Carmichael and her decision to live in Guinea.

In one of her last interviews, in May 2008 with the British music critic Robin Denselow, she said she found her concerts in the United States . being cancelled. “It was not a ban from the government. It was a cancellation by people who felt I should not be with Stokely because he was a rebel to them. I didn’t care about that. He was somebody I loved, who loved me, and it was my life,” she said.

Ms. Makeba was born in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, the daughter of a Swazi mother and a father from the Xhosa people who live mainly in the eastern Cape region of South Africa. She became known to South Africans in the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg in the 1950s.

According to Agence France-Presse, she was often short of money and could not afford to buy a coffin when her only daughter, Bondi, died aged 36 in 1985. She buried her alone, barring a handful of journalists from covering the funeral.

She was particularly renowned for her performances of songs such as what was known as the Click Song — named for a clicking sound in her native tongue — or “Qongoqothwane,” and Pata Pata, meaning Touch Touch in Xhosa. Her style of singing was widely interpreted as a blend of black township rhythms, jazz and folk music.

In her interview in 2008, Ms. Makeba said: “I’m not a political singer. I don’t know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us _ especially the things that hurt us.”

Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting from Johannesburg and Rachel Donadio from Rome.

    Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76, NYT, 10.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/world/africa/11makeba.html?hp

News Analysis

Discord in South Africa’s

Top Party Sows Seeds of a Rival

October 31, 2008
The New York Times
By BARRY BEARAK

JOHANNESBURG — Politics, boiled down to its essence, is about the “outs” trying to get in and the “ins” trying to keep the “outs” out. In the 14-year-old democracy that is South Africa, the “ins” have always been the African National Congress, the party that unshackled the nation from apartheid and then reassured it with the grandfatherly mien of Nelson Mandela.

For many South Africans, a vote against the governing party remains an unthinkable act of apostasy. In the last election, in 2004, the A.N.C. won more than two-thirds of the vote, while the party in second place attracted a mere 12 percent.

But no one governs forever, and the prevailing wisdom has long been that the biggest threat to the A.N.C. is not so much a strengthening of the “outs” as a split among the “ins,” with the party dividing in two, amoeba-like, a political mitosis with each competing body claiming to be the more legitimate.

Such a historic split now seems to be in the works, set in motion by the A.N.C. national executive committee’s recent decision to oust President Thabo Mbeki, Mr. Mandela’s successor, before his term expired. During the past few weeks, several prominent defectors from the party — all with unimpeachable credentials from the liberation struggle — have been barnstorming the country, claiming to be the true heirs of the A.N.C. legacy and fomenting political rebellion.

This weekend, they will be holding a convention in Johannesburg, and they have already announced that a new political party will be started on Dec. 16 in Bloemfontein, the same city where the A.N.C. was founded in 1912. The defectors have yet to announce a name for their organization, but the T-shirts being distributed call the movement the South African National Congress.

“We need no favors, just the right to go into the marketplace of ideas,” said Mbhazima Shilowa, a central figure in the insurrection and the former premier of Gauteng Province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Already, the split has provoked a cross-fire of name-calling, with the A.N.C. leadership likened to warlords and the defectors referred to as traitors and dogs. Mr. Shilowa, once the nation’s top trade unionist, has been portrayed as a sellout who is overly fond of whiskey and cigars.

Though thousands have attended some of the breakaway group’s rallies, at times tearing up A.N.C. membership cards and stomping on the party’s flag, the coming convention will be the first real head count of the rebels’ strength. Is the A.N.C. faced with a sizable split or just an annoying crack at the seams?

“The A.N.C. is not just afraid, it is terrified,” said a political analyst, Justice Malala.

An A.N.C. insider, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, “To stop this thing, favors are being called in, favors are being granted.”

But just what is the fight about? Actually, it is hard to say. Clearly, there is a clash of titanic personalities and loyalties; whether major principles are in dispute is more ambiguous. The A.N.C. prides itself on having a wide ideological wingspan within its top ranks, at once accommodating doctrinaire Communists and millionaire businessmen.

But as with any big family, there are also long, gnarled roots of hurt, years of grievances neither forgotten nor forgiven. The common cause of the liberation struggle has given way to the daily grind of governing. Some “comrades” get plum jobs, while others are left with sour grapes. The spoils of patronage are always at stake. Bids are always in the pipeline.

Several watershed events led to the current discord. In one of the most decisive, Mr. Mbeki was wrenched from the party helm in December, losing to his nemesis, Jacob Zuma.

This left South Africa with two rival centers of power. Mr. Mbeki remained the country’s president. Mr. Zuma, tainted by 12 charges of fraud, corruption and racketeering, was the president in waiting.

The animus between the factions has stayed at a simmer, and the aggressive zeal of some of Mr. Zuma’s supporters has made many South Africans cringe: A.N.C. members have threatened to “kill” if their man is kept from ascending to power in next year’s elections; they have donned T-shirts that herald Mr. Zuma’s roots — “100 percent Zulu boy”— introducing an element of ethnic rivalry into national politics.

Then came the public humiliation of Mr. Mbeki. After he stepped down as president in late September, the A.N.C. replaced him with a caretaker. Throughout, Mr. Mbeki has obeyed the party dictate and has played no visible role in the rebellion, though, in a letter sent to Mr. Zuma earlier this month, he criticized the “cult of personality” that has grown around the A.N.C.’s new president.

But others within the Mbeki faction have felt no similar constraints. The most visible rebel has been Mosiuoa Lekota, until recently the nation’s minister of defense. He earned the nickname Terror as a rampaging soccer player, and his speaking style is similarly combative, repeatedly punching all the hot buttons about Mr. Zuma: the Zulu boy T-shirts, the loose talk about “killing,” the lingering criminal allegations against him.

