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02/23/2005:

"The elusive rainbow: Change is glacial in post-apartheid South Africa: power and wealth are still in the grip of the white minority"

...I fall into the generation for whom apartheid was the dominant international cause of our youth. If baby-boomers were galvanised by Vietnam, then those who came of age in the 1980s were inspired by the campaign to transform South Africa. Even if we were not manning the 24-hour picket at Trafalgar Square, apartheid formed a kind of backdrop to the times. Cry Freedom was on at the movies, Free Nelson Mandela was the anthem at every college disco. What Thatcherism was at home, apartheid was abroad: the issue of the age.

That was nearly two decades ago. I assumed that a trip in the winter of 2005 would be to a wholly different country, with apartheid and all its works a bad, fading memory. That's where I was wrong.

Of course, and as everyone knows, the formal structures of that dreaded system have long gone. The country is ruled by its second black president; "Whites Only" signs are to be found behind glass in a museum and nowhere else.

And yet, the rainbow nation, the "new South Africa" so constantly invoked and effectively publicised, proved elusive. What I found, during what one scholar calls the "banal encounters" of day-to-day life, was a set-up remarkably like the one I had imagined back when I was a student shaking a bucket for the anti-apartheid movement.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk