by Robert Guest
One recent emigrant was Mark Shuttleworth, by far the most successful South African Internet entrepreneur. Shuttleworth is best known among his compatriots as the first African in space: he paid the Russian space program several million dollars to let him join one of their crews in orbit. He could afford such an expensive holiday because, while still in his twenties, he created software that let people do business online without fear of having their credit card details stolen. In 1999, he signed a deal to sell his company for $575 million. At the time he said he would never leave Africa, but less than two years later he packed his bags for London, griping that South African capital controls prevented him from making the most constructive use of his money. “If I see some crazy project in Norway I want to invest in,” he said, “I should be able to get the money from South Africa now, not in six months. That is what entrepreneurs do.”17 His case is not typical, of course, but if African countries want to keep their home-grown talent, they will have to allow them a bit more freedom. Still, Shuttleworth says he’ll return one day.
9. BEYOND THE RAINBOW NATION
South Africa’s prospects
Apartheid was beyond parody. Black and white South Africans were ordered by law to live separately, but whites employed several million blacks to clean their houses, cut their lawns, nurse their children, lay their bricks, and pick their grapes. Inequality before the law produced cruel absurdities. On one occasion a black woman was convicted of sleeping with a white man on the basis of her own confession and jailed. The white man was found innocent, however, because the only evidence against him was the testimony of his black lover.1
No one could come up with a foolproof definition of “black” and “white” (unsurprisingly, as it is not possible) but the authorities devised tests for borderline cases. If a pencil, placed in the subject’s hair, stayed there, he was deemed curly-haired and therefore “Native.” If he played rugby rather than soccer, he was possibly “colored” (mixed race) rather than black. Each year, hundreds of South Africans were racially re-classified.
No satirist could create fiction more grotesque than the reality of white supremacist rule. But some tried.
Tom Sharpe, a British writer who was deported from South Africa in 1961, wrote Indecent Exposure, a blood-flecked farce set in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. What would happen, Sharpe asked himself, if one took the thinking behind apartheid to a preposterous extreme? Take the apartheid leaders’ horror of inter-racial sex, combine it with the brutality of the old South African police force, and you have Luitenant Verkramp, the policeman anti-hero of Sharpe’s novel. Verkramp tries to cure his constables of their habit of raping black women – not because he feels sorry for the women but because he believes it immoral for black and white to breed together. His solution is gruesome. He has his men strapped into chairs, shown pictures of naked black women, and given electric shocks to make them associate black womanhood with pain.2
It was an outrageous parody. But what Sharpe could not have known was that it was not far from the truth. The South African army really did use electric shock treatment – to try to make gay soldiers straight. They used pictures of naked men rather than black women, but the principle is the same.3
A paradise, for some
I arrived in South Africa in 1998, as Nelson Mandela’s presidency was entering its final year, and was struck by all the things that usually strike new arrivals. Perhaps more so. My previous jobs were in London, Tokyo, and Seoul: three cramped, crowded, costly, safe, efficient cities with iffy weather. Johannesburg is rather different.
The weather is perfect, for a start: warm and sunny, but never humid. South Africa is huge and sparsely populated, so space is cheap. My wife and I rented probably the largest house we’ll ever live in, eight minutes from the Economist’s office, with a kitchen bigger than my whole apartment had been in Tokyo and a swimming pool and a lemon tree in the garden. The food is great, too. In season, hawkers at traffic lights sell boxes of avocados, softer and more flavorsome than the little cannon-balls sold in British supermarkets and one twentieth of the price. Shop shelves groan with fresh asparagus, Knysna oysters, and unfeasibly large ribs. A bottle of good Cape chardonnay in a Jo’burg restaurant costs slightly more than a large can of beer from a Japanese vending machine. All in all, life in South Africa’s commercial capital is pretty comfortable.
Except that I’m only describing the northern suburbs, an island of middle-class indulgence surrounded by grim workers’ townships and plastic-shack squatters’ camps. It is one of the worst travel-writing clichés to describe a country as a “land of contrasts,” but the phrase is hard to avoid when describing South Africa. It is like a European archipelago dropped into an African ocean. The Third World lives in a shed at the bottom of the First World’s garden, which he weeds on Wednesdays.
South Africa is Africa’s best hope. It has by far the continent’s largest and most sophisticated economy. If South Africa prospers, it could pull the rest of the continent in its wake, as Japan did in Asia. If it were to stagnate, or revert to tyranny, it would be as if someone had poured sugar into the continent’s gas tank. So what are South Africa’s prospects?
A gentler kind of government
In many ways, the leaders of the African National Congress, the party that has governed South Africa since 1994, have behaved well. Many senior ANC members were imprisoned and tortured by the old regime, but they have not sought revenge. South Africa is no longer a country where ordinary citizens are terrified of their government, although the police can still be rough. The death penalty has been abolished, as has corporal punishment in schools.