“It is said that there needs to be a political solution to Comrade Zuma’s legal troubles,” he said wryly in one speech. “What does this mean? Are you not then saying that when we all are caught stealing we will all be entitled to a political solution?”

The splintering of the A.N.C. makes riveting political theater, and many champions of democracy find the goings-on all to the good, like an antitrust suit to break up a monopoly. Two strong political parties would serve the people better than one, they say.

Others are warier. The country has “a propensity for violence,” wrote Mondli Makhanya, the editor in chief of The Sunday Times, warning of “just how easily the blood tap can be turned back on.”

Last week, Mr. Lekota traveled to Orange Farm, a destitute township south of Johannesburg. As he spoke inside a community center, a small pro-Zuma crowd stood outside the front gate, waving A.N.C. placards and dancing the toyi-toyi, a step made popular during anti-apartheid protests.

The more belligerent among them occasionally chanted, “Kill Lekota! Kill Shilowa!” Some, like Johnny Radebe, made bold threats: “If Terror Lekota comes here again, we will take up arms. We will shoot to kill.”

But as such things go, the protest was actually quite mild and certainly not the slugfest portrayed in some of the South African news media. Lost in the overheated reporting was the fact that most of the crowd was there out of curiosity rather than pugnacity. Unemployed, they had nothing else to do.

However much traction the new party is able to muster — against long odds with an election likely within the next six months — the political battle lies with winning over people who take liberation for granted and wonder when they will be lifted out of their appalling poverty.

“People in Orange Farm have been ignored forever,” said Lebohang Tsotetsi, 20, as he dawdled among the weary, sun-parched crowd. “Whether it’s the A.N.C. or not, what does it matter? We’re just waiting for a government that cares.”

    Discord in South Africa’s Top Party Sows Seeds of a Rival, NYT, 31.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/world/africa/31safrica.html

Post-Apartheid South Africa

Enters Anxious Era

October 6, 2008
The New York Times
By BARRY BEARAK

DIEPSLOOT, South Africa — A dusty maze of concrete, sheet metal and scrap wood, Diepsloot is like so many of the enormous settlements around Johannesburg, mile after mile of feebly assembled shacks, the impromptu patchwork of the poor, the extremely poor and the hopelessly poor.

Monica Xangathi, 40, lives here in a shanty she shares with her brother’s family. “This is not the way I thought my life would turn out,” she said.

Her disappointment is not only with herself; she is heartsick about her country. Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa — the global pariah that became a global inspiration — has lapsed into gloom and anxiety about its future, surely not the harmonious “rainbow nation” so celebrated by Nelson Mandela on his inauguration day.

“If only I could make Nelson Mandela come back,” Ms. Xangathi said. “If only I could feed him a potion and make him young again.”

This longing to propel the past into the present is rooted in more than fond reminiscence. Two weeks ago, a vicious power struggle culminated in something like regicide, with the governing African National Congress deposing one of its own, President Thabo Mbeki, and replacing him with a stand-in for Mr. Mbeki’s archrival, Jacob Zuma.

The actual changing of the guard was orderly enough, but months of behind-the-scenes back-stabbing have made many South Africans long for days more abundant with moral clarity, including those fretful about a figure as polarizing as Mr. Zuma.

The past year has been especially unnerving, with one bleak event after another, and it is more than acidic politics that have soured the national mood. Economic growth slowed; prices shot up. Xenophobic riots broke out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners and chasing thousands more from their tumbledown homes.

The country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply. Gone was the conceit that South Africa was the one place on the continent immune to such incompetence. The rich purchased generators; the poor muddled through with kerosene and paraffin.

Other grievances were ruefully familiar. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates. But more alarming than the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting.

The poor apply padlocks in defense. The rich surround their homes with concrete and barbed wire — and there are suggestions that more are simply fleeing the country.

“On our street alone, just that one small street, three of the husbands in families were killed in carjackings or robberies,” said Antony McKechnie, an electrical engineer who a month ago moved to New Zealand. “If we had stayed and something had happened to any of our three children, we would never be able to forgive ourselves.”

Rich and poor, black, white and mixed race: their complaints may differ, but the discontent is shared. Polls show a pervasive distrust of government, political parties and the police.

In great measure, the tough realities of South Africa’s long haul after apartheid have simply replaced the halo of liberation’s first days. Likewise, while Mr. Mandela seemed a saintly figure to many, his successors seem all too human.

“We are not the world’s greatest fairy tale, but rather a young, messy and not-always-predictable democracy,” said Mark Gevisser, a journalist and the author of “Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.”

Messy and unpredictable, yes. Scandalous, too.

Mr. Mbeki was president for nine years, and his image slowly warped from someone aloof but well intentioned to someone secretive and conniving. During the past year, he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his police commissioner, accused of shopping with mobsters in an expensive haberdashery and permitting them to pick up the tab.

Mr. Mbeki’s political nemesis is Mr. Zuma, whom he once fired as deputy president and who has image problems of his own. In 2006, he was tried on rape charges and acquitted, testifying that his accuser had encouraged him by wearing a short skirt and sitting provocatively. As a Zulu man, he said, he was duty-bound to oblige her. He then showered, as he described it, to “minimize the risk” of contracting the virus that causes AIDS.

Last December, Mr. Zuma won control of the African National Congress, clearing the way for him to assume the presidency after the 2009 elections. Only lingering corruption charges could frustrate his ambitions, and some of his more prominent followers have declared they will “kill” if Mr. Zuma is thwarted. On Sept. 20, party leaders called an early end to the Mbeki years, installing a caretaker, Kgalema Motlanthe. Mr. Zuma remains the president-in-waiting.

The onslaught of unsettling news has proved too much for some with the means to flee. No reliable numbers are kept on emigration, but “packing for Perth” — a phrase used to describe white flight, not necessarily to the Australian city — is believed to be on the increase.

Since 1996, the black population has risen to a projected 38.5 million from 31.8 million, according to government statistics. The white population has dropped to a projected 4.5 million from 4.8 million.

John Loos, an economist at First National Bank of South Africa, who tracks the reasons given by people who sell homes in white suburban markets, said 9 percent cited emigration in the last quarter of 2007. In the first quarter of 2008, the number rose to 12 percent; in the second quarter it reached 18 percent.

Minority groups — which include whites, Asians and people of mixed race — “are prone to overreacting about anything,” Mr. Loos said. “We have people with the mind-set that this country is just another Zimbabwe in the making.”

Far fewer blacks emigrate out of such despair, but that does not mean they are more cheerful.

“Things are quite scary here, especially during the Zuma court cases with people talking about war and killing,” said Rodney Muzuli, a community development worker. “You wonder if we’re going the path of Rwanda.”

Hlengiwe Dladla, a mother at home with her 1-year-old in Diepsloot, said: “I don’t trust Jacob Zuma. Did you hear what he said at his rape trial? Well, I am also a Zulu, and I can tell you that if he was truly a cultural man, he would respect a woman, short skirt or not.”

Louis Manjanja, 26, a TV installer, blames the African National Congress, which led the liberation struggle, for the troubles. “The A.N.C. is a bunch of greedy guys fighting for positions and ignoring what needs to be done,” he said. “I voted for them before, but not again.”

It is easy to tap into such naysaying. But there is a case to be made that pessimistic South Africans are looking at a glass that is actually more than half full yet describe it as near empty. Not so long ago, people feared that the end of apartheid would set off civil war and a blood bath.

Adam Habib, a political analyst, finds it understandable that the marginalized complain, and he invokes the term “relative deprivation.” The gap between the rich and the poor may be widening, but the lot of the poor is improving, he said: the unemployment rate, however horrendous, is in decline; the incomes of the poor, however meager, are on the rise.

While some critics have likened Mr. Mbeki’s exit to a Stalinist purge, Mr. Habib, a deputy vice chancellor at the University of Johannesburg, pointed out that the transition was smooth and nonviolent, something rare in Africa. “Our democracy is only 14 years old,” he said. “Rather than calling this a crisis, people ought to ask how our institutions came together so well in so short a time.”

Mr. Zuma fares badly in national opinion polls, but there is no denying an allure. A personable man, he seems to win over every audience he meets. He talks tough on crime, and despite his notorious postcoital shower, he seems to address the topic of H.I.V. and AIDS in a reasoned manner. For nearly a year, Mr. Zuma and Mr. Mbeki represented two competing centers of power. Some businessmen are relieved to see the combat decisively at an end.

Indeed, South African pessimism has spawned a countervailing industry of reassurance. Louis Fourie, a noted financial adviser, travels the country delivering a speech called “South Africa, How Are You?” Yes, he confesses, the public education system is deplorable. Yes, crime is horrendous. Yes, 20 million impoverished South Africans are “living in hell, no other way to describe it.”

But, Mr. Fourie reminds people that the country has 1,533 miles of gorgeous coastline, 10 international airports, a robust stock exchange and an open society with a free press. He fondly repeats the phrase that South Africa is “the most unsung success story in modern history.”

Since May, one of the nation’s best-selling books has been a pep talk titled “Don’t Panic!” by a businessman, Alan Knott-Craig. Aimed primarily at downhearted white people, the book laments the “tsunami of negativity” and discourages those packing for Perth.

Mr. Knott-Craig, 31, said in an interview that 67 of his 72 classmates in an accounting course had emigrated. “People are being bombarded by bad news, and at every water cooler it gets reinforced,” he said. “People thank me for helping them snap out of their negativity.”

And yet perhaps even Mr. Knott-Craig is susceptible to gloom.

In the preface to “Don’t Panic!” he seems to praise South Africa with faint damnation. “Will we still have a viable country in 2020?” he asks himself rhetorically, cautiously concluding, “I think we’ve got a better than 50-50 chance.”

    Post-Apartheid South Africa Enters Anxious Era, NYT, 6.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/world/africa/06safrica.html?hp

10 South African Cabinet Ministers Resign

September 24, 2008
The New York Times
By BARRY BEARAK and ALAN COWELL

JOHANNESBURG — The South Africa president’s office, still controlled by the ousted Thabo Mbeki, announced on Tuesday that 10 ministers, the deputy president and three deputy ministers had tendered their resignation, including Trevor Manuel, the powerful finance minister regarded as an anchor of the country’s reputation for economic management.

The markets went into an immediate decline in reaction to the announcement, which initially appeared to be a blow against Jacob Zuma, leader of the governing party who won a weekend power battle against Mr. Mbeki.

But the markets generally recovered when an aide to Mr. Manuel later said he was willing “serve the new administration in whatever capacity.” Tito Mboweni, the central bank governor, also signaled his readiness to stay on, Reuters reported.

“We are asking people not panic about his announcement,” Mr. Manuel’s spokeswoman, Thoraya Pandy, said in a statement to South Africa’s SABC News.

“There is a very strong rider to his resignation — that he has indicated that he will assist and serve the new administration in whatever capacity that is asked of him.”

The South African rand initially fell as much as 2.9 percent to 8.2176 per dollar and was at 8.1547 by 1:15 p.m. in Johannesburg, Bloomberg reported, a measure of investors’ perceptions about South Africa’s economic stability and Mr. Manuel’s role in securing it.

