https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii156/articles/kevin-cox-south-africa-in-history-s-shadow

Over thirty years have passed since South Africa’s first non-racial elections. The vast majority of voters in 1994 had struggled all their lives under the stifling burdens of apartheid—in the workplace, on the land, in their neighbourhoods; the future could only be better. To some degree this has been the case. Though millions still live in informal squatter settlements, housing conditions have improved.footnote1 A considerable amount of land has been restored to those forcibly evicted by apartheid-resettlement programmes, despite the slow rate of progress. Pensions have been equalized upwards to the level previously enjoyed only by whites, providing a crucial safety net for many African households. The poor receive a free weekly allowance of electricity. Schools have been desegregated, at least formally, and Africans have moved up the educational ladder; over two-thirds now attain high-school education. Trade-union membership rates are high. Africans have been recruited to all levels of the civil service.

On the other hand, while South Africa had long vied with Brazil for the dubious distinction of having the most unequal income distribution in the world, this is no longer the case; South Africa now stands alone. The rich have done very well in the post-apartheid era, partly due to the eye-popping expansion of the financial sector; but the share of income held by the poorest 40 per cent is barely half the average for ‘emerging markets’.footnote2 The spatial segregation enforced during the apartheid era has scarcely shifted; instead, the informal settlements of the townships have expanded to incorporate immigrants from other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The gdp per capita growth rate has stagnated since 2008, due only in part to strong population growth. Economic stagnation reinforces occupational stasis, with its residual racialization of the skills hierarchy—‘whites on top’, followed by Indians, Coloureds and Africans.footnote3 The rate of formal unemployment is staggeringly high: over 50 per cent among the young. Traffic reports regularly warn of road-block protests, where local communities and the unemployed, armed with rocks and burning tyres, are demanding jobs and services.

Exacerbating these macro-economic problems has been the measurable decline in the country’s public infrastructure—power, water, transport. Since 2007, growing demand for electricity has outstripped supply from Eskom, the state-owned electricity provider, leading to major power cuts or ‘load-shedding’. The blackouts have had serious effects on the economy, not least in interrupting water supplies which have to be pumped up to the high plateau where the industrial Vaal Triangle and the Rand mines are located. Broken freight trains mean that Transnet, the state-owned rail and logistics company, has struggled to ship iron ore and coal to the ports, representing lost exports estimated at nearly $5 billion a year. Hit by high energy costs and unreliable transport, the minerals-energy complex that has been the motor of South Africa’s development since the 1880s is starting to stall.

Compounding these difficulties has been the rise of violent crime. The homicide rate stood at 42 per 100,000 in 2021—second only to Jamaica, and far above the rates for neighbouring Namibia, Botswana or Zimbabwe.footnote4 Assault, burglary and car-jackings have become a staple of the daily news. The wealthy can take advantage of a panoply of private-security measures; poorer South Africans are far more exposed. Informal work, often illegal, is vulnerable to extortion under the threat of violence; systematically so for the zama zamas, own-account miners who dig in abandoned gold mines, at great physical risk. Worse still, in recent years, the vandalization of infrastructure has become a major problem. Anything metal is open to theft: road signs, manhole covers, the copper in cables. Looting soared during the pandemic, when—as passengers and security guards stayed home—the commuter-rail system in the Johannesburg area was reduced to total wreckage, with photos of tracks torn up and stations stripped bare. The effects are regressive; those without cars are left to the mercy of the gang-run taxi-cab companies, whose turf wars can end in shoot-outs, with passengers sometimes caught in the crossfire.

Falling turnout rates in recent elections are a measure of how far the post-apartheid optimism has evaporated. From 87 per cent in 1994, turnout dropped to 73 per cent in 2014, 66 per cent in 2019 and 59 per cent in 2024. The anc’s popular vote has dropped from 12 million in 1994 to 6.4 million in 2024, and its share of the total from a high of 70 per cent in 2004 to 40 per cent, forcing the party into a coalition government with the liberal Democratic Alliance, preferred vehicle for most white, Indian and Coloured voters, and two conservative groupings: the Inkatha Freedom Party, established by descendants of the Zulu royal family, with its stronghold in KwaZulu-Natal; and the Patriotic Alliance, a small right-wing party mobilizing poor Coloureds in the Western Cape. These motley forces comprise the parliamentary base for Cyril Ramaphosa’s second presidential term. The opposition now consists of ex-president Jacob Zuma’s mk, a populist Zulu party that took 15 per cent—over 2 million votes, mainly from the anc—in the 2024 election; and Julius Malema’s left-populist Economic Freedom Fighters, with 1.5 million votes, 10 per cent of the total. The pluralization of parliamentary forces may be positive, after twenty years of the anc’s unchallenged predominance; but the extent to which the new party landscape correlates with ethnic and tribal groupings bodes ill. There is now frequent talk of South Africa as a ‘failing state’ or, as the international ngo community prefers to put it these days, a ‘fragile’ one.footnote5
Blame the party?