South Africa has become a freer, more tolerant place. Black South Africans are no longer barred from traveling where they please. Young white men are no longer conscripted to go and strafe neighboring countries. Anti-apartheid guerrillas have found jobs in government and started eating at smart restaurants instead of bombing them.
Abortion and gay sex are now legal. The constitution of 1996 promises freedom of expression, information, movement, and association, not to mention the rights to privacy, access to adequate housing, and a clean environment. For a country that until recently deprived nine tenths of its population of full citizenship, this has been a dramatic change.
Some of South Africa’s new constitutional rights are harder to guarantee than others. The “right” to adequate housing implies that someone has a duty to build adequate houses for people who don’t have them. In practice, this has been interpreted to mean that the government has to make reasonable efforts to provide the roofless with shelter. This it has tried to do: between 1994 and 2002, 1.4 million neat new brick houses were built with government subsidies of about $2,000 each. One study found that only a third of these houses were of a “suitable standard”; but they were still much better than the hovels they replaced.4
The government has done several other things that have greatly improved the lives of poor South Africans. By 2003, it was supplying free piped water, up to a modest limit, to 26 million of South Africa’s 45 million people. The state has also brought electricity to many who previously relied on paraffin to light their homes and cook their food. Between 1996 and 2000, the proportion of homes with electric power rose from 55 percent to 70 percent.5 This has meant fewer lethal fires in crowded slums.
Not only has the government brought services to the poor, but it has given them money too. Pensions, mostly. Having converged in the last years of apartheid, state pensions for black and white South Africans were equalized. In many townships and rural villages, old women have become the most reliable breadwinners for large extended families. The monthly pension was only about $80 in 2001, but for many households this meant the difference between eating and not eating.
A safer place to do business
All this was achieved without printing money. A glance over the border at Zimbabwe shows how important this is. South Africa’s public finances under the ANC have been more carefully managed than they were under
the old regime. Macroeconomic policy has been better than in living memory.
The government still spends a bit more than it receives in tax revenues, but the budget deficit shrank steadily from a worrying 9.1 percent of GDP in 1993 to an estimated 2.4 percent in 2003.6 Inflation fell too, from a peak of 18 percent in 1986 to 5 percent by late 2003, although it crept back up to 12 percent by late 2002. Trades unions and left-wingers within the ANC put tremendous pressure on the government to spend more and let inflation rise, but the party leaders understand that the gains from fiscal irresponsibility would probably be fleeting.
With sanctions ended, South Africa has become, in many ways, an easier place to do business. Fiscal and monetary policies have been consistent and conservative. Trade barriers, once towering, have been lowered several notches. Currency controls have been relaxed and may yet be abolished. Corporate governance has improved: companies have been obliged to publish more transparent accounts, and insider trading has been curbed.
As I write, however, all these reforms have yet to spur much growth. Average incomes have not fallen under the new regime, but they have not risen much either. Between 1994 and 2002, economic growth averaged 2.8 percent a year, outstripping population growth of 1.8 percent. This was much better than the previous twelve years, during which growth was a wretched 0.6 percent a year. But many black South Africans actually grew poorer under black rule, mainly by losing their jobs.
Can’t fire? Won’t hire
Although the black middle class expanded swiftly in the early years of ANC rule, so did the number of poor South Africans, almost all of them black. Joblessness exploded. Using a strict definition (counting only those who actively sought work in the last month), the number of unemployed black South Africans rose from 1.6 million in 1994 to 3.6 million in 2001. Using an expanded definition, including those who want to work but have given up looking, the number rose from 3.2 million to 6 million over the same period. Put differently, between 31 percent and 43 percent of black South Africans were jobless in 2001.7 Among unskilled rural black women, the figure was more like two thirds.
The rise in joblessness has largely been a consequence of the government’s efforts to protect workers. Besides all their racial laws, the ANC, urged on by its union allies, has passed a series of laws obliging firms to treat their employees more generously.
Firms must grant maternity leave, increase overtime rates, and pay a “skills levy” that is reimbursed only if the firm spends money on the kind of training that the government thinks its workers need. How a bureaucrat might know the answer to this question is not explained. Minimum wages are negotiated between unions and the larger firms in an industry and then extended to smaller firms in the same industry, whether they were party to the agreement or not. Since larger firms can usually afford to pay more, this makes it harder for small businesses to get started. Jobless South Africans tell pollsters that they would be willing to accept pay packets roughly half the typical minimum wage, but union leaders insist that they should not be allowed to.
To a European, some of these rules might sound unremarkable. But South Africa is not Europe. The ANC has tried to grant First-World legal privileges to a workforce with largely Third-World skills. The trouble is, workers with few skills do not produce enough to enable their employers to pay them generously – which is why the South African government has found its own laws impossible to obey. In 2000, the minister in charge of the civil service sought an exemption from some of the rules, as did the state-owned airline.
Some labor laws only apply to firms with more than fifty employees, so firms try hard to keep their headcount below this figure, by sub-contracting, for example. Thabo Mbeki, the president, sees this as quite a big problem. He once recounted how he had visited a factory and asked the boss how many employees he had. “About fifty,” was the answer. But Mbeki could see 300. Most of them were contract workers, explained the boss, employed by labor brokers, and therefore not his responsibility.8 The government later passed new rules restricting the use of sub-contractors.
When sacking staff or retrenching, bosses must follow long and complex procedures to the letter. A small technical violation of these procedures can lead to awards of up to a year’s salary to each employee involved. Most businessmen I talked to in South Africa felt that the labor courts were biased against them. For small employers, sacking unwanted staff can be an excruciating hassle, as a friend of mine, Michael, found out. He was the Johannesburg bureau chief for a British newspaper, which is to say, he was in charge of a two-man office, consisting of himself and an assistant who was supposed to run errands and generally make life easier for him while he struggled to meet deadlines.
Michael told me that, shortly after he arrived in South Africa, he discovered that his assistant had borrowed the company car without permission or a driving license, crashed it, and tried to cover up his tracks. When Michael was out, he ran up a bill on the office phone that exceeded his salary, including 258 calls in four months to friends and relatives in Zimbabwe. Michael said he gave him five written warnings to stop and countless spoken ones, but to no avail. Eventually, he decided to fire him but found that he could not. After a year of preparing for hearings, attending hearings, and paying legal fees, he was ordered by a labor arbitrator to give the man another chance.
If you fire him, the arbitrator said, he won’t find work again – which was doubtless true. But if workers are this hard to fire, employers have a strong incentive not to hire them in the first place. South Africa’s labor laws are supposed to be pro-poor, but their effect is anything but. They may benefit those who already have jobs, but they also make it harder for the jobless, who are mostly much poorer, to find work.
A rough nation
Those with no other means of earning a living sometimes turn to crime. Joblessness can lead to alienation, and poverty gives people an incentive to steal. With guns easily available, plenty of rich people worth robbing, and a tradition of revolutionary violence that dates back to the days when the ANC called for the townships to be made “ungovernable,” you would expect South Africa to be a dangerous place. It is.
According to one survey, an incredible 11 percent of fifteen-year-old boys think that “jack-rolling” (recreational gang-rape) is “cool,” and one South African man in four admits to having raped someone.9 The average South African is five times more likely to be murdered than the average American. (This rate is slightly better than it was in the early 1990s, largely because political violence has almost stopped.)
The popular mood seems to be that brutality should be met with brutality. Most South Africans want to bring back hanging. In 1999, a front page of the Sunday World, a black newspaper, showed a photograph of a dead man sitting in a lavatory cubicle, his brains smeared on the wall. The caption explained that he had stolen a mobile telephone and then shot himself rather than face the lynch mob outside.
The same year, the BBC aired footage of South African police officers, who knew they were being filmed, kicking, stubbing out cigarettes on, and goading their dogs to bite some carjacking suspects. The item attracted a volley of complaints from South African viewers, several of whom fumed that the BBC’s reporter should have left the officers alone, as they were only doing their job.
Both crime and the response to it seem to be fired by a palpable anger in South African society. This anger may have political roots. Many whites are furious that they no longer run the country, while many blacks are frustrated that they are not yet rich. The least intelligent whites, for whom apartheid job reservation was most beneficial, are probably the angriest now that it has gone. A couple of white security guards used to patrol the street where I lived in Johannesburg in a state of permanent rage that they no longer had nice jobs working for the state railway firm. One used to cradle his pistol and say things like: “I hate the fucking kaffirs. I fucking hate them. I want to fucking shoot them all.” He was soon fired and replaced with a more personable black guy.
In mos
t parts of South Africa, but especially in rural areas, people assume that the police are powerless to catch criminals. So vigilante groups, including a couple of large, well-organized ones, are uncomfortably popular. I once arrived at a little hotel near Kruger National Park with a British friend, who saw a snarling leopard logo on the wall and asked me what it was. I explained that it meant that the place paid protection money to the local vigilante group, Mapogo a Mathamaga, which was notorious for dangling suspected thieves over crocodile-infested rivers until they confessed.
“No, really,” he said, “what is it?” I assured him that I wasn’t joking. Our guide, a kindly middle-aged lady, chipped in, recounting with approval how vigilantes “catch criminals, give them a bloody good hiding, and sometimes they don’t get up again.”
Under apartheid, the police’s job was to crush subversion, and their main obstacle was that everyone hated them. Black policemen were deemed traitors and liable to be “necklaced,” which meant having a burning tire filled with gasoline placed around their necks. At a police station in Soweto, officers told me how, in the 1980s, they sometimes awoke to the sound of hand grenades being lobbed through the window.
In the new South Africa, the same policemen are supposed to catch common criminals, and their main hurdle is their lack of detective skills. The ANC government, many of whose leaders have vivid memories of bleeding in police cells, have made it clear that police are no longer allowed to kick confessions out of suspects. The trouble is, many police are unfamiliar with more modern ways of securing convictions.
