By insisting the workers were "visitors" the young men left their wives and children home, and lived in slums. Young men without family ties led to crime, rape, murder, and of course, HIV epidemic. But since you had to leave the cities when you retired or got sick (you were a visitor, remember?) you went home and gave the HIV to your wives and children before you died.
They could do a heart transplant in JoBurg, but in tribal areas, kids died of diarrhea and kwashiorkor. The tribal farms deteriorated, since the women were farmers, and used traditional methods based on slash and burn, but now there was no place to move and slash and burn to get new fields when the land was exhausted, so the result was ruined land.
Finally, if you were white, even if you were stupid, you could get a well paying job. A "kaffir" would be displaced by a white man wanting his job, and of course, a "kaffir" got one fifth the wages of a white man.
The good news is that whites could live in luxury in their enclaves and ignore the nearby slums.
No, I don't like South Africa today. But don't make it out as a perfect land back then. Like "Gone with the Wind" the perfect land is a myth.
Yeah, after all those African tribes invented heart transplants and built some of the best hospitals in the world. Oh wait a minute, they didn't do any of that.
I guess your philosophy is that if someone anywhere works hard and provides something better for his family and friends that he's obligated to give it away for free to everyone. There's a name for people who think like you, "communist".
It never ceases to amaze me that people living in third world countries whose ancestors never built anything worth noticing feel they're entitled to everything ever produced anywhere in the world by anyone.
Perhaps the author was being kind enough to not remind us of conditions that exist in your own backyard. I do not live in a slum, and I venture not many on FR do. Two blocks away from me are slums and to say I ignore them is extreme. This borders on the insanity that we in the western world forced onto other countries in the name of "compassion". The type of government that South Africa had cannot be blamed for all of the ills now found in that country.
The author is trying to pass along a warning to people of the U.S. To attack his background is to ignore his message at our own peril.
As much as we value the right to vote, why do we have a problem getting twenty five percent of the elegible voters to vote? What most people really want is stability and safety first and freedom and opportunity second. (I'll probably get flamed for that statement, but think about it. Are we not giving up many freedoms for more safety now?)With all its faults, and you have to start somewhere, whites created a level of stability and safety that the Blacks had never known before.
I have said it before and I'll say it again, If the white man did to the Blacks In Africa what they did to the Indians in America, S.A. would be as prosperous as we are today. Does anyone really believe the American Indians would have full voting rights today if they were a ninety percent majorty? That is what S.A. was faced with.
Rhodesia is obviously not better off by any perspective.