Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma

Author:Ruchir Sharma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Endless Honeymoon

IN 2003 SOUTH AFRICA WAS GETTING READY to celebrate ten years of freedom since the end of white minority rule, but it was also suffering a case of guilt by association. Across the Limpopo River, Zimbabwe was disintegrating. Given both countries’ histories of racial strife, many observers figured it was only a matter of time before South Africa, too, succumbed to violent demands that whites yield a share of the wealth to the millions of blacks who were still mired in poverty, without jobs or land of their own. That March I decided to go see for myself if these dark predictions had merit.

Arriving on a Sunday morning in Cape Town, my first stop was Robben Island, the infamous former penal colony where Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the black liberation movement were held for decades. Its squalid jail cells were the very symbol of apartheid-era oppression, but I found to my astonishment that many of the retired white prison guards were still living on the island with several former black prisoners, who were serving as guides to visitors like me. The ex-prisoners were living quietly alongside their ex-jailers, with no sign of imminent explosion. Robben Island was typical of the “forget the past and get on with the future” attitude I found among most South Africans during my travels from Port Elizabeth at the tip of the eastern Cape to Pretoria in the north.

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