In a statement on its Web site, the president’s office said the ministers who offered their resignations included those responsible for defense, intelligence, prisons, public enterprises, science and technology, and public works.

“They have resigned and it is up to the incoming administration to re-appoint them if the incoming administration so wishes,” Mukoni Ratshitanga, Mr. Mbeki’s spokesman, said in a telephone conversation. Some of the officials who quit, such as Essop Pahad, an old friend of Mr. Mbeki’s who held the title of minister in the presidency, and the deputy president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, were regarded as especially close allies of the outgoing president.

It was not clear if other officials would be reappointed. “All the ministers have expressed their availability to assist the incoming administration in the hand-over process and any other assistance that might be sought from them,” the statement from the presidency said. The A.N.C. sought to quickly limit the impact of the announcement.

“The country should not panic,” Khotso Khumalo, an A.N.C. spokesman said on South African television. He said the resignations should not be interpreted as any kind of rebuke of the incoming president. “Some of them just want to spend more time doing other things,” he said.

Mr. Ratshitanga said the resignations would be effective Thursday — the day the South African Parliament is due to choose an interim successor to Mr. Mbeki until elections scheduled for next year.

Mr. Mbeki was forced from office during a weekend of hardball political maneuvering by allies of his arch-rival Jacob Zuma, the head of the ruling African National Congress.

In his first public comments since Mr. Mbeki’s ouster, Mr. Zuma tried to assure the nation on Monday of a smooth transition, and while he said there were many fine candidates to serve as acting president, the only name he mentioned was that of the veteran party stalwart Kgalema Motlanthe.

Mr. Zuma is not eligible for the position immediately since he is not a member of Parliament, as required by the Constitution for presidential contenders, but is likely to take over after the election confirms him as president next year.

“I am convinced that if given the responsibility, he would be equal to the task,” said the garrulous Mr. Zuma as Mr. Motlanthe sat nearby.

Jessie Duarte, Mr. Zuma’s spokeswoman, told a South African radio station on Tuesday that Mr. Motlanthe “will be president of course until the next election,” Reuters reported.

Mr. Zuma could have gone through the contortions of having himself appointed to Parliament where the A.N.C. has a large and reliable majority and then be named interim president. But he has chosen instead to wait until next year’s parliamentary elections.

If Mr. Motlanthe is indeed the choice, it is a best-case scenario, according to a statement from the opposition Democratic Alliance, which has warned that the governing party’s infighting has stymied the government.

The statement called Mr. Motlanthe perhaps the most level-headed and reasonable of all the politicians in the Zuma camp, praising him for standing up to the party’s youth league, whose members vowed to shoot to kill if anything interfered with Mr. Zuma’s rise to the presidency.

Mr. Motlanthe, who was born in 1949, is a veteran of the freedom struggle and the trade union movement. The apartheid government arrested him in 1977 for his political activities and placed him in prison for 10 years on Robben Island with Mr. Mandela and Mr. Zuma.

In July, Mr. Motlanthe — though a member of the opposing faction of the party — became a minister without portfolio in the cabinet, someone acceptable to Mr. Mbeki who could keep an eye on things for Mr. Zuma. “There is no reason for South Africans to be apprehensive,” Mr. Zuma said Monday.

“The transition will be managed with care and precision,” he said, adding that he wanted all of the party’s ministers and deputy ministers to remain in their positions.
 

Barry Bearak reported from Johannesburg, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    10 South African Cabinet Ministers Resign, NYT, 24.9.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/world/africa/24safrica.html?hp

Editorial

The Failures of Thabo Mbeki

May 24, 2008
The New York Times

Crackpot and dangerous theories on AIDS. Extreme and widening levels of income inequality. Enabling Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and only belatedly trying to halt mob atrocities against desperate Zimbabwean and other African immigrants. This is the legacy of South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who has one more year in his second term.

It would be hard to imagine a more depressing contrast with the leadership of Nelson Mandela, Mr. Mbeki’s predecessor and one of the 20th century’s great heroes.

History will laud Mr. Mandela for leading his country, peacefully, from hateful apartheid to democratic majority rule, marvel at his commitment to honesty and healing and celebrate his promotion of South Africa as a diverse and tolerant “rainbow nation.”

If it remembers Mr. Mbeki at all, it will be for appointing a health minister who favored garlic and beet root as treatment for South Africa’s more than five million citizens infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and for his stubborn refusal to use South Africa’s economic and political clout to stop Zimbabwe’s horrors.

Instead, Mr. Mbeki declared that there was “no crisis,” even as Zimbabwe’s electoral count was being hijacked, opposition supporters terrorized and thousands of its citizens fleeing over the border to South Africa where they still have not found safety. The only explanation is his misplaced loyalty to Mr. Mugabe, who was once a hero for leading Zimbabwe to majority rule.

South Africa is the richest, most developed country south of the Sahara and the continent’s largest, most exemplary democracy. Africa badly needs its enlightened leadership. A decade ago, under Mr. Mandela, South Africa was swiftly emerging as the respected leader of a proud, postcolonial Africa.

Under Mr. Mbeki’s leadership, the fruits of the nation’s hard-fought victory over apartheid have gone mainly to officials and former officials of the ruling African National Congress, not to the millions of poor people in the townships who faced down the dogs, the bullets and the pass laws and still must live without adequate jobs, education, housing or health services.

The resulting frustration and anger helps explain, though it cannot justify, this week’s outbreak of xenophobic violence in the shantytowns. At least 42 victims have been killed — many beaten, stabbed, hacked or burned to death — and some 25,000 have been chased from their homes.

