“Legacy: We hear only the good. What is the state of South Africa as a result if Mandela’s rule? Are they better off now?”
My boss has gone to South Africa on hunting trips, three times now. He also housed a foreign exchange student from there for almost a year. He describes a dangerous nation, where there are areas white just plain cannot enter at night. Specifically, his exchange student lamented that more and more areas were becoming ‘off limits’ to whites, at night.
He also described tha absurdity of the AIDS epidemic there. Some high level official had sex with an underage relative...now the media outrage over this was not the incest, infidelity, or statutory rape. No, the outcry was that he had not used a condum. Adding to the absurdity, this official retorted that he had taken a shower prior to the intercourse, which apparently is widely believed in the region to prevent std’s. So, the political discourse, during the entire time my boss was in country on one of his trips, was whether or not this guy was lying about taking the shower.
And I look at the Pistorius case. Even if you believe he is guilty, it is hard to ignore the paranoia he had, in prior Facebook posts...or the fact that he lived in a walled community with razor wire.
Such is present day South Africa - a Mad Max style world, where violence and ignorance rule the day.
Big deal -- There are areas like that in almost any large US city. When I lived in Oakland, CA back in the 1990's, there were areas that whites knew they had best avoid even in broad daylight.