South Africa, time for change

Dear readers,

During the World Cup, eyes will be on South Africa. It is a tense time: the country at a crossroads and in need of shaking off a century of divisions. We are pleased to bring you this insightful article by two leading South African analysts written for Le Monde diplomatique.

by Moeletsi Mbeki and Johann Rossouw

As the World Cup kicks off, South Africa has been preparing to show its best face to the world. But the country is tense, and at a crossroads. Will it seize this occasion to emerge at last from more than a century of divisive nationalisms?

This has been a tumultuous year for South Africa so far, even by its own standards. Protests at municipal level against poor services and corruption are at an all-time, post-apartheid high. And the tone of public debate is increasingly tense. The April murder of the far-right politician Eugene Terre'Blanche at his farm by two black farm labourers (one only 15) raised the spectre of racial conflict once again. Julius Malema, 29, president of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, has become the country's most prominent politician, mixing brazen populism with racist incitement (this includes singing an old anti-apartheid protest song which goes "Kill the Boers, they are rapists").

South Africa is at a key juncture, and has been since the end of apartheid. Today's state, economy and social order are largely the outcome of European colonisation and internal resistance to it. There are lasting colonial characteristics. Two are the legacy of the Dutch: the strategic value of the Cape Sea Route, and so of South Africa as a country, between the declining West and the rising East; and the practice of meeting the country's labour needs by importing black slaves, which later laid the groundwork for cheap, mostly black labour.

Read this exclusive article on our website: http://mondediplo.com/blogs/south-africa-time-for-change

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Regards from all at Le Monde diplomatique.

Moeletsi Mbeki is a South African businessman and political analyst; Johann Rossouw is an Afrikaans writer and political philosopher