Mr. Mbeki’s most likely successor, Jacob Zuma, the current leader of the A.N.C., is no Nelson Mandela either. While more popular among the poor than the arrogant and aloof Mr. Mbeki, he has offered few coherent ideas for addressing their economic plight. He has been more willing to criticize Mr. Mugabe’s electoral manipulations, but overly cautious in proposing solutions (though that is Mr. Mbeki’s job, not his). His ignorance on AIDS and appalling attitudes toward women — revealed in a 2006 rape trial that ended in his acquittal — stained his personal reputation. Serious corruption charges against him are still pending.

South Africa can ill afford another five years of failed leadership and frustrated hopes. Whoever succeeds Mr. Mbeki must look long and hard at all that has gone wrong and vow to do better. South Africans and all of Africa need and deserve better.

    The Failures of Thabo Mbeki, NYT, 24.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/opinion/24sat1.html

A magnet for immigrants

Saturday May 24 2008
The Guardian
This article appeared in the Guardian
on Saturday May 24 2008 on p26 of the International section.
It was last updated
at 00:01 on May 24 2008.

Estimates say there are about 5 million immigrants from other parts of the continent, equivalent to 10% of the population. Many are fleeing conflict but a high proportion are also attracted by the chance to make a living. The main immigrant groups are from:

Zimbabwe It is estimated there are 3 million in South Africa, about a quarter of Zimbabwe's population. Many say they fled persecution but that may be overstated in order to obtain asylum. Zimbabweans are generally well educated and are regarded as reliable workers and find it easier than some South Africans to find work.

Mozambique Hundreds of thousands of people from Mozambique work in South Africa. Some are legal, such as mineworkers on the gold mines around Johannesburg. But many street hawkers come to Johannesburg in search of a living. They have been the target of previous attacks by South African traders in Johannesburg.

Malawi One of the few African countries to maintain ties with apartheid South Africa, Malawi has been a source of immigrants for years. But as the country seems locked in a struggle to feed its people, growing numbers have gone to South Africa where they have an advantage as English speakers over some other immigrants.

Democratic Republic of Congo There has been a steady flow of illegal immigrants from the DRC, blighted by war and economic collapse, since South Africa's doors opened with the end of apartheid. Many work guarding cars parked in the street.

Somalia Immigrants from conflict-riven Somalia can be found across South Africa, but particularly in the Cape, where many have shops. They have been the target of previous killings.

Nigeria Citizens of Africa's most populous country have gone to South Africa as traders but also gained a reputation for involvement in drug and prostitution rackets. Nigeria's scam artists also set up shop in South Africa because so many people were wary of doing business with people in their own country.

Burundi The Hutu-Tutsi conflict drove away many of its educated population.

    A magnet for immigrants, G, 24.5.2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/24/southafrica

South Africa

says apartheid-era foes fan violence

Fri May 23, 2008
2:25pm EDT
Reuters
By Wendell Roelf

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa's security chief accused rightwingers linked to the former apartheid government on Friday of fanning anti-foreigner violence that has spread to Cape Town, the second largest city and tourist centre.

At least 42 people have been killed and more than 25,000 driven from their homes in 12 days of attacks by mobs who have stabbed, clubbed and burnt migrants from other parts of Africa they accuse of taking jobs and fuelling crime.

The South African government has been criticized for its slow reaction to the violence, which started in a Johannesburg township on May 11, and for not adequately addressing poverty widely blamed for the bloodshed.

But Manala Manzini, head of the National Intelligence Agency, told Reuters people linked to former apartheid security forces were stoking the violence.

"Definitely there is a third hand involved. There is a deliberate effort, orchestrated, well-planned," he said.

"We have information to the effect that elements that were involved in the pre-1994 election violence are in fact the same elements that have re-started contacts with people that they used in the past."

Manzini said some violence emanated from worker hostels where Zulu migrants traditionally live.

Much of the township bloodshed in the final years of apartheid involved brutal clashes between supporters of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the African National Congress, which has been in power since the end of white rule.
 

SHOCK

Africa Union chairman and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete said he was shocked by the attacks.

"The general feeling is of shock and disbelief on the current assaults and killings carried out indiscriminately against foreigners in some parts of South Africa," he told reporters in Arusha. "These are nothing but acts of thuggery."

South Africa's Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka apologized to those affected by the attacks while visiting Nigeria, one of the countries whose citizens are threatened.

"The violence is regrettable and shocking ... I want to apologize to those who have been affected and want to give the assurance that those who are responsible will be dealt with by the law," she said before meeting Nigeria's vice president.

Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, in Moscow, said the violence was giving her country a "very bad image", and that the government would deal with it decisively.

"It's a very embarrassing issue and a very serious issue," she told Reuters after meeting Russian ministers. "It's giving us a very bad image and we are serious about stamping it out."

The police and prosecuting office said they would work together to speed up cases linked to the violence, while the justice department was considering setting up special courts.

Police said mobs attacked Somalis and Zimbabweans overnight in Cape Town and looted their homes and shops. More shops were looted in Lwandle township near Strand, north of Cape Town, and Knysna, a resort town on the southwest coast.

Hundreds of migrants were evacuated from a squatter camp near Cape Town, hub of the prized tourist industry.

"We don't know the exact number of shops looted and burnt, but it's a lot," said Billy Jones, senior superintendent with the Western Cape provincial police. He added that a Somali died but it was unclear whether this was linked to the attacks.

Police said 200 people, including a 13-year-old youth, had been arrested for looting and being in possession of stolen goods since Thursday evening, while 1,200 foreigners were being housed in temporary shelters.

Authorities said a Malawian man was shot in Durban overnight and three other foreigners were stabbed in North West Province.

Earlier this week President Thabo Mbeki authorized the army to help quell the violence.

The violence comes amid power shortages and growing discontent which have rattled investors in Africa's biggest economy.

Officials in the tourism industry are worried overseas visitors will stay away. The country hopes to draw half a million extra tourists for the 2010 soccer World Cup.

Mozambique said nearly 13,000 migrants and their families had left South Africa. South Africans were beginning to leave that country in fear of reprisal attacks. Malawi said it had begun evacuating more than 850 of its citizens.

There are an estimated 3 million migrants fleeing Zimbabwe's economic collapse, making them the biggest group among some 5 million immigrants in a country of 50 million people.
 

(Additional reporting by Gordon bell in Johannesburg, Charles Mangwiro in Maputo, Mabvuto Banda in Lilongwe, George Obulutsa in Arusha, Felix Onuah in Abuja and Conor Sweeney in Moscow; writing by Barry Moody; Editing by Elizabeth Piper)

    South Africa says apartheid-era foes fan violence, R, 23.5.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2160065720080523

South African troops

deployed to end violence

Thu May 22, 2008
12:58pm EDT
Reuters
By Paul Simao

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Soldiers went into South African townships on Wednesday to help police end attacks on African immigrants that have killed at least 42 people.

Soldiers backed police in early morning raids in Johannesburg and air force helicopters patrolled Alexandra township after President Thabo Mbeki approved army intervention to quell unrest that has threatened to destabilize Africa's largest economy.

At least 15,000 people have been forced from their homes in 11 days of attacks by mobs that accuse immigrants of taking jobs and fuelling crime. Mozambique said over 10,000 of its people had fled back to the country.

Police, supported by soldiers, conducted early morning raids on three dormitory hostels near Johannesburg, the first army involvement to stop the attacks.

Firearms and ammunition were seized and 28 men were arrested. None of them were immediately linked to the violence, police spokeswoman Sally de Beer said.

The attacks have increased political instability at a time of power shortages and disaffection over Mbeki's pro-business policies. Soaring food and fuel prices helped push tensions to breaking point.

"It is another blow -- although I wouldn't advise panicking at this point in time," said BNP Paribas strategist Elizabeth Gruie of the attacks. "We have to see how the government can deal with that in the very short term."

The deputy leader of the ruling African National Congress, Kgalema Motlanthe, criticized the police delay in responding to the violence which erupted in Alexandra township on May 11 and spread rapidly.

CRITICISM

"The delay encouraged people in similar environments to wage similar attacks against people who came from our sister countries on the continent," Motlanthe said at an international media industry conference in Johannesburg.

"We are confronted by one of the ugliest incidents in the post-apartheid era".

Mozambique said 10,047 migrants and their families had returned from South Africa since the violence broke out.

"The number is likely to increase in the next days as long as violence unfolds in South Africa," Deputy Immigration Director Leonardo Boby told Reuters in Maputo.

The South African currency fell sharply earlier this week on the back of the violence. The rand was firmer on Thursday at 7.6695 to the U.S. dollar.

The biggest group of immigrants come from Zimbabwe. An estimated three million have fled economic collapse at home.

Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai visited Alexandra on Thursday and met Zimbabweans sheltering at the police station there.

One refugee said he was considering going home despite the fact that in Zimbabwe he would have to face hyperinflation, shortages of food and an upsurge of political violence since disputed March 29 elections.

"I'm too scared," said Samuel Dhliwayo, a 30-year-old Zimbabwean who worked as a painter.

South Africa has a population of about 50 million and is home to an estimated 5 million immigrants.

Its reputation as a haven for immigrants and asylum seekers is in tatters, and there are growing fears that the crisis could dent the country's lucrative tourism industry and cripple its hosting of the 2010 soccer World Cup.

(Additional reporting by Charles Mangwiro in Maputo, Gordon Bell and Barry Moody in Johannesburg; Editing by Marius Bosch and Matthew Tostevin)

    South African troops deployed to end violence, R, 22.5.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL2160065720080522

Anti-Immigrant Violence

Continues in South Africa

May 20, 2008
The New York Times
By BARRY BEARAK

JOHANNESBURG — Violence against immigrants, like some windswept fire, spread across one neighborhood after another here in one of South Africa’s main cities at the weekend, and the police said the mayhem left at least 12 people dead — beaten by mobs, shot, stabbed or burned alive.

The violence continued to rage on Monday, as police fired rubber bullets and made arrests to try to quell the violence in and around Johannesburg, and said the death toll had reached 22, The Associated Press reported.

Thousands of panicked foreigners — many of them Zimbabweans who have fled their own country’s economic collapse — have now deserted their ramshackle dwellings and tin-walled squatter hovels to take refuge in churches and police stations.

On Monday, men wielding clubs and sticks patrolled along the road near one camp — apparently South Africans trying to prevent foreigners from returning, The A.P. said.

This latest outbreak of xenophobia began a week ago in the historic township of Alexandra and has since spread to other areas in and around Johannesburg, including Cleveland, Diepsloot, Hilbrow, Tembisa, Primrose, Ivory Park and Thokoza.

Amid so much violence, the police were spread thin, sending in squads of officers in armored vehicles. “We are using all available resources and will call in reinforcements if the need arises,” a police spokesman, Govindswamy Mariemuthoo, told reporters.President Thabo Mbeki said Sunday that he would set up a panel of experts to investigate the causes of the violence. Jacob Zuma, the president of the governing African National Congress and the man presumed to succeed Mr. Mbeki next year, called the attacks on foreigners a matter of national shame.

“We should be the last people to have this problem of having a negative attitude towards our brothers and sisters who come from outside,” Mr. Zuma said.

Many of South Africa’s current leaders sought shelter in neighboring countries during the apartheid years and were deeply embarrassed by the violence.

