There is a growing group of disenfranchised white Afrikaners, squatting in public parks and on former landfills, in what some of them feel is due to the “reverse Apartheid” of the very aggressive affirmative action-type policies which are now in place, whereby it is nigh impossible for these lower class whites to get hired.
For the record, it was not the Boers who imposed the extremely cruel and violent system of racial Apartheid, it was the British, who defeated two Boer nations in South Africa: the South African Republic (Republic of Transvaal) and the Orange Free State in 1902. Institutionalized Apartheid was mandated during British Rule in 1948.
Apartheid was enforced until 1991. Then Nelson Mandela was duly elected President of South Africa in 1994, a country remarkable on that Continent for never having undergone a coup d’état.
The bitterness of the 80% black majority of South Africans, after three centuries of oppression and 50 years of unfathomable cruelty under Apartheid will take time to heal.
While many blacks have risen to middle- or upper classes, the overall unemployment rate of blacks has also grown between 1994 and 2003. The current corrupt ANC-led government is failing to achieve both economic growth and redistribution of wealth. Since they took power, South Africa has fallen steadily in the UN’s Human Development Index, whereas it had been steadily rising until the mid-1990s.
