Schechter denies any political affiliations, but his own mentors, "Ruth and Joe, became people I wanted to emulate with my own emerging synthesis of activism and attitude. Unlike them, I didn't have a home in a movement or party or an organization. I guess I was more the "Lone Ranger" They inspired me to get involved with South Africa and I did so for the next thirty years. . . ."
But Schechter had been brought up in an activist family. "[T]he whiff of socialism and a family history in the labor movement shaped my values."
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But, on the heals of the revolution, the ideal government did not blossom:
Now Schechter quotes the bad news [from another source:] "The gap between the rich and the poor inside South Africa has broadened, not narrowed."
In 1999, there was a gap "between the total income of the 13 percent of the population who are white and the 87 percent of the country's 41 million people who are not."
and
"[S]peculators in Europe . . . drove down the price of gold in hopes of making a quick profit, leading to massive unemployment in the mining industry. One hundred and fifty thousand workers were affected.
"[Eleven] years after Nelson Mandela walked free, corruption has become the issue du jour in South Africa. Even president Jacob Zuma, who narrowly slithered out of a corruption trial before his election, is blasting corruption in the ranks of the African National Congress, which came to power as the morally superior alternative to an apartheid regime that shamelessly used the wealth it controlled to benefit Afrikaners and deprive the black majority of services."
Maybe expectations were too high, Schechter writes sadly. Things could not change in such a short time. But "compared to other conflicts tearing African states apart, South Africa looks very advanced." There is no chaos. Compare also our own United States, "where promises are unfulfilled, treasure squandered and war overseas makes South Africa seems positively nirvana-ish."
"[South Africa was] expected by the world to self-destruct in the bloodiest civil war along racial lines." Not only was this avoided, but also, "we created among ourselves one of the most exemplary and progressive non racial and non-sexist democratic orders in the contemporary world."
"[T]he real Long Walk [reference coined by Mandela] is hardly over as poverty and exploitation grows and festers, not only here but worldwide."
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