Newspaper editorials have called the outbursts a matter of using immigrants as scapegoats for South Africa’s problems. The official unemployment rate is 23 percent. Food prices have risen sharply. The crime rate is among the highest in the world.

And yet South Africa, with the most prosperous economy in the region, is a magnet that draws a continuing stream of job seekers from Malawi, Mozambique and elsewhere. An estimated three million Zimbabweans have sought refuge in their neighbor to the south, many of them fleeing here in recent months as Zimbabwe’s economy has utterly collapsed and political violence has intensified.

Mobs of South Africans shout: “Who are you? Where are you from?” as they maraud through the narrow streets they share with immigrants. They order people from their homes, steal their belongings and put padlocks on the houses.

Shops and businesses — many of them owned by Zimbabweans, Somalis and Pakistanis — have been looted. Many victims are legal residents with all the proper immigration documents. Some are being assaulted by neighbors they have known for years. However genuine the rage against immigrants, criminals have also made crafty use of the opportunity.

The police said they arrested more than 200 people over the weekend.

    Anti-Immigrant Violence Continues in South Africa, NYT, 20.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/world/africa/20safrica.html?hp

Outrage over video showing

white South African students

abusing blacks

February 27, 2008
From Times Online
Jonathan Clayton, Johannesburg

A video showing white male Afrikaner students forcing black domestic workers to eat dirty meat and drink soup into which they had urinated has inflamed racial tensions and provoked violent protests between students.

The home-made video, which was made to protest against moves to integrate black and white students in the same university residences, shows the four young men at the University of the Free State humiliating black workers, some of whom are elderly.

A violent backlash against the film caused all classes to be suspended today as hundreds of staff and students marched in protest. Police fired stun grenades to disperse an angry crowd gathered outside the whites-only halls of residence where the film was shot.

In the video the burly white students, who make no attempt to hide their faces, order the blacks who were cleaners at the whites-only Reitz hostel to down full bottles of beer. They then lead them to a playing field where they are told to display their athletic skills.

In the final extract a white male urinates on food and into a plastic soup container in a toilet. Then, shouting: "Take! Take!" in Afrikaans – he apparently forces the campus employees to eat the dirty food, causing them to vomit.

A narrative in Afrikaans indicates the recording was made in protest against the new university integration policy. Last month, there were angry demonstrations on campus against the policy by mainly white students.

"Once upon a time the boere (Afrikaners) lived peacefully here on Reitz Island, until one day when the less-advantaged discovered the word 'integration' in the dictionary," one of the white students says.

The video ends with the words: "That, at the end of the day, is what we think of integration."

Anton Fisher, a University spokesperson, said that the cleaners, four women and one man, were duped – an act which has increased anger over the video.

The spectacle of young whites exploiting older black cleaners, considered to be some of the most vulnerable people in the country, has outraged public opinion across the spectrum and triggered nationwide soul-searching over the high level of racism in the country 14 years since the end of apartheid in 1994.

It comes at a time of increased political tension with many whites accusing the Government of having abandoned its all-inclusive “Rainbow Nation” approach in favour of positive discrimination which they say has veered towards reverse racism.

Blacks have countered that Nelson Mandela, the country’s first black president, tried to hard too reconcile with old-school whites who refuse to change their ways.

The university, which is located in what was previously the Orange Free State – a bastion of Afrikaners – is known for having predominantly white students since the days of apartheid.

It has encountered difficulties trying to integrate people from other racial groups. Student groups say they are now planning to call nationwide anti-racism demonstrations in response to the video.

Frederick Fourie, the University’s rector, said he was "extremely upset about the incident".

The four students who have been identified in the video could face serious action. Two have already left the university and so cannot be suspended or expelled. All four however could face criminal charges.

Feelings are running high on the campus which has split along racial lines over the issue.

Many white students – while distancing themselves from the video – say the four risk being made scapegoats over a policy of integration which is being forced down their throats.

Black students say they cannot study alongside white students who do not unequivocally condemn the video and its purpose.

The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) said today that racial tensions in the country appear to have risen over the past month.

Frans Cronje, deputy chief executive officer at the institute, said that a spate of recent events raised concerns about whether South Africa was able to build on the general improvement in race relations the institute has monitored over the past years.

He referred to a racist shooting in the northwest of the country, where a young white man allegedly went on a shooting spree in a township that claimed several black lives, including a young child.

The Forum for Black Journalists then ejected white colleagues from a recent “blacks only” meeting with Jacob Zuma, the newly elected President of the ruling African National Congress.

Mr Zuma, who is in line to take over as the country’s president when Thabo Mbeki steps down in 2009, said he saw nothing wrong with a “blacks only” meeting – a comment which many non-blacks interpreted as the end of an attempt to build an all-inclusive, multi-racial society as promised in the ANC’s founding charter and the country’s current constitution.

"Actions such as these shown on the video will do great damage to race relations in South Africa. It probably sets us back a significant amount of time," Mr Cronje said.

    Outrage over video showing white South African students abusing blacks, Ts Online, 27.2.2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article3447848.ece

Power Failures Outrage South Africa

January 31, 2008
The New York Times
By BARRY BEARAK and CELIA W. DUGGER

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — At first, the power blackouts seemed a mere nuisance, the electricity suddenly dead for two or three hours at a time, two or three times a day. Radio announcers jocularly advised listeners to make their morning toast by vigorously rubbing two pieces of bread together and wisecracked about amorous uses for the extra darkness.

But after three weeks of chronic failures —after regularly irregular vexations with lifeless computers, stove tops and stoplights — public forbearance has given way to outrage. This nation, long a reliable repository of cheap, plentiful electricity, finds itself pitifully short of juice.

