The vista from among the shacks, hubbub and agonies of Alexandra says it all. Towering beyond the crumbling hostels built for the township's migrant mineworkers are two skyscrapers - the pinnacles of Sandton, the financial district that marks the wealthiest apex of the wealthiest city in Africa: Johannesburg.
Tom Burgis is West Africa correspondent at the Financial Times, based in Lagos, having previously been the Johannesburg correspondent. Before joining the FT, he was freelance and spent a year in South America, most of it with the Santiago Times as Chile attempted to bring Augusto Pinochet to justice.
He has written for openDemocracy's debates on protest and globalisation, and for a year presided over the monthly Bad Democracy Awards.
Among Tom Burgis's articles in openDemocracy:
"Arresting development in Chile" (14 June 2005)
"Michelle Bachelet's hard lesson" (26 June 2006)
"The siege of Hong Kong" (12 December 2005)
"A guide to the post-9/11 world" (8 September 2006)
"Addicted: William Burroughs and a world in heat" (3 November 2006)Few countries have such an unequal distribution of wealth as South Africa. Since the end of apartheid fifteen years ago, the prevailing economic orthodoxy has held that a rising tide would eventually lift all boats. Yet inequality lies at the root of many of the nation's ills.
The rallying-cry of the latest township riots is a demand for basic services - without which poor South Africans' hopes of escape from destitution are throttled. The income-gap serves as a place where crime, violence and Aids ferment.
It was not supposed to be like this. When Nelson Mandela led the African National Congress to victory in the 1994 elections that deposed white rule, many South Africans believed - despite the long-jailed freedom-fighter's warnings to the contrary - that democracy would automatically engender prosperity.
Instead, the new order inherited modern history's most successful attempt to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. Johannesburg's juxtaposition of dirt-poor townships and plush suburbs is the geographical legacy: a black labour-force near enough to work but far enough away for wealthy whites to sleep easily.
Today the economic pyramid largely retains the shape of the apartheid years, even if a few black notables have reached the peak.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded in a 2008 report: "The most disappointing aspect of post-apartheid economic performance is the emergence and persistence of extreme levels of unemployment, particularly for less-skilled younger blacks, together with the continuation of widespread poverty and the widening of inequalities."
Olive Shisana, head of the Human Sciences Research Council, says income inequality lies behind a potentially alarming rise in the number of young women whose sexual partners are much older.
The girls who slink into corrugated-iron knocking-shops are hardly in a position to insist that their older lover put on a condom. Experts call this "transactional sex", where the wealthy partner supplies mobile-phones and other tokens that serve as a sticking-plaster over the lack of meaningful economic advances.
"If you had a society that was different in terms of access to resources, I think things would be very, very different", says Dr Shisana. "For people to try to equalise, they go to sugar daddies."
It was horror at inequality in its own right, rather than a hatred of the whites who benefited from it, that motivated some of the country's most valuable ideas. Mandela's renowned non-racialism is the most prominent; among the others is the proposal of the white South African Aubrey Meyer - fed originally by an abhorrence of "separate development" - that climate change should be countered by allocating the right to pollute equally among every human being on the planet.
Yet the skewed distribution of resources continues to define life in South Africa.
The wall within
Such disparities - combined with rampant car-theft - have given rise to an entire informal industry: the guards who earn a few rand keeping watch over parked vehicles.
The overwhelmingly black attendants depend for their living on the very lawlessness from which they, rather than those who can afford electric fences, are much more likely to suffer. The gratuitous violence that accompanies many crimes appears to be motivated as much by economic structures that have kept most blacks poor than by a lasting racial animosity.
The other end of the spectrum was recently evident at one of Johannesburg's most chic nightspots, where a multi-coloured elite was plied with champagne as models enacted James Bond scenarios to showcase designer bulletproof attire. What better way to avoid becoming one of the 19,000 South Africans who are murdered annually while still flaunting the wealth that makes you a target, was the barely concealed sales pitch.
Politicians argue, with some merit, that righting the distortions of apartheid was never going to be straightforward. Supporters of Thabo Mbeki, president until September 2008, point to the achievements of "black economic empowerment" (BEE), the policy that obliges leading companies to transfer equity and other benefits to the black majority.
Others, though, say the income-gap is a direct result of such policies, whose main beneficiaries have been a crop of politically-connected black magnates.
Moeletsi Mbeki, the former leader's brother and a critic of BEE, writes in a new book that the policy "strikes a fatal blow against the emergence of black entrepreneurship by creating a small class of unproductive but wealthy black crony capitalists made up of ANC politicians, some retired and others not, who have become strong allies of the economic oligarchy".
The new government, led by Jacob Zuma, promises more "broad-based" black empowerment. Yet it seems unlikely that much will change while there persists among those with the credentials to work the system a mindset that was best expressed by Smuts Ngonyama, a former spokesman for the Mbeki government. He said simply: "I did not join the struggle to remain poor."
Comments
While I agree with many of the points made in the article, the analysis remains shallow and avoids reflection of the complexities of transformation.
I am angry when I see politicians or the small group of "black diamonds" (those, who benefited from the "black economic empowerment" policies) flaunt their wealth. The sight of a begging street child approaching an exotic sports car at the traffic light (tinted windows remain closed) is much too common. But I realise that undoing 80 years of exploitation by a small minority is an incredible task. One that could maybe compared to undoing the wrongs of colonialisation, which in very few countries has progressed smoothly.
We need to acknowledge that the disparity that we observe in societies like South Africa is no different from the disparity between the developed countries and the least developed ones. Only that in the latter case, the proverbial street child is too far away to bother the rich at the traffic light.
The author calls South Africa "history's most successful attempt to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.". Surely, that distinction must go to the colonial history of many of today's richest countries. With the recent global financial experimentation, during which the banks managed to privatise gains, but socialise losses, coming in as a close runner-up.
True as the article may be in its anecdotal examples and in some of the causes for the persistence of inequalities it remains a decidedly one-sided analysis; No mention of the absorption of millions of emigrants at the deperate and poor end into a society that was already distorted in terms of equity and very little balance in terms of recognising the need for innovation to accompany "freedom" or the (significant?) efforts that have been applied to rectify the imbalance.
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