I’ve Always Felt I Left South Africa Too Young To Write About It—But Here Goes

For the most part, I don’t trust my childhood memories of South Africa. I think most of them aren’t memories at all, just photographs I’ve seen. In a few cases, though, there are no photos, so the images in my mind’s eye must be real memories:

The rose pattern on my bedspread.

Lying in that bed, having stuck a blue bead up my nose—scared to confess to my parents, but also quite sure I’d die in my sleep if I didn’t.

Soaping up an empty bathtub, so I could “ice skate.” (My triple lutz had an unconventional landing—on my eyebrow—resulting in another trip to the ER, embarrassingly soon after the bead incident.)

One memory, though, seemed so weird I decided to fact-check it with my 87-year-old dad.

I remember being in our garden in Johannesburg and seeing a man walk out of our house with an armful of clothes. “Yes,” said my dad. “I remember that one”—meaning one of many uneventful burglaries—“because he took my father’s (tuxedo) jacket and my (tuxedo) pants, so to this day I have a mismatched set: my dinner jacket and 100-year-old trousers.”

This sort of crime—clothes taken from closets, blankets from beds—was common back then. In apartheid South Africa, 15% of the population owned nearly 90% of the wealth; some level of redistribution, through an uneasy combination of charity and theft, was part of everyday life.

For various reasons, post-apartheid South Africa continues to suffer from extreme wealth inequality. The Gini coefficient is a measure of economic equality within a country—with 0 representing maximum equality and 1 maximum inequality. The most recent report available puts South Africa, with a wealth Gini of .82, as one of the most inequitable countries in the world. South Africa also has one of the world’s highest murder rates—six times the American rate.

But the U.S.—with a Gini coefficient of .75—is not far behind South Africa in terms of wealth inequality. And over the last 45 years—due to globalization, automation, the decline of unions, and an increasingly regressive tax code—wealth and income gaps in America have only grown wider.

Last week, as the Trump administration welcomed 59 white South Africans to the U.S. as “refugees,” there was no mention of the link between crime rates and wealth inequality. At that ceremony, and again during yesterday’s Oval Office meeting with President Ramaphosa, the accompanying narrative from the Trump administration was one of “white genocide”—perpetuating the unfounded idea that white South Africans are being systematically targeted and killed by the country's majority black population. This was of course a dog whistle—more like a flashing neon sign—to white Christian Americans: As you become more of a minority here in the U.S., you are right to feel scared. This is where DEI leads. This is why DEI must be abolished.

Here’s what this race-baiting narrative leaves out:

1. The vast majority of South Africa’s murder victims are young, black men in poor, urban areas; about half of all South African murders are confined to 12% of the country’s precincts.

2. Farm murders—which involve victims of all races—account for fewer than 1% of all homicides in the country.

3. The motivation for farm attacks is generally considered, even by most Afrikaners, not racial but opportunistic: farm owners and their employees are physically isolated—far from neighbors and police stations—and therefore especially vulnerable.

South Africa remains one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with—if you ask anyone in my family—the very best rugby players. But it is also the place that saw a boom in “rape gates”—hallway gates protecting bedrooms—and the invention of The Blaster, a flamethrower designed to thwart carjackings.

If America does not want to go the way of South Africa, crime-wise, we should halt our march towards extreme economic inequality. If we are looking for other lessons from South Africa, we should also be on high alert for corruption, which was a featureof the apartheid era and has endured—most famously under Jacob Zuma—through all five post-apartheid presidencies. 

South Africa is indeed a cautionary tale for the U.S. to heed—but not in the way Trump suggests. The lesson is not: beware a black majority. The lesson is: beware gross income inequality. Beware corruption.

Thank you for reading,
Kate

Some notes:

1. To my one (known!) Swedish reader, I was surprised to find Sweden so high up in the inequality rankings. Let's discuss.

2. Should you choose to join me in the Gini coefficient rabbit-hole, you’ll come across a lot of different numbers: there are separate Gini measures for wealth, income, and consumption. I ended up focusing on wealth—but whatever lens you choose, make sure you are comparing countries, apples-to-apples.

3. I think the phenomenon of the ‘PayPal mafia' is broadly understood now, but in case not: former South Africans (and powerful people with strong connections to South Africa) are playing an outsized role in American politics: Pretoria-born Elon Musk of course, but also Cape Town-born David Sacks (Trump’s crypto czar), and German-born Peter Thiel, who as a child lived in both South Africa and (what is now) Namibia. Though Thiel operates largely behind the scenes, he is credited with staffing key roles for Trump, including promoting J.D. Vance as a potential VP.

I’ll never stop wondering how my fellow South African emigrants—all people who have achieved enormous success here in the U.S.—are now on a path to recreate the kinds of structural inequities they grew up with…versus building on America’s time-tested strengths. Are their visions of a techno-autocracy just age-old white supremacy cloaked in mad coding skills? Is working the problem of how to terrorize and then escape the huddled masses just super-duper, intellectually interesting? I thought every kid fresh to America in the 1970s and 1980s had inhaled Schoolhouse Rock, secretly hoping that the U.S. citizenship test would require belting out the magnificent Preamble. I guess not. 

4. What Now usually comes out on Fridays, but South Africa has been much in the news, so this week I’m posting a day early.