The government has confessed to an “electricity emergency” and has begun a program of rationing for industrial users. This is a mortifying turn for a country that considers itself the powerhouse of Africa and resists comparisons to its underdeveloped, famine-plagued neighbors.

But electricity shortages, now expected to be a fact of life for the next five years, are more than an embarrassment. They threaten continued strong growth here in a nation that accounts for a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic output and ranks among the world’s top 25 countries in gross domestic product.

Because South Africa is an engine of growth for the region, a slowdown here would also affect its neighbors, undermining global efforts to reduce poverty and damaging South Africa’s own drive to slash its woeful unemployment rate of 25.5 percent.

One of this nation’s largest employers, the mining industry, virtually halted production for four days last week because Eskom, the dominant, government-controlled utility, could not guarantee enough power to ventilate and cool the deep underground shafts. Companies that mine gold and platinum restarted production only on Tuesday after emergency negotiations with Eskom, South Africa’s Chamber of Mines said.

“The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented event,” said Anton Eberhard, a business school professor at the University of Cape Town and an energy expert. “That’s a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa’s reputation for new investment. Our country was built on the mines.”

The current crisis stems from Eskom’s lack of capacity to generate enough power, and its inability to keep many of its plants working.

The predicament was foretold. In 1998, a government report warned that at the rate the economy was growing, the nation faced serious electricity shortages by 2007 unless capacity was expanded. The government, led by President Thabo Mbeki, who assumed office in June 1999, tried unsuccessfully to induce private investors to build additional power plants. Only belatedly did it permit Eskom to begin the necessary expansion.

“The president has accepted that this government got its timing wrong,” Alec Erwin, the public enterprises minister, said last Friday at a much-anticipated news briefing that broke a mystifying public silence.

This statement was a rare admission of fault by a prideful, post-apartheid government. Mr. Mbeki, now in the final year of his second term, can legitimately boast of many successes, among them the provision of electricity to the impoverished masses. Since the African National Congress came to power in 1994, South Africa has doubled the percentage of its population connected to the grid to more than 70 percent.

Though the government insists it will not allow the power crisis to jeopardize future industrial projects and interfere with plans to play host to the 2010 World Cup in soccer, many experts consider the power shortage a lamentable foul-up likely to undo some of Mr. Mbeki’s economic accomplishments.

“The warnings were well-known, but the government was too aloof and arrogant to act,” said William Mervin Gumede, the author of “Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the A.N.C.” (Zebra Press, 2005, with a revised edition in 2007). “This is simply disastrous for the economy. You can throw out all the goals of 6 percent economic growth.”

South Africans are appalled by the daily interruptions to their lives. Workers sit idle, televisions flick into darkness and silence, elevators stall between floors, gas stations cannot pump, cakes remain forever half-baked. Every intersection with disabled traffic lights becomes a four-way stop, with drivers in each direction maddeningly delayed as the endless lines of cars inch forward.

Eskom calls the power failures “load shedding,” rotating the cuts around neighborhoods, allocating the inconvenience. The utility has a Web site with a dial in the corner; a needle gyrates between “safe” and “danger.”

The load shedding has three degrees of severity, and on the worst days, a community may experience half a day without power. The site provides a timetable for each area, but the schedule is often wrong. In coming months, when rationing is extended to residential users, the power shutdowns should be more predictable.

At Sandton City, suburban Johannesburg’s gargantuan, upscale shopping complex, the power cuts leave the mall with the eerie stillness of an interrupted stage performance. Customers and sales clerks appear stunned by the abrupt gloom, wondering whether to give up or carry on.

At The Bread Basket, a gourmet food store in the mall, the 33 employees hurry to complete their transactions in the near dark. Backup power supplies keep the cash registers working for a few minutes.

Then the store’s doors reluctantly close, with the scones, croissants and baguettes left stillborn in the ovens, the tuna salad, couscous and tzatziki dip slowly going bad as the refrigeration cases lose their cool.

“What can we do?” said the owner, Panos Avraamides. “We throw out all the salads, all the dips, all the antipastos, I let the employees have a one-hour break. Then they come back and stand around and do nothing.”

Norman Samuel, the manager of Etkinds, a nearby camera and binocular store, said glumly that his sales were down 40 percent. “People leave the shopping center when the lights go out,” he said. “Who wants to be here? The food court gets all smoked up because the ventilators don’t work.

“We were all optimistic about this country’s growth, but this will destroy it. I have sales reps coming into the store because they want me to carry their product. What can I tell them? I’m already cutting inventory.”

Most merchants are losing a day of sales each week. In Alexandra, the poor township just blocks from Sandton, John Kendia shuts his clothing shop with each power failure. “We’ve had the lights go out for four and five hours,” he said. “Who except thieves want to be in the store in the dark?”

Expensive gas-fueled generators can reawaken the light, and worried merchants and wealthy homeowners have quickly bought the machinery.

Now the equipment is scarce. Mark Haycock owns a hardware store in the city of George in Western Cape Province. “I have four suppliers, but they tell me that I’ll be lucky to get more generators in by March,” he said.

For its part, the government is beseeching customers to conserve power, an unfamiliar appeal in an energy-profligate nation. It has announced subsidies for solar-powered water heaters and a program to exchange energy-wasting light bulbs for more efficient ones. Solar-powered stoplights are supposed to free traffic from the whims of the enfeebled power grid.

And of course, the crisis itself enforces a sort of moderation.

“Because of this situation, economic growth just stops,” said Andrew Kenny, an engineering consultant. “In that way, the problem solves itself.”
 

Gavin du Venage contributed reporting

from George, South Africa.

Power Failures Outrage South Africa, NYT, 31.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/world/africa/31safrica.html