How should South Africa’s deteriorating social and economic conditions be explained? The two most commonly heard accounts both focus on the anc’s record, but offer opposing analyses of where it has gone wrong. For the left, the turning point was anc and sacp leaders’ collusion with capital in accepting a neoliberal framework during the 1990–94 transition. Rather than rallying the townships and international support behind a coherent redistributive programme, Mandela and his comrades agreed to demobilize. In this reading, the post-apartheid regime was midwifed by South African finance and mining capital, along with the World Bank and imf, while ‘sacp leaders eagerly offered the forceps’ and the mass movement of the townships ‘was kept locked outside the delivery room’.footnote6

Liberal critics also identify the anc as a crucial problem, but for them the issue is that the party has remained wedded to leftist statism and is not neoliberal enough. In What’s Gone Wrong?, Alex Boraine, architect of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, argues that the anc’s long years in exile, incessantly targeted by Pretoria’s secret police, inculcated it with an understandable fear of infiltration, making party loyalty and commitment to programmatic dogma the paramount virtue.footnote7 Frans Cronje, head of the country’s Institute of Race Relations, blames the apartheid rulers for hounding the originally quite moderate anc into Moscow’s embrace in the 1950s. For Cronje, the transition got off to a good start with Mandela’s 1992 speech at Davos and Mbeki’s deepening of the neoliberal turn with the 1996 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (gear) programme, which cut South Africa’s national debt from 50 to 25 per cent of gdp, while growth rates hit 5 per cent in 2004–07, albeit fuelled by a real-estate bubble on a scale to match those in the us and Europe. But, Cronje argues, Mbeki’s personal flaws—superstition about aids, paranoia towards his rivals, involvement in corrupt weapons deals—opened the way for the anc left, the sacp and cosatu to oust him as party president by exploiting Zuma’s populist appeal at the 2007 anc conference at Polokwane. After Zuma’s victory in the April 2009 presidential election, the left seized control of party policy, raising the minimum wage, imposing a union-friendly charter on the mining industry, expanding health insurance and accelerating Black Economic Empowerment measures. It was this departure from liberal-economic good sense, combined with Zuma’s industrial-scale corruption, that led to South Africa’s ‘fall’.footnote8

A third explanation for the anc’s failings is cultural. In Africa Works, a locus classicus of this approach, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz argued that post-colonial Africa has evolved its own form of modernity, combining advanced Western technologies with local cultural models and forms of rule. After independence, the rackety European-colonial state structures were further informalized in the interests of African elites, who needed resources for their client constituencies to shore up their status as ‘Big Men’. According to Chabal and Daloz, and contrary to the shibboleths of ‘good governance’, the imf structural-adjustment programmes of the 1980s deepened this process of ‘retraditionalization’ due to the rich pickings to be had from privatizing state assets. But in its own way, they argue, the system ‘works’, providing personalized solutions to societal problems, albeit at the cost of low economic growth.footnote9

Although Africa Works specifically excluded South Africa, the political scientist R. W. Johnson has developed a comparable cultural analysis of the anc regime, albeit less critical of its colonial predecessors. Johnson calls the failing-state label ‘hopelessly ahistorical’. Rather, South Africa has reverted to its pre-colonial mores. Cattle-raiding forays played an important role in Xhosa and Zulu societies; when anc leaders looted the state, they were simply reinstating an older pattern of authority, culturally transmitted down the generations, though also reinforced by apartheid-era ‘tribalization’ policies. This was a form of neo-patrimonialism, based on a Big Man accruing personal wealth and distributing it to clients. As Johnson points out, Zuma came from a relatively modest background but had no difficulty in adopting ‘all the attributes of a Zulu chief’—the great kraal at Nkandla, the many wives and multiple children, the host of clients and cronies. For Johnson, plunder itself is the main cause of South Africa’s low growth and rising unemployment, with corrupt and bankrupt state-owned enterprises a major drag on development. Unlike Chabal and Daloz, however, he is optimistic about neoliberal structural adjustment, arguing that with a debt crisis looming, the anc will have to change, either under imf pressure or its own.footnote10

