re: South Africa seizing land from white people

quote:

---

That's okay, the white people seized it from the Africans.

---

As I understand it, that's not necessarily the case in South Africa, at least for a good chunk of the land owned by white farmers (especially Boers). A lot of the land was simply empty, and another large chunk of it was negotiated for by the Boers (i.e., get those 1,000 cattle back that my rival king stole from me and I'll give you this land). The National Act of 1913 complicates things, for sure, but it's a complex story. The Boers, especially, were never large enough or powerful enough to simply go in and steal a bunch of land from larger tribes (the Brits were, though).

Complicating things further, there has since been a ton of inter-tribal movement in southern Africa since the Dutch first set foot on the land. A fairly sizable chunk of South Africa's black population is descended from people who didn't even live in the area in the 1600's. On top of that, you have large numbers of refugees and their descendants who fled there after the African post-colonial wars in the 1960's and then the post-Soviet wars in the 1990's.

quote:

---

Besides, it's some OTHER fricking country, why should we care how they run their business?

---

I'd like to see the most powerful country on the continent (or what at least used to be - they had nuclear weapons at one time) avoid the low level ethnic cleansing that doomed their neighbor. Between this, Zuma's issues (and Malema's ascent), the sky-high (and rising) violence rates, and things like Cape Town's water crisis, it's fairly clear that the country is careening down a shitty path. It was bad enough in Zimbabwe, and it would be far worse in South Africa if something like that were to ever happen there. It will definitely affect both us and Europe if things continue to get worse there.