EXCERPT
What do rolling blackouts, public disorder, and impending societal collapse in South Africa, have to do with the contemporary preoccupations of cosmopolitan Westerners?
At first glance, the comparison is a little perplexing. But the strife and chaos descending today upon Africa’s 5th largest country has its antecedents in the very same game the West’s business and governmental elites are playing today with unfettered enthusiasm.
In 1990, South Africa had the African continent’s largest economy. It also had apartheid, the reprehensible race-based system of government that suppressed the voices of well over two-thirds of the population. In February of that year, Nelson Mandela was released. This moment – the culmination of Mandela’s ‘long walk to freedom’ – was an event of
Ben Crocker is a research fellow for Common Sense Society, in Washington DC. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns.
Originally published in Spectator AU.