No More Mandelas

I've spent nearly 25 years engaged with South Africa and its extraordinary political and human dramas.

When I first went to the country the white regime still refused to allow blacks to share the same buses, toilets, beaches, schools and neighbourhoods as whites.
The place reeked of injustice and cruelty.

I had some of the most intense experiences of my life while living in that beloved country.

After the birth of the democratic state I would occasionally find myself in arguments with people who told me the whole place was going to go down the tubes. More often than not they were white South Africans who had benefited under apartheid.

I believed some of them would never accept the idea that a black person might rule over them, indeed that a black person might rule just as effectively as any white.
The disillusionment is felt strongly in the townships.
But the need to defend a young democracy from arguments that are sometimes founded on racist assumptions should not blind us to unpalatable realities.

My sense is that many in the international community have taken South Africa's post apartheid stability for granted.

We have failed to observe the politics closely or to analyse the exact nature of the economic stability that has been achieved. Look a little closer and the cracks emerging in society are profoundly worrying.

Unequal society

While the ANC government worked hard to maintain economic stability and growth, precious little of the new wealth has made its way to the poor.

By Fergal Keane
Panorama
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