buyx
Anyway, not second guessing OP, just putting it out there.
I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.
In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.
English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:
At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)
No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
Just to clarify: lamb is far more common in South Africa than mutton (aged sheep) and most people don't differentiate between the two. Maybe it's the flavour of the lamb that they're referring to that differs between the countries.
The term mutton is overloaded: in South Asia, I believe it refers goat.
Dutch: Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen pijn. Afrikaans: Ek kan glas eet, dit maak my nie seer nie
The truth, of course, is that Afrikaans split off from Dutch centuries earlier, but it wasn't a "prestige language" until the 20th century.
The page comes from a more innocent time, when the internet hadn't hit critical mass, and you could get away with stuff like that without pedants fact-checking you to death.
It's rare to see an error in the opening sentence of an article, and maybe a nitpick but I believe "bushmen" usually refers to San hunter-gatherer nomads, not Bantu language-speaking pastoralists.
Most South Africans are familiar with the fact that black Americans refer to themselves as African Americans. Heck, Oprah used to be must-watch afternoon/evening TV in South Africa during the 90s and 2000s. In fact, there was probably better representativity of African Americans than black South Africans on SA English TV in that era.
This brings back bad memories, and illustrates the risk of linear thinking: South Africa's black population was denied proper services under apartheid, including telecommunications. In an effort to supposedly right that wrong, the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, was given a years-long monopoly on fixed-line telecommunications in return for putting in fixed line connections to black communities. There were reports that an American corporation, SBC, helped write the country's telecoms act after it acquired a minority stake in Telkom.[1][2]
That monopoly set South Africa back many years, and it's only been in the last decade that it began catching up with the rest of the world. Oh, and the copper network has been so badly looted that many/most places now have wireless landlines. And those under-served black people: they all bought cellphones for the same reasons that people in the rest of the world did.
[1] https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2007/08/27/telkom-sbc-and-a-f... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070827181955/http://www.busrep...
Of course reducing everyone to grinding poverty is one way of reducing inequality, but it’s hard to see what the utility of that would be.
Blacks will, and do, bear the brunt of the deterioration anyway.
In any case, apart from many Afrikaners, whites are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion about South Africa’s future-they’re dwindling as a percentage of the population because of aging, emigration, higher black birth rates and inward migration from other African counties.
The country is, objectively, deteriorating.
The police are dumb as rocks and totally lazy: look at the Boksburg tanker blast in December to see how they don’t GAF about doing their jobs.the public was standing around a burning gas tanker taking pictures for social media for hours before it exploded and killed dozens. The police only pitched after the explosion.
There is no serious border control, and any mention of it is shut down as “xenophobic” by the media and business that want to flout labour regulations by hiring undocumented migrants from the rest of Africa, despite the obscene unemployment rate.
The electricity situation has been discussed at length here previously, but it’s strangling the economy.
Sure you can make money if you are skilled, but you can make better money using those skills in any number of other countries.
The only thing that’s keeping many middle-class South Africans from emigrating is the cheap domestic help. They are happy to exploit the obscene inequality since it gives them cheap labour. They live in terror of washing their own clothes and cleaning their own toilets.
It doesn’t mean it’s all wrong, but important to recognise the limitations of the source.
It may possibly have been a thing 20 years ago, but nowadays, I doubt anyone relishes the breakdown in services as "sticking it to the man".
A focus on race-relations, in 2023, obscures the real issues plaguing South Africa, which, although in large part a legacy of apartheid don't have to do with black-white relations.
In fact, that was one of the reasons why he was elevated to power: Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism led to huge numbers of deaths, and his political downfall in the ANC.
I’d say the real issue is not the ANC’s electoral dominance, but the party’s practice of Democratic Centralism, which allows the leader unfettered control. I would guess the closest modern analogue would be the Chinese Communist Party.
Zuma was allowed to loot the country, along with his cronies because of this, just as Mbeki was allowed to practice his AIDS denialism.
As you said, the ANC’s power is eroding, but until there’s electoral reform, to make MPs independent of party bosses, South African democracy will always be at risk of being captured by nefarious actors.
The country has reasonably strong labour laws, but employers, who never really moved beyond the cheap servile labour model under apartheid hate worker rights (which aren’t really that strong by world standards). So they hire undocumented workers from other African countries. This contributes to the huge unemployment rate amongst South African citizens.
Kidnapping for ransom, which was unheard of ten years ago, has become a thing because of Mozambican and Pakistani crime syndicates.
It’s one of a myriad of problems in the country, but the fact is that any attempts to control the borders have been decried as “xenophobia” by elites. Interestingly, SA white conservative types, who rally for support from anti-immigration people overseas, support illegal immigration in South Africa (along with most upper middle-class people), since it keeps labour costs down, and they hold black South Africans in contempt.
There’s also been a general collapse in state capacity: the recent explosion in Boksburg where the police never bothered pitching up at the scene of a leaking LPG/propane truck to control bystanders led to 40 deaths, is indicative of the sort of don’t-give-a-damn attitude of most state institutions.
South Africa also props Botswana up via a customs union.
https://www.tralac.org/news/article/6931-surge-in-botswana-s...
The Democratic Alliance looked like it was going to pick up the votes of disaffected black voters, but instead it seems like its leadership decided to pay more attention to Western culture wars (Helen Zille going on about "wokeness" etc) and to protect its right flank from being eroded by Afrikaner nationalists after the 2019 election, rather than courting the centre.
Cyril Ramaphosa's personal popularity helped the ANC in 2019, but it was also used by the DA as an opportunity to shaft Mmusi Maimane, who could have been a viable potential leader in SA.
Can't blame the voters if the politicians leave them with a dearth of choice.
Jacob Zuma came to power partially because he wasn't an AIDS denialist, and one of the few things Zuma can claim credit for was widespread availability of anti-AIDS drugs, and the resultant recovery in South Africa's life expectancy.
AIDS denialism is pretty-much dead in South Africa....it only ever was a pique of Thabo Mbeki, and because of his power as head of the ANC, the rest of the leadership had to be sycophantic.
Private property rights are intact in South Africa (for now perhaps, but things are bad enough without the need for exaggeration). Also, monetary (exchange) control regulations are quite loose nowadays, and shouldn’t affect normal people trying to emigrate, but as you say, the exchange rate makes this a moot point.
The same sort of intrigue that happens in the Chinese Communist Party ruling circles happens in the ANC (not surprising since both are organised under the same principles), meaning that the leader has unfettered power until the next ANC elective conference. Mbeki (competent but with crazy ideas about AIDS that were his undoing) and Zuma were allowed to run amok. Add cadre deployment to the mix, and you can see why South Africa is such a mess…the democratic constitutional order is badly weakened when the electorally dominant political party is run as a personality cult.
I expected Cyril Ramaphosa to be more aggressive in cleaning out the rot, and to perhaps reform the ANC structurally, but he seems very tentative…