BOARD OF EDITORS David Apter, David Baltimore, Daniel Bell, Guido Calabresi, Natalie Z. Davis, Wendy Doniger, Clifford Geertz, Stephen J. Greenblatt, Vartan Gregorian, Stanley Hoffmann, Gerald Holton, Donald Kennedy, Sally F. Moore, W. G. Runciman, Amartya K. Sen, Steven Weinberg STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD Editor of Dædalus PHYLLIS S. BENDELL Managing Editor SARAH M. SHOEMAKER Associate Editor MARK D. W. EDINGTON Consulting Editor SASIMA CHUAPRASERT Circulation and Editorial Office Assistant Cover design by Michael Schubert, Director of Ruder-Finn Design Printed on recycled paper frontmatter wi2001.p65 1 01/29/2001, 3:09 PM DÆDALUS JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Why South Africa Matters Winter 2001 Issued as Volume 130, Number 1, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences frontmatter wi2001.p65 2 01/29/2001, 3:09 PM Winter 2001, “Why South Africa Matters” Issued as Volume 130, Number 1, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. ISBN 0-87724-024-8 © 2001 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Library of Congress Catalog Number 12-30299. Editorial Offices: Dædalus, Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Telephone: (617) 491-2600; Fax: (617) 576-5088; Email: [email protected] Dædalus (ISSN 0011-5266) is published quarterly by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. U.S. subscription rates: for individuals—$33, one year; $60.50, two years; $82.50, three years; for institutions—$49.50, one year; $82.50, two years; $110, three years. Canadian subscription rates: for individuals—$42, one year; $78.75, two years; $109.50, three years; for institutions—$60, one year; $102, two years; $138.50, three years. All other foreign subscribers must add $7.00 per year to the price of U.S. subscriptions. Replacement copies for damaged or misrouted issues will be sent free of charge up to six months from the date of original publication. Thereafter, back copies are available for the current cover price plus postage and handling. GST number: 14034 3229 RT. All subscription orders, single-copy orders, and change-of- address information must be sent in writing to the Dædalus Business Office, 136 Irving Street, Suite 100, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Printed in the United States of America. Printing Office: 2901 Byrdhill Road, Richmond, VA 23228. U.S.A. newsstand distribution by Eastern News Distributors, Inc., 2020 Superior Street, Sandusky, OH 44870 Telephone: 800-221-3148. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to DÆDALUS, 136 Irving Street, Suite 100, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. frontmatter wi2001.p65 3 01/29/2001, 3:09 PM Contents V Preface Mamphela Ramphele 1 Citizenship Challenges for South Africa’s Young Democracy Mads Vestergaard 19 Who’s Got the Map? The Negotiation of Afrikaner Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings 45 “Two Nations”? Race and Economic Inequality in South Africa Today Leslie Boyd, Michael Spicer, and Gavin Keeton 71 Economic Scenarios for South Africa: A Business Perspective Francis Wilson 99 Minerals and Migrants: How the Mining Industry has Shaped South Africa Charles Simkins 123 Can South Africa Avoid a Malthusian Positive Check? Virginia van der Vliet 151 AIDS: Losing “The New Struggle”? Kader Asmal and Wilmot James 185 Education and Democracy in South Africa Today Michael J. Kahn and B. Daya Reddy 205 Science and Technology in South Africa: Regional Innovation Hub or Passive Consumer? Mark Shaw and Peter Gastrow 235 Stealing the Show? Crime and its Impact in Post-Apartheid South Africa frontmatter wi2001.p65 4 01/29/2001, 3:09 PM Peter Gastrow and Mark Shaw 259 In Search of Safety: Police Transformation and Public Responses in South Africa Leslie Witz, Ciraj Rassool, and Gary Minkley 277 Repackaging the Past for South African Tourism ADVISORY BOARD Kader Asmal, Leslie Boyd, George Ellis, Peter Gastrow, Frene Ginwala, Wilmot James, Michael J. Kahn, Gavin Keeton, Tom Lodge, Amina Mama, Gary Minkley, Nicoli Nattrass, Kole Omotoso, Nicky Padayachee, Mamphela Ramphele, Ciraj Rassool, B. Daya Reddy, Jeremy Seekings, Mark Shaw, Owen Sichone, Charles Simkins, Michael Spicer, Virginia van der Vliet, Mads Vestergaard, Francis Wilson, Leslie Witz frontmatter wi2001.p65 7 01/29/2001, 3:09 PM Preface V Preface to the Issue “Why South Africa Matters” N THE SPRING of last year, Dædalus published an issue entitled “Brazil: The Burden of the Past; The Promise of the I Future.” In choosing to publish an issue dealing with the new South Africa, as that nation has evolved in recent years, Dædalus might have used an analogous subtitle, seeing it as an opportunity to comment not only on what South Africa experi- enced in the terrible decades of apartheid, but also on how its history since the seventeenth century has shaped it. Indeed, Brazil and South Africa have often been compared, with atten- tion given to race, class, poverty, and wealth. If we have chosen a more tendentious title, “Why South Africa Matters,” it is because all who have written for this issue believe that the South African experiment in self-rule, adopting a constitution that extols representative institutions, that seeks to make de- mocracy a reality on a continent where it scarcely exists today, is a matter of the greatest consequence. South Africa today is multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious—the characteristic features of many of the most highly developed societies in the world at this time—but it is by no means certain that the unique human resources created by such diversity can be protected V Preface wi2001.p65 5 01/29/2001, 3:11 PM VI Dædalus when massive inequalities and inequities prevail, when educa- tion is so inadequate for many, when crime is rampant, unem- ployment is common, and there are overwhelming pressures to seek simplistic explanations to account for conditions recog- nized to be deplorable and unjust. As long as apartheid existed, there were compelling reasons for men and women outside South Africa to extend help. While some exaggerated what they did to end the iniquitous apartheid system, how effective their interventions were, and what they accomplished because of their regard for South Africa’s long- time political prisoner and first president, Nelson Mandela, the country was unquestionably for a time the object of consider- able international solicitude. South Africa cannot claim compa- rable attention today, and not only because of the absence of a charismatic political leader. It is today a struggling state like many others in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and those outside need more than ever to understand its problems and what it is doing to resolve them. This, then, is the principal objective of this issue of Dædalus; it tells of policies rarely mentioned in the world’s mass media, where only the country’s acute social and economic problems are featured. While no effort is made to minimize the seriousness of the country’s plight, our chief concern is to analyze both the strengths and the weaknesses of the society, at once so highly developed and so tragically impoverished. To consider its options and opportuni- ties, its handicaps and intolerances, requires imagination and candor. Our authors have sought to provide both, refusing to be taken in by the more conventional criticisms of a society seek- ing desperately to define itself. South Africa matters, for itself, for the rest of Africa, but also for a larger world community that has invested such hope in its democratic prospects as a multiracial state. In South Africa, as elsewhere in the developing world, it is common to emphasize the salience of economic problems— incontestably crucial—but these must always be seen in a con- text that takes account of the political, social, and intellectual conditions that prevail in this rich/poor society, that make it unique, different from all others on that vastly overpopulated and largely impoverished continent. Until the full dimensions of Preface wi2001.p65 6 01/29/2001, 3:11 PM Preface VII the South African political experiment are understood—and there is frank appraisal of the need for creating a national dialogue that does not search for scapegoats, that accepts the importance of being hospitable to all who seek to find a place in a land endowed by nature with abundant resources—there is no possibility of understanding how the problems of unemploy- ment, health, education, and crime relate to each other, and why fostering a “polity of discussion,” in both public and private life, is absolutely crucial. Building on what the country achieved through its “Truth and Reconciliation” procedures, it must look now with equal thoroughness at the institutions created since the end of apartheid, asking whether they are in fact achieving their intended purposes. What is one to say about South African politics today, about the party system, the nation’s press, the influence of the trade unions? What concern is there with the levels of migration that have become common, that are revealed in the vast queues of South African citizens applying for visas to go abroad? Is the country prepared to probe deeply into its educational system—asking about the quality of the men and women who are today teaching the young—and are those issues any less important than those that relate to the problems of crime and punishment that make many, both inside and outside the country, preoccupied with what they conceive to be its endemic violence? What price is being paid for these conditions in terms of lost tourist revenues, diminished foreign investment, and the like? Whatever the suffering of the past—and who would be so churlish as to deny it?—there is today the possibility of tran- scending it, of achieving the kind of human dignity that Immanuel Kant called for.