Though a few grains of truth may be found in each of these explanations, there are criticisms to be made of them all. The left perspective fails to probe the real difficulties confronting socialist reconstruction in the era of financialized globalization. The liberal critique averts its eyes from the vertiginous inequality that deregulated capital has helped to cause. The culturalist approach fails to explain the scale of plunder and patronage under Dutch and British colonial rule. At the same time, all three concentrate almost exclusively on the choices of the anc leadership; important as that is, such a focus can leave important factors out of the picture, treating South Africa in isolation from larger geopolitical and world-economic forces. This essay attempts instead to provide a more structural explanation for South Africa’s situation. Without wanting to dismiss the toxic effects of neoliberalism, the harsh legacies of apartheid rule have been more significant in what has unfolded.
Formative struggles

It was the 1886 discovery of a gold reef running from east to west through the interior of southern Africa, at the level of present-day Johannesburg, which would become known as the Rand, that catalysed the final struggle to forge a unified state out of the multiple polities between the Cape and the Limpopo River. For nearly a century, the English coastal colonies (the Cape and Natal) and the Dutch-speaking inland Boer republics (Transvaal and the Orange Free State) had been battling each other, even as they fought to suppress, at various times, the militant Zulu and Xhosa peoples of the Eastern Cape and Indian Ocean seaboard; the Khoi and San hunter-gatherers of the barren west; and the Pedi, Sotho and Tswana of the north. The British had seized the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars for its strategic location on the sea route to India; there was little support in London at that stage for an expensive military campaign to conquer the interior. Without the gold, the Transvaal Boer republic might have remained a frontier region, where white landowners made a living by exploiting their armies of labour tenants and squatters, or sharecroppers, as well as big-game hunting for ivory and skins to export. Beyond the reach of the British colonial authority’s laws and taxes, emanating from Cape Town, the Boer farmers were also geographically isolated from the circuits of global capital and the markets of the urban-industrial economy, to a far greater extent than Argentina’s estancias or us cattle ranches. The other crucial difference between southern Africa and the settler colonies in the New World or the Antipodes was the scale of the ‘native’ African populations, who outnumbered the whites by four to one. They proved more resistant to the white man’s diseases and more willing to work than the Indians of the North American plains: this would be of major significance for the mines.

The gold mines transformed the Transvaal from a rural backwater into a booming, semi-industrialized statelet under the leadership of its frontier-militia commander, Paul Kruger. British mining and railway companies poured in borrowed capital, while an influx of what the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners called uitlander labour—‘foreign’ whites, mainly British—provided the more skilled element in the mines and in the network of railways built from the port cities of Durban and Cape Town up into the Rand. Kruger kept a tight grip, exercising a monopoly over the supplies of dynamite and black labour, denying the uitlanders a vote while their taxes filled the gold state’s coffers, strengthening his hand against the British and helping to re-arm his kommando forces with German guns. The confluence of geopolitical tensions—the arrival of German imperialism in southern Africa—with intra-European ethnic ones—English complaints of maltreatment by the Afrikaners—was compounded by the destabilizing impact of industrial-capitalist extraction processes on the region. Moreover, in place of simple commodity exchange among the whites, and the Bantu practice of customary land tenure and subsistence farming, global capital required the production—and ongoing reproduction—of an exploitable labour force.

The Randlords, as the English-speaking mine owners were known, put immense pressure on the Transvaal government to supply cheap black labour for the mines. The geological conditions of the Rand, where the bulk of the ore was low-grade and buried very deep, imposed a labour-intensive extraction process and high capital costs. At the same time, the fixed price of gold—the Bank of England’s shift to the Gold Standard by the 1870s underwrote the credit flows in this first era of globalization—as well as the Afrikaner state’s high taxes, meant that profits could only be increased through downward pressure on labour. But the Afrikaner landowners of the Transvaal, Kruger’s base, with their massive farms, also relied on the products of African sharecroppers and the help of labour tenants in tending their herds and harvesting the crops. The Randlords had the backing of the Cape Colony, where diamond-mining companies like Cecil Rhodes’s De Beers were already finding ways to corral new sources of labour, not least by raising the hut tax, forcing Africans to work for cash, and pioneering new forms of labour control, notably the compound, that would be transferred to the gold mines. Rhodes, the son of an English vicar, had been sent as a teenager to relatives in Natal to cure his sickly constitution. By the age of 23 he had made a fortune in diamonds and was plotting the expansion of British South Africa up the eastern spine of the continent, across the Zambezi. A press campaign in London for this ‘Cape to Cairo’ project helped win the Cabinet’s backing for military intervention in 1899, launching the Boer War, in which British forces, frustrated by their inability to stamp out the kommando guerrillas, resorted to torching farms and rounding up Afrikaners to starve in concentration camps, while the Boers slaughtered Africans suspected of colluding with the imperial power.

The Boer War concluded with a compromise, sealed in the Union of South Africa’s 1910 Constitution. The country would be a British dominion, on the ‘self-governing’ model of Canada and Australia, ruled by a ‘moderate’ Afrikaner government, elected on a whites-only suffrage. The polity was buttressed by white ownership of mines, corporations, banks and agricultural land, the latter codified in the 1913 Land Act which specified that Africans were not allowed to own or lease land outside the scheduled ‘native reserves’, proto-homelands that covered barely a tenth of the country. One result was to reduce African tenant farmers to servants or labourers, or drive them to the land-poor reserves. It also served to increase the pool of migrant labour available to the Randlords: younger sons would be sent for a stint in the mines, living in hostels, leaving their families behind; their wages didn’t need to cover the cost of household reproduction. (The Land Act also tried to do away with labour tenancy and sharecropping on white farms, with limited success; there would still be millions of African farmers on the platteland in the 1960s, particularly in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.)

South Africa’s insertion into the international division of labour as a major minerals producer—gold, but also diamonds, copper, coal and, later, platinum—would be dependent on these circuits of temporary migrants from across the region; workers who were only semi-proletarianized, in that they worked for wages but also had access to the means of subsistence at home, either through customary tenure in a native reserve, or through their labour-tenant or sharecropping families on white-owned farms. Above-ground, clerical and engineering jobs were reserved for whites by the 1911 Mines and Works Act, while the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act demarcated the cities as white spaces and required all urban Africans to carry a pass; lighter but still comparable restrictions would apply to the Coloured and Indian populations. Premised above all on securing cheap labour for the mines, these racialized class structures would sediment within the culture and society of the newly formed country, leaving it riven by discontent.

The agricultural depression of the inter-war period deepened the material insecurity in the African reserves and saw increasing numbers slipping away to find work in the cities; perhaps also to escape patriarchal rule and the burden of finding the traditional lobola, or bride price. This worsened the labour shortage in the white countryside. Meanwhile, rural Afrikaners seethed at the country’s submission to the British Empire after the atrocities of the Boer War; sentiments that would be channelled by a ‘purified’ National Party against the Anglophile governments led by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. The Second World War sharpened the intra-white polarization. The National Party under Daniel Malan took a pro-German line against the Smuts government’s Empire loyalism, in hope that if Hitler defeated Britain, an Afrikaner republic would be restored. In the 1948 election, Malan rallied the rural vote of white farmers, worried about the shrinking supply of black labour, and the urban vote of white workers who feared competition from blacks’ lower wages, to squeak a victory on a platform of curtailing African urbanization through a policy of ‘apartness’.

Apartheid was a deepening of racialized labour regulation, not a rupture from it. Nevertheless, it represented a decisive strategic choice, a rejection of Smuts’ gesture towards integration that was intended to neutralize the appeal of a new generation of black leaders in the anc Youth League—Sisulu, Tambo, Mandela—who were attracted to the small but intellectually potent South African Communist Party, the country’s first non-racial political organization. Instead, the National Party government aimed at the ‘uplift’ of Afrikaners, the poorest section of the whites, through the intensified exploitation of the African majority. ‘Influx control’ would set tight limits on the black population in the cities through harsh enforcement of identity documents—the ‘pass’ system. Only a thin layer of ‘Section Tenners’, named after a clause in the 1945 Bantu (Urban Areas) Act, would have rights of permanent urban residence; the aim was that they would answer to South African industry’s demands for an intermediary layer of skilled black workers; hence the provision of schools, something absent for Africans elsewhere. Otherwise, Africans were only allowed to move to the townships as temporary migrant workers, living in hostels, and on the pattern of the mining industry; family members from the reserves or the white-run rural areas were banned from joining them.

