There’s Mr Mandela. Nelson Mandela. A free man. Taking his first steps into a new South Africa. South Africa News 11th February 1990
I am amazed the African people have not risen up against the ANC. Greater education is required. And you are correct: Steve Biko was the real voice of South Africa. He gave his life so that others would be free. Mandela has prostituted black South Africa to a white, rapacious, corporate past and future. His behaviour has been shameful. BeholdZeus, Board post Youtube
The US supported South Africa right through the 1980s. The Reagan administration had to find ways to get around Congressional legislation calling for sanctions. They were able to increase trade and support for South Africa right to the end ... In 1988 the US declared Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to be one of the more notorious organisations in the world. That’s part of the reason for supporting the South African apartheid regime. Professor Noam Chomsky, University of Colorado 5th April 2003
1988: The Pentagon declared that the African National Congress – Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress – was one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world. Noam Chomsky, lecture Brown University April 2010
11th February 1990: In Cape Town, South Africa, it has just been announced that the world’s most famous political prisoner is about to be freed. Days that Shook the World s1e3: Martin Luther King/Nelson Mandela, BBC 2003
In 1962 he was captured, tried for terrorism, and sentenced to Life in prison. ibid.
Despite the impression of unity, their marriage is already faltering. ibid.
In 1994 South Africans voted in their first democratic elections. The ANC won a landslide and Mandela succeeded [F W] De Klerk as President. ibid.
Miners have found these very interesting round metallic objects – I call them metallic because they’re made of hematite which is a naturally occurring type of iron ... The parallel grooves that go around the centre of each of them ... They’re about one or two inches in diameter. Michael Cremo, author Forbidden Archaeology, radio interview Hidden History of the Human Race
Josh travels to South Africa to locate a giant man-eating river monster. Then Josh hunts a pint-sized beast that’s been tormenting local villagers. Destination Truth s1e5, Skyfy 2007
South Africa supposedly has its own Nessie ... Mamlambo ... An African safari hunting down a brain-sucking river monster – Hemingway, eat your heart out. ibid.
One of the country’s most notorious mythical creatures – the Tokeloshe. ibid.
South Africa is facing a crisis. After nearly twenty years of democracy millions are still homeless and unemployed. Violent protests have swept the country. Leading to the worst police killings since the end of Apartheid. With the government mired in allegations of corruption that reach right to the top. This World: South Africa: The Massacre that Changed a Nation, BBC 2013
Many here work at Marikana, one of the world’s largest platinum mines. What happened here over six days last August has changed South Africa for ever. Fed up with low wages, thousands of the miners went on an unofficial strike. ibid.
What happened next shocked the world. ibid.
In some communities unemployed is even as high as 80%. ibid.
The white minority still ran the economy. ibid.
Still nearly half of South Africans live on less than £3 a day. ibid.
The ANC has failed to develop an economy that benefits everyone. ibid.
The brutality meted out at Marikana and the fact that there was then an attempt to cover it up, and plant evidence, and torture some of the strikers ... is deeply deeply depressing as well absolutely outrageous. ibid.
I love Africa, in general South Africa and West Africa, they are both great countries. Paris Hilton
South Africa's military aggression and destabilization of its neighbours cost the region $10 billion in 1988 and over $60 billion and 1.5 million lives in the first nine years of this decade. UN Economic Commission for Africa
The Nigerians were branded as criminals in South Africa where crime had, in a few short months, become the decisive political, social and economic issue. Misha Glenny, McMafia
South Africans came to perceive Nigerians as the worst criminals because they were highly visible, working tirelessly to expand the consumption of drugs and the use of prostitutes across all communities in South Africa, and offering further evidence of their unparalleled ability in devising financial scams and fraud. ibid.
All manner of innocents were ensnared by the engineers of the new illicit economy. Crime sucked the lifeblood from the new South Africa like a deadly leech, leaving it debilitated and racked by fear and insecurity. ibid.
In hard figures that meant that around 20,000 South Africans lost their lives at the hands of their compatriots every single year (in 2005 almost 52,000 rapes were reported in South Africa and, given the usual ratio of reported to actual rapes, the real figure seems astronomical). ibid.
The turmoil and terror were generated from within South Africa society, a profound legacy of apartheid that paved the way for unprecedented domestic violence and criminality that mingled dangerously with mutual suspicion between communities. ibid.
There were two separate criminal industries that had designs on South Africa. The first was narcotics, whose main players were from Nigeria, Italy and South America; the second was the trading of weapons for sub-Saharan Africa’s valuable minerals – diamonds, copper, zinc, and a little-known substance called coltan. Primarily involved in this second business were Russians, Belgians, Americans, French, Brits and Israelis. ibid.
The fragile new government had to devote the bulk of its resources to domestic policing. Its borders were porous and its transport links open to the highest bidder – drug runners and arms dealers. ibid.
Two distinct but related gang cultures – one, known as ‘The Number’ was found throughout the coloured and black inmates of South Africa’s prisons. The other lay in the coloured and black townships. ibid.
Nowhere were the gangs more powerful than in the coloured townships of Cape Town. ibid.
Cape Town: at night, these pedestrians often stagger drunkenly, one reason why South Africa boasts one of the worst road-death rates in the world. Either side of the highway, the sun bounces off the tiny corrugated tin shacks in which whole families live. Above them stands a dense web of wires, which are draining electricity illegally from the main grid ... Crammed in like battery chickens, originally by the apartheid regime, they survive to this day on pitiful wages, should they be fortunate enough to find work. ibid.
The police under apartheid did little to discourage such aggression – the core of their philosophy celebrated violence against coloured or black people, regardless of who perpetrated it. ibid.
As apartheid began to crumble in the late 1980s and early 1990s the opportunities for the bosses stated to grow rapidly. Two supergangs emerged in the Cape Flats: The Americans led by Jackie Lonti, and later in opposition to them came The Firm (a carefully planned amalgam of several gangs excluded by the Americans). ibid.
Where would South Africa be without its ARUs? For every member of the South Africa Police Service, there are four and a half private security personnel in the country. Licensed to use firearms, these men’s primary task is to protect the white middle classes from burglary and assault. The latter live in stupendously affluent districts characterised by high walls, high-voltage electronic fences and high levels of anxiety. ibid.
By the late 1990s, some 15,000 cars and 5,000 vans and trucks were hijacked annually in South Africa, while another 100,000 were stolen while unattended. ibid.
With his considerable financial clout, Bout bought up Mafeking airport just south of the Boswana border, lock, stock and barrel, installing mechanics and administrators there and even paying the salaries of immigration officers. This was a key hub in the dispatch of weapons to other southern African countries, from where the planes would return with a payload of minerals and even commodities like rare fish and gladioli (for sale in the United Arab Emirates). ibid.
Exports of cannabis from southern Africa (chiefly to Europe) are growing faster than from any other producer region in the world, now accounting for about 10 per cent of global production. ibid.
The connection between religion, racism, and totalitarianism is also to be found in the other most hateful dictatorship of the twentieth century: the vile system of apartheid in South Africa. This was not just the ideology of a Dutch-speaking tribe bent on extorting forced labour from peoples of a different shade of pigmentation, it was also a form of Calvinism in practice. The Dutch Reformed Church preached a dogma that black and white were biblically forbidden to mix, let alone to coexist in terms of equality. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p251