In parallel with ‘influx control’, the National Party set about turning the native reserves into self-governing tribal homelands. In part, this was a tactical response to growing black resistance, aiming to divide the African majority by ‘tribalization’; but the claim that these Bantustans would become real nations was also calculated to meet the rising tide of anti-colonialism across the continent and, in the process, to create a truly white, if rump, South Africa. In the 1960s a major push to modernize and mechanize white farming drastically reduced the need for African labour, leading to the ‘whitening of the platteland’ through the forced expulsion of sharecroppers and labour tenants and their relocation to desolate resettlement camps in the tribal homelands, under the rule of their traditional chief or—as with the Bafokeng in Bophuthatswana—the king. Some 3.5 million Africans were evicted from their lands in this tide of misery. On its own terms, this racialized social-engineering project was a success; by the early 1980s, 54 per cent of Africans were living in the homelands. Now fully proletarianized—deprived of the means of subsistence—they were funnelled into new industrial zones, built within the jurisdiction of ‘white South Africa’ but adjacent to the proto-national Bantustans, making use of their pools of cheap labour. Resettlement would also give rise to the ‘career’ miner, workers now completing one contract after another, rather than returning to the countryside; and not just miners but factory hands, dockers and construction workers, too. They would provide the basis for the explosive rise of the African trade-union movement.

This would prove the turning point. The growing African, Coloured and Indian labour movement signalled its presence in the 1973 Durban dock strikes. The new unions, federated as cosatu, would be a key component of the anti-apartheid movement. A second element was the politicization of township youth led by the high-school students who initiated the 1976 Soweto uprising. By the mid-1970s, the black southern African states—Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe—were winning independence and offered a refuge to the outlawed anc. The National Party’s response to the rising urban unrest was to devolve responsibility for local government and public housing to black municipalities. But their corruption and high-handedness galvanized a new middle-class civic movement to organize further protests and rent strikes. The 1983–85 township uprisings led the government to declare a state of emergency, which in turn produced a foreign-debt crisis and stock-market crash; the highly statist apartheid economic system came under attack on neoliberal grounds. It was becoming apparent that breaking working-class resistance would require a transition to a universal franchise and thus African majority rule. The South African intelligence service had put out feelers to the anc in the early 1980s; in 1991, public negotiations finally began with the reformist wing of the National Party over the dismantling of apartheid.
Transition

How was the anc to deal with the sedimented social legacy of South Africa’s first century and the racialized class pyramid that the English and Afrikaners had forged? At its summit, a handful of mining and manufacturing conglomerates were owned and run by a small group of white families, linked into international business and banking circles. A growing black professional middle class was coming to outnumber its better-off and better-trained white, Indian and Coloured peers. They were outnumbered in turn by the young black proletariat, increasingly jobless, who headed for the cities once ‘influx control’ was ended in 1986. Their ‘late’ proletarianization in the 1970s and 80s came at a crucial moment for the world economy, when global growth rates and labour uptake were starting to decline. The millions of Africans thrown off their land, herded into tribalized resettlement camps, then flung into the industrial economy, would be ejected from it from the 1990s, to swell the ranks of the urban unemployed.

The global conditions for the post-apartheid transition were not propitious. South Africa’s self-liberation from settler-colonial rule came late in the century—too late for it to attempt the classic model of economic uplift through export-led, state-backed industrial development. By the early 1990s, the rise of China was already well underway and the chance of any other state following that development path was foreclosed; on the contrary, latecomers like Brazil and South Korea were already starting to deindustrialize. In any case, South Africa would have been ill-equipped for such a course. Mineral exports kept the currency relatively strong; newly unionized labour fiercely defended its rights; the major banks and corporations would certainly have resisted the sort of public intervention and allocation of capital required for a developmental state. Geographical location also counted against it. South Africa is a long way from global consumer markets, in contrast to middle-income export economies like Mexico or Slovakia, with richer countries just across the border. The obvious outlet would be the markets of sub-Saharan Africa, but, due to the prevalence of customary tenure, capitalist development is a challenge and they take only a fifth of South Africa’s exports.footnote11

Transforming a mineral-dependent economy into one more focused on industrial growth for overseas markets was always going to be daunting. The whole social and physical infrastructure, the knowledge base, skill structure, industrial production and domestic markets are geared towards mineral production, or dependent on it. It is what the South African business and banking sectors know best.footnote12 Import-substitution policies had a brief moment after the First World War and were given further impetus by the Second. But from the start of National Party rule in 1948, the government’s attempt to control African urbanization would get in the way, imposing temporary migrant-labour status on the majority, on the assumption that workers’ families would remain behind in the native reserves and ‘live off the land’. This limited the possibilities for training and upgrading African workers’ skills; short-term contracts were not the answer.footnote13

The anc’s approach to these strategic problems was informed by the sacp’s famous definition of South Africa as ‘colonialism of a special type’. It was not formally a colony, since it had been an independent country since 1910; on the other hand, those who put the means of production and labour power into motion and monopolized the state were the descendants of those who had arrived as colonizers from imperial countries while it was under the rule of first the Dutch and then the British. The exploited class were the indigenous populations, along with those imported by the early white settlers as slaves or indentured workers to facilitate the accumulation process. For sacp theorists, this called for two successive revolutions: first a national one, in which colonial rule in all its aspects, economic, political and cultural, would be dismantled; after which the national working class would overthrow the national capitalist class and prepare to build socialism.

In hindsight, what is curious is the emphasis on the ‘national’ as the framework within which the social process would unfold. The transition negotiations made clear that South African capital would always be able to draw on global capital’s political guardians. The balance of forces was also determined by the resources upon which the apartheid rulers could call; unlike the French-Algerian settlers, reliant on a French state that had its own agenda, they had their own military capability and the industrial base to support it. Against this, there was the historic weakness of the anc. It was not until the 1970s that generalized demands for the abolition of apartheid and introduction of a non-racial franchise began to animate the black population as a whole.footnote14 This also reflected the history of working-class politics in the country and the delayed proletarianization of the rural majority, thanks to the mine-owners’ need for semi-subsistence labour. The anc’s moral hand was much stronger than its political one. Moreover, it was damagingly weakened at the start of the negotiations by the carnage inflicted by supporters of the Zulu independence party, Inkatha, instigated by factions in the intelligence service.

To recall these difficult conditions is not to prettify the subsequent evolution of the anc. On his release from prison in 1990, Mandela had famously reiterated the 1955 Freedom Charter’s call for the nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries, adding that ‘modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable’.footnote15 The story of that modification has been told many times and the main reasons for it are not in dispute. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the anc disarmed, with no international support for any form of post-capitalist transition. Indeed, the anc’s objective had always been national liberation—the elimination of apartheid and establishment of black majority rule—rather than radical economic transformation. Second, there was the stake of Western capital. The imf and the World Bank, in particular, were determined to make South Africa’s transition a capitalist success story. An army of experts descended on the country to train anc leaders in ‘economics’ and the importance of private-property rights.footnote16

The upshot was to bind post-apartheid South Africa into dependence on foreign investment, and therefore to maintaining an attractive ‘business climate’. As a token of good will to international investors, the anc agreed to take on the debt incurred by the apartheid regime; the only way to pay this down was by selling off state-owned industries, notably iron and steel and oil-from-coal (sasol). Ending capital and currency controls—one of the conditions for the imf’s $850 million loan—resulted in disinvestment and capital flight. A private-property clause inserted into the new Constitution proved a serious obstacle to land reform, eliminating the possibility of expropriation without compensation. Joining gatt and the wto, represented as South Africa’s coming in from the cold, meant lowering tariffs and ending subsidies to the textile and auto industries that had provided employment for the new black proletariat. In 1996, gear would be a further pro-market shift. The anc’s evolution was dramatically symbolized at Marikana in 2012, when police fired on striking miners at a Lonmin platinum mine, killing 34. Sitting on the board of Lonmin was one Cyril Ramaphosa, General Secretary of cosatu during the late apartheid years, who had denounced the Marikana strikers as ‘criminal’ and called for government action. By the time he became president in 2019, Ramaphosa’s personal wealth was $450 million. Corruptions of